The experience of watching TED Talks on your iPhone or iPad is about to get even better. Version 2.0 of our iOS app is out and, once you download it, expect faster buffering and downloads for videos, not to mention more self-adjusting profiles for different connection speeds. But the real star of the show: the subtitles. With this release, TED is the largest content provider to use iOS6′s new subtitle feature on its streaming video service. Meaning that subtitles are now available in 90 languages, directly in the video player. And, should you want to watch via Apple TV, when you scoot over to AirPlay, the subtitles will travel with you. Each language also now has its own catalog of available talks.

“This release is a very important one to us. Our talks are translated by a team of volunteer translators worldwide. For the first time ever, their work is now available on iOS, our largest mobile platform right now,” says TED’s Thaniya Keereepart, who led the update. “The subtitle piece utilizes iOS6′s new HLS services. Our engineers have been working very closely with Apple to make it possible.”

Reviewers for the app seem to be loving these new features.

Filip Truta writes on Softpedia.com, “The official TED application for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch now features subtitles in over 90 different languages and faster buffering, just to name a couple of the enhancements delivered in version 2.0 … The app is snappier now.”

And Federico Viticciof MacStories.net writes, “I’ve been watching a few videos with it and it’s been a solid update so far. The app is generally faster on 3G and videos load faster than the previous version. Living in a town where 3G is actually faster than my home DSL connection, I can confirm video buffering starts quickly. I’m a fan of TED’s video player controls that sport the same metallic elements of Apple’s Music app. The big new feature in this update is the addition of subtitles and translations. Subtitles are available in over 90 languages and they can be enabled from the video player and they persist over AirPlay — useful if you’re going to stream TED to an Apple TV or Mac running Reflector.”

The app is available here »
And download the Android version of the app from the Google Play store »

Subtitles for Version 2.0 of the TED iOS app make use of iOS6′s streaming video service. Subtitles move with the talk via AirPlay.

Version 2.0 of the TED iOS app offers a catalog of talks available in each language. Subtitles in the app are available directly in the video player.

Cesar Kuriyama: One second every day

“Basically, I’m recording one second of every day of my life for the rest of my life—chronologically compiling these one-second, tiny slices of my life into one single continuous video,” says Kuriyama in today’s talk. Why? “I hate not remembering things that I’ve done in the past,” he says.

When Kuriyama turns 40, he’ll have a one-hour video encapsulating his 30s. And when he turns 80, he’ll have a five-hour video spanning 50 years. In this talk, he reveals what he recorded in the first 365 days of the project — both the glorious and the painful.

Naturally, Kuriyama was curious what others would do with this tool. And so he took to Kickstarter, where more than 11,000 people funded his efforts to create a 1 Second Everyday app. It’s available for iOS now, and will soon be available for Android.  Below, see some of the videos created with it.

Ryan Kawailani Ozawa—who describes himself as a father, husband and web geek—downloaded the app for the new year. Here’s his January 2013, in a beautiful 31 seconds.

A friend of Kuriyama’s, Kathy Monahan set out to record all of 2012, editing the footage together herself since the app wasn’t available yet. Watch her year unfold, from concerts to learning how to use a crossbow.

Arseny Vez of in St. Petersburg, Russia, shares his January 2012 using the app.

Think 1 Second Everyday is for the dogs? Possibly. Here, a user has captured January 2013 in the life of their dog, Henry.

A look at January 2013 in Amsterdam.

From ultrasounds to what’s for dinner, John Mezzepesa captured December 2012 and January 2013.

Ben Nesvig’s French bulldog is just one of the stars of his video of January 2013.

Martha Denton filmed January 2013 in New York City, Milwaukee and Detroit.

Pedro Sostre edited together one second from every iPhone video he’s taken over the past five years.

Robbie Marr brings you January 2013 in Brighton, England.

Chicken and waffles figure greatly in Oliver Church’s 2013 thus far.

