Meedan.org, a San Francisco and Cairo-based NGO that develops creative social Arabic and English translation software, has launched a for-profit spin off to pursue commercial ventures.

The ventures will focus on regional and global access to digital real-time content, said a statement released at the Abu Dhabi Media Summit.

Meedan Labs has unveiled its first product ‘Translatedesk’ at the summit. It is a social translation solution for social media, connecting fans with brands to distribute the work of sharing real-time social content to fan communities.

The ethos of most commercial crowdsourcing applications, like CNN iReport, Viki.com and Mechanical Turk, has been focused on extracting maximum value from the crowd in exchange for minimum pay. However, rating, mentoring, correcting, annotating, sharing data, and building community value are all explicitly incentivised in the reputation and payment model in Translatedesk.

Translatedesk will release onto the web on November 11, Meedan Labs partner with Taghreedat to translate social media from Saudi Arabia for the National Geographic sponsored Out of Eden Walk, a seven-year walk around the world begun in the Arab Region by journalist Paul Salopek.

Meedan.org has brought more than $10 million behind Arabic access to content software with the partnership of foundations including The MacArthur Foundation, The Alwaleed Foundation, the Cisco Foundation, The Coexist Foundation, IBM Foundation, Google.org, and Qatar Foundation Intl, and donor agencies including the Sida, the UK Foreign Office, and the British Research Council.

It will continue to promote open source technologies like Checkdesk, an investigative live blogging platform, and open content strategies  such as Classroom to Classroom, a virtual exchange platform for secondary schools. - TradeArabia News Service