Laura Ferenc captured both December and January 2013. She writes, “This left-brain heavy, non-creative bookkeeper is taking a bit more time noticing things each day.”

The second half of 2013, as captured by Collin Ferry.

Congratulations is in order for TED Fellow Jon Gosier. His mobile app, Abayima, has been awarded a $150,000 grant from the Knight News Challenge, which funds innovative projects designed to get information to all corners of the globe.

While smartphones may be the norm in the West, most mobile phone users in the world — about 4 billion of them, to be specific — use simpler phones, often called “feature phones,” that don’t have a lot of storage memory, and can’t be used when a phone signal isn’t available. Abayima is an open-source application that turns a SIM card into a storage device, using every inch of the limited memory available on a standard SIM.

This means that a cheap feature phone can be used as an e-reader, for instance. And that, in locations where communication networks have been compromised or are under surveillance, journalists can communicate with sources safely using good old “sneakernet,” sharing information hand-to-hand via a small SIM chip.

Gosier and the team at Hive Colab tested a pilot of the app during the 2011 elections in Uganda, when text messages were being monitored and blocked, and were encouraged by the results.

Tell us a bit about yourself and your path to software development and social entrepreneurship.

My own path to technology was one that I think informs my desire to help younger technologists. I grew up with a passion for computers, but very little in my surroundings reinforced that passion. I didn’t have mentors or role-models in technology to look to, and it never really even occurred to me that computer science was a career choice until much later in life.

So I was self-taught and eager to learn, but blissfully unaware of the opportunity in the space. I moved to Uganda in 2008, where I kept meeting hard-working, talented young technologists who were doing everything right but still faced a lot of difficulties. They mostly taught themselves to program, many had gotten into good local universities and were at the top of their class, and they were proactively developing applications in their spare time as well. Yet they were entering a job market with 80 percent unemployment for youth.

Their only options were often to take non-creative, non-entrepreneurial jobs with banks, multinational telecom companies, government or non-governmental organizations. Those are fine careers, but I feel they should be options and not the only path to success. So I decided to invest my resources and time in creating paths of opportunity for African technologists across the continent.

I like to say that talent is spread evenly across the world, opportunity is not. I founded innovation company Appfrica to address this problem.

How many years has the competition been running?

Appfrica launched Apps4Africa as a way to support Africa’s young innovators and technologists, and it has been running for three years now. It was conceived in late 2009 when some colleagues and I realized there were few initiatives that were in direct support of the solutions to local problems coming from Africa’s innovators — though there were plenty of resources available for foreign solutions. Over time, it’s become much more about much more than just app creation. Our goal for the future will be much more about scaling sustainable business ideas and investing in startup growth.

Appfrica is responsible for planning and managing the competition each year, along with our partners the U.S. Department of State and World Bank. We also mentor and advise the winners to help them take advantage of new opportunities for media attention and funding.

Why does Africa need this competition? 

That’s an interesting question that we ask ourselves each year. Now that we’ve run the competition for three years, we recognize that Africa doesn’t just need another competition. Africa needs opportunities for structured mentorship and training beyond the competition model. The feedback from previous entrants has been that they need more support past the competition itself: once they’ve received the initial investment, our entrants want to stay engaged and connected to an international community of experts they can continue to learn from and have the opportunity to connect with for follow-up support. We’re working really hard to create a “competitive program” model, instead of another competition. The competitive program would engage entrepreneurs throughout the year, providing mentorship, training, and additional access to funding. This model would also have a strong research and evaluation component, so that we can better identify ways to serve these tech entrepreneurs in order to increase their success rates.

Can you tell us about any of the particular apps that have come out of the competition? Any particular success stories we should know about?

Wow, there have been so many. I’d say the biggest success stories have been iCow, by TED Fellow and Apps4Africa 2010 winner Su Kahumbu, and Farmerline, by Apps4Africa 2011 West Africa winner Alloysius Attah. Both weren’t just successes in terms of impact, but for the individual entrepreneurs and teams behind them as well.

iCow is a simple mobile app that helps farmers to time the most optimal periods for impregnating or milking their cattle, which in turn improves efficiency and yields, resulting in more income to the farmer. Su shared the other day that using her app, farmers have been able to generate anywhere between $100 and $500 dollars per month in additional revenue!

Farmerline is a software application that delivers agricultural information to farmers through voice or text messages to their mobile phone. Since winning Apps4Africa, it’s been piloted by over 200 fish farmers and as won many other awards.

A full list of past winners and their contact details can be found here.

How do you choose your winners, and how are they awarded?

To be honest, Apps4Africa has evolved every year because of what we learned the year prior. This year is no different. We’ve come to understand that the “app competition” is a fun, interactive way to discover people with great ideas and solutions — but the real benefit isn’t the competition itself. It’s what Appfrica is able to offer in terms of follow-on support and scale.

That said, this year we will select winners based on two main criteria. First, have they considered how to make their solutions scalable as a business? And second, what is the potential for growth and wider impact of their solution, either locally or continent-wide?

What are Knowledge Partners and how does that component work? 

Our Knowledge Partners contribute to the Apps4Africa knowledge community in various ways, and we look for ways to provide value to them as well.  Right now, our partners are mostly US- and Africa-based organizations that see the value in supporting African technologists. Many of our Knowledge Partners work or have worked with successful African technologists, whether application developers or hardware engineers. We are creating a robust ecosystem where our Knowledge Partners can interact with Apps4Africa’s technologists on multiple levels, whether through social media amplification, or as competition judges, or by providing insight on their successful processes as a mentor.

Tell us about your partnership with the US Department of State. How did this come about?

The US Department of State (DOS) is Apps4Africa’s main supporting partner. The DOS has expressed keen interest in engaging African entrepreneurs in meaningful ways, and has recognized that the local solutions in Africa deserve additional investment. They identified Appfrica as the best vehicle to co-create and manage the Apps4Africa competition, and they’re now interested in supporting Appfrica’s mission to work with additional high-level sponsors to build the competition into the competitive program I mentioned earlier.

What are the challenges involved in running this competition?

The biggest challenge is actually before the competition begins. Each year, prior to the competition, we select several target countries where we host brainstorming sessions. These events are an opportunity for the app developers to hear from the various stakeholders about what types of solutions are actually needed. This includes government officials, NGO representatives, university faculty, the local and multinational private sector and so on. It’s an unprecedented opportunity for all involved to have a dialogue that helps the app developers design solutions that are actually needed.

These events are great, but a challenge to take on organizing. In 2011 we organized 15 such events in 15 countries in just six months! That was the most challenging and ambitious undertaking Appfrica has pursued thus far.

What’s your hope for the competition in terms of its future growth and influence? 

The next step is for Appfrica to turn the A4A competition into a more holistic model that creates a programmatic feedback loop, so that winners and finalists can benefit even more from our knowledge community year round.

We want to create more access to resources and funding to help winners continue to scale their solutions and businesses after the competition.

Apps4Africa is just one of many initiatives that we’ve been able to launch and scale over the past few years, others include our in-country innovation hub and co-working space HiveColab and Abayima, which is our initiative to empower people in developing countries to communicate when oppressive governments disrupt mobile networks.

As a fully bootstrapped African headquartered organization, Appfrica relies upon pubic-private sector partners to make each of our programs a success. With Apps4Africa, we’re forming relationships with corporations and enterprises who see the African market not only as a place for philanthropy, but for investment and economic growth.

Anything else you’d like to add?

We’re already planning Apps4Africa 2013, so if you have an interest in getting involved, please reach out to us!

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Navigating around big cities is rarely easy. Subway systems are generally crowded and unreliable, taxis are often expensive and prone to gridlock and bike lanes remain underdeveloped in too many urban areas.

But Sara Cantor and George Aye, the founders of Chicago’s Greater Good Studio, have an idea to make getting around their city at least a little bit easier. Aye, a professor at the Art Institute of Chicago and former designer for the Chicago Transit Authority, and Cantor, a professor of design and former research director at Information Architects, are working on an app they hope will greatly improve on HopStop. They are currently designing a transportation app that will not only remind users of line closures, but will show them where to pick up a coffee along their route or remind them to bring an umbrella if rain is in the forecast. The app they envision could design a route to avoid staircases for someone with an injured ankle, or tell a user if they should take the crowded bus in front of them or wait a few minutes for a bus with a seat. The app will be created through crowdsourcing, with self-designated “Urban Agents” feeding data into the application to make it work.

Cantor and Aye’s project, Designing Chicago, has just been named the latest winner of The City 2.0 award.

In 2012, the TED Prize was bestowed upon an idea rather than an individual — The City 2.0, an online platform for the sharing of ideas to make cities function better. The $100,000 prize was broken into 10 grants of $10,000 each, to be given to a variety of projects spanning areas like transportation, education, housing, health, public space and food. So far, seven of the grants have been given out.

To suggest a project for one of the final three City 2.0 awards, nominate it through The City 2.0 website.

For those of you who depend on your iPad, Android or iPhone for your daily dose of TED, get ready to hit the update button. To make your on-the-go TED experience that much more thought inspiring, we’ve made some wonderful updates to our apps.

Android owners, here’s what’s new for you with version 1.1

• For the hearing-impaired, or those that prefer reading along, subtitles are now available on your Android.
• And not just English subtitles — you’ll be able to browse TEDTalks available in more than 70 languages.
• Love TED Radio Hour on NPR? Well, it’ll now be built into your Android app. Just hit the Listen button in the top right!
• Not to mention that Facebook sharing will be that much easier with this new version.

iPhone and iPad TED aficionados, here’s what you can expect with version 1.8:

• Lots more talks for your viewing pleasure. With our updated app, you’ll be able to watch more TEDx and TED-Ed videos in addition to your favorite TEDTalks.
• Oh, you’re a TED Radio Hour fan too? Good! Because the NPR radio show is now available in the daily audio playlist.
• Your Facebook sharing will now be more streamlined too. In fact, you’ll be able to easily share TED videos with other iPhone and iPad users.
• And we’re working on some incredible updates for iOS 6.

Don’t have a TED app yet? You know what to do. Android crew, get it at Google Play and iFans, head straight to iTunes. And see more screenshots below.

On your Android, you’ll now get subtitles — in English as well as in 70 other languages.

And here, a look at the TED experience with our updated app for the iPad.

The new TED app for Android is built to adapt to all kinds of Android devices, including the new Sony Tablet P “dual screen” and the Amazon Kindle Fire, making it feel natural and familiar to users across different devices. You can find the TED app in the Google Play store and the Amazon Appstore for Android.

The functionality of the TED app is fine-tuned for the mobile audience, and allows for offline browsing and viewing, as well as audio-only engagement: App users who are out for a jog, commuting to work, or simply multi-tasking can listen to TEDTalks, either on an individual basis or through TED’s curated audio stream.

Features include:

Up-to-the-minute videos: TEDTalks are published daily, and Android app users can see the latest TEDTalks videos as soon as they’re available online.
Browse + search: Whether they’re online or off, users can browse the TED library – by theme, tag, rating or popularity – and search for a talk by speaker name or topic.
Easy sharing: Users who are inspired by a talk can share it easily over Facebook, Twitter or email.
Bookmarks: Users can mark and save talks for viewing later within their “My Talks” tab.
Offline viewing: The app is designed to support a mobile lifestyle, in which users move fluidly between online and offline use. Users can download video and audio directly to the device to watch on the plane or other locations where Internet connectivity may not possible. The full library is searchable in offline mode.
Curated audio stream: Out for a jog, multi-tasking, or just interested in listening, TED app users can listen to TEDTalks, either on an individual basis or through TED’s curated audio stream.

Find the TED app for Android in the Google Play store and the Amazon Appstore for Android.

And watch our promo video: