Paris-based Semiocast, which helps brands understand and interact with real-time Web services, has again done a study on Twitter usage. After finding that only 50% of tweets are in English, based on an analysis of 2.8 million tweets, the company has now looked at nearly five times as many Twitter messages in order to gain more insight on the increased international presence of the popular micro-sharing service.

According to an analysis of 13.5 million tweets published over the course of one week, Semiocast concluded that users located in the United States account for only thirty percent of all tweets. The next English-speaking country on the list comes in fifth, with only 6 percent of tweets analyzed originating from the United Kingdom.

Top countries are the U.S., Japan, Brazil, Indonesia and the UK, in that order.

Semiocast says only 0.5% of tweets appear to come geo-tagged. In order to establish the share of countries more accurately, the company also processed tweets and self-declared locations in bios from users with the help of its multi-lingual semantic technology platform, effectively parsing the locations of Twitter users as good as possible.

Semiocast says the strongest growth rate was not registered in the United States, where Twitter is headquartered, but in other regions around the world. Furthermore, English now accounts for less than 44% of tweets, down from 50% merely six weeks ago.

Japan, where Twitter has been actively bolstering its presence for the past two years now, is the second largest tweeting nation, accounting for about 15% of messages worldwide. The third largest Twitter nation is Brazil, with nearly 12% of messages worldwide, which translates to about 6.2 million messages per day.

Indonesia, where Twitter is big thanks to partnerships with local carriers, ranks fourth with 10% of messages worldwide or about 5 million messages on a daily basis.

Overall, the sample of tweets analyzed is fairly small, considering that today, an estimated 53 million tweets are published on a daily basis, up from 50 million per day in February 2010.

Nevertheless, other companies who’ve analyzed the internationalization of Twitter in the past have come to similar conclusions: the growth rate of tweets is clearly accelerating outside the United States, and the share of Twitter messages originating from the company’s home country is getting smaller every day. Even Twitter investor Fred Wilson has written about that trend on his blog last weekend.

For more context, Sysomos has published research findings on this topic before.

In January 2010, the company looked at 13 million active Twitter accounts from mid-October to mid-December 2009 and found that 50.8% of Twitter activity came from the U.S., followed by Brazil (8.79%), the U.K. (7.2%), Canada (4.35%) and Germany (2.49%). Japan was 10th at 1.22%. That was a sharp drop compared to the 62.1% share in the United Stated Sysomos registered in June 2009.

How long until Japan, Indonesia or Brazil takes the lead at the expense of the United States?

You can watch Steve Ballmer talking about Ford and Microsoft’s new partnership here but we’ll run a liveblog for you all here so you don’t have to whip out the headphones. Refresh this page to see updates.

10:41 – Ballmer talking about Hohm. Decreases energy costs. Automating and optimizing the process of charging your electric vehicle.

YouTube’s video page overhaul, which the company itself says is one of the biggest redesigns in its history, is about to get noticed by a lot more people today.

A YouTube partner just forwarded us an e-mail he received from the Google company, stating that all videos will be transitioned to the newly designed page some time today.

Here is the relevant part of said e-mail, which leaves little to the imagination:

Dear Partner,

We want to provide you with an update on YouTube’s new video page, which we’ve been hard at work on for the last several months.

You can read more about it here:

http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2010/01/video-page-gets-makeover.html

http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2010/02/latest-changes-to-video-page-new.html

On Wednesday, March 31st we’re happy to let you know that we’ll be transitioning all YouTube videos to this new video page.

This new video page makeover is one of the biggest redesigns in YouTube history — and we’re excited to make YouTube a better place for you and your content!

You can read more details about the redesign in the blog posts linked in YouTube’s email to its partners, or check out what Jason wrote when the new video page was publicly released (only opt-in) last January.

In short: less clutter, easier search and no more stars.

Sure, everyone has been able to active the new look for a while now, but not every member of the humongous YouTube community reads the company blog, or TechCrunch for that matter, so chances are many will be seeing the new video page for the first time today.

Remember, this on a site that is seeing more than 20 hours of video uploaded every minute.

Expect lots of confused people roaming the tubes today.

Following the location-based frenzy that took place at this year’s SXSW festival, my colleague MG Siegler highlighted a definitive issue when it comes to checking in on various social networks like FourSquare, Gowalla, Loopt and others. The problem is that each of these check-in services has their own places database, which means that a place on Foursquare may be slightly different than a place on Gowalla, even though they’re technically the same place. Moreover, within many location-based social networks, there are duplicates for some venues since people are allowed to create their own. Location-based advertising and marketing service Placecast is hoping to resolve this problem by launching its Match API, Rosetta Stone like-database for location venue data.

Placecast’s free Match API will enables location content providers and location-based application developers to refer to a location in any number of ways, and validate that those references resolve to one true location for each check-in. In more simple terms, the API will take duplicate listings for a venue and combine them into one listing. The API translates data across services and matches it for accuracy, regardless of the ID system. And because the Placecast Match API is an open system, Placecast’s Match API enables companies working with location data to use any (or multiple) ID system and resolve to one true location. For example, if I check-in to the lobby of the Hilton Hotel and a friend checks into the restaurant at the Hilton Hotel, the Match API would resolve these and show both as the same location and check-in venue.

The Placecast Match API aims to resolves two issues with large location-based data sets. First, it disambiguates addresses, indentifying all of the different ways to express the address of a location. Second, it maps all the relevant IDs from different content providers to that same place on the planet, so that it is always referred to correctly by any other system. Placecast’s system has already been in place for more than a year and has already processed millions of location records worldwide.

Location-based companies such as WCities, Socialight, Urban Mapping, and Buzzd have already begun testing the open web services API. Placecast’s CEO and founder, Alistair Goodman, tells me that identifying a venue or business correctly in a location based social network is the foundation for location-based advertising. His reasoning is that for a business to deliver promotions or marketing message, the network needs to correctly refer to the business in its location data.

Placecast’s Match API isn’t the only resolution to the issue of multiple check-in data for the same location. yesterday, SimpleGeo launched a Marketplace will make it easy for developers to see a range of different geodata and pick what they want to use. SimpleGeo also launched Storage Engine, which is is a cloud-based system to allow developers to store location and do queries on it, sort of like an Amazon S3 for geodata.

Check.in works around this place problem by doing a look-up on each service and letting you pick the correct check-in spot. But it’s a bit slow, and still seems rather tedious. The other option is to adopt a standard for places. The Activity Streams group is working on such a concept. Yahoo could also implement a system on top of its WOEID system. But this risk of adopting a standard for a location-based social network is sacrificing their their business since these place databases are one of the keys to each service.

Placecast, which recently raised $3 million in funding, also debuted its technology, called ShopAlerts, that allows retailers bring people into their stores by sending them text messages when they get near their retail outlets. The startup also offers a location-based advertising platform that weaves together location information and other data from audiences across the web, mobile, and email. Placecast will analyze inventory, segments audiences and targets ads for maximum relevance for advertisers and publishers.

Ha! Hold on. Let me walk around a little, calm down. Ummm… so Gene Munster of Piper Jaffray, the guy who was right about the iPad because he wouldn’t shut up about it for most of the last five years, is saying there’s a “70% chance” that Apple will build a search engine. Barring thought that Apple needs to run a search engine like a fish needs to run a bicycle factory, let’s look at what he’s saying (via BusinessInsider)

This Saturday, Apple will be releasing the iPad to the masses, and you can be sure that one of the first things people will do when they get their hands on the device is explore what awaits them on the App Store. For anyone who regularly uses Google Docs in the workplace, one of the most appealing apps is likely going to be Memeo’s Connect Reader, which will allow users to download and natively view all of their Google Docs files on their iPads. We got a sneak peek at the free application, which will launch the same day as the iPad.

The application allows users of any Google Docs account (be it normal or Premiere) to automatically download and store their Docs, which they can then view using the iPad’s document viewer that’s been integrated into Memeo’s app. The viewer supports a range of popular formats, including Office, Apple’s iWork formats, and docs created in Google’s online editor (which are downloaded as HTML to preserve formatting).

So why is this important? First, given the current battle waging between Apple and Google, it’s unlikely that Apple would even approve a Google-made Docs app at all.  But Google Docs is popular enough that it would be unwise for Apple to ban the service from the iPad entirely — users would just make the jump to the upcoming Google tablets.  Memeo thinks that it and other independent third parties are well positioned in the current situation, as they’ll be able to provide services to bridge this gap.  It’s also worth pointing out that Steve Jobs allegedly sent an email stating that the iPad would support importing Google Docs to the iPad through iWork or iDisk.

We last wrote about Memeo in January, when Google started allowing users to upload any type of file to Google Docs, effectively allowing them to use it for online storage. Memeo was one of Google’s preferred partners for the launch, and their desktop sync software has already been adopted by 40% of Google’s enterprise customers (defined as companies with 1000+ seats).

InsideView, a service that mashes up social data for enterprises to increase sales productivity has raised $11.5 million in Series B financing led by current investors Emergence Capital Partners, Rembrandt Venture Partners and Greenhouse Capital Partners. This brings the company’s total funding to $25 million.

The company’s flagship product, SalesView, crawls through more than 20,000 web sites, social networks and databases including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Hoovers, Reuters, and SEC filings, to give businesses sales intelligence and information that will aid sales operations with helping develop and maintain leads and clients.

SalesView is available as a stand-alone Web application as well as integrated with CRM vendors like SugarCRM, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, and SalesForce.com. In fact, SalesView is ranked as one of the most popular free apps on SalesForce’s App Exchange. The service currently has over 10,000 users with more than 1,700 companies that access SalesView’s feed, including Ariba, Centive, Cisco/WebEx, JobScience, and SuccessFactors.

The new financing will be used to for new customer acquisitions and for further product development. Competitors include Hoovers and Genius.

Everyone remotely involved with online video is quick to jump on the iPad bandwagon – we’ve recently covered announcements from the likes of Ooyala, Brightcove and Kyte. You can add two more to that list now, courtesy of Delve Networks and MeFeedia.

Delve Networks, for one, says it will support full video delivery when the tablet device lands in users’ hands on April 3rd.

Newspaper, magazine and online publishers who already use Delve to deliver video on the iPhone or iPod touch (the company also helps publishers reach audiences on Android and Blackberry phones) will automatically be able to deliver video to the iPad without further changes.

Their videos will automatically be encoded in the right format to be viewed through iPad’s player if the publisher inserts some lines of code on its website. Delve’s detection system will then decide the appropriate link to present to the viewer depending on which device he or she is using. Delve does not not require browsers to support HTML5, although the company says it considers HTML5 support to be a key component of its product roadmap.

Delve Networks clients include Lego, NFL, Pokemon, the Department of Defense, Skateboard.TV and more.

MeFeedia this morning touted its ability for advertising on HTML5 videos, thanks to its All Player technology, which it says is patent-pending. MeFeedia claims the All Player platform powers over 50 million monthly video ads across web and mobile devices (including those that don’t support Flash – guess which ones they mean by that). You can view a demo here.

Who’s next?

TweetDeck is switching its default video Tweeting platform today, from 12seconds to TwitVid. TwitVid.com will serve as the video service across all existing TweetDeck products, as well as all new products released by TweetDeck in 2010.

TwitVid will be integrated into the next iteration of the TweetDeck’s desktop application, which is expected to be launched next month. TwitVid will also be the default video application in TweetDeck’s iPhone application and soon-to-be-released Android application.

Launched last year, TwitVid.com allows users to upload, view and share videos in both HD and SD. Essentially the TwitPic of video, TwitVid rolled out a Twitter video application for the iPhone and unveiled a realtime search engine and analytics platform last December.

Scoring a deal with TweetDeck, one of the most popular and widely-used social media clients on the market, is a huge coup for TwitVid, not to mention the fact that the startup edged out competitor 12seconds for the spot.

Realtime streams are quickly moving from the consumer Web to the enterprise. The constant flow of status updates, links, and shared items people are becoming accustomed to on Facebook and Twitter is finding its way into enterprise apps like Socialcast, Yammer, and Salesforce Chatter.

Investors are betting on this trend. Socialcast is getting an $8 million cash infusion from Menlo Ventures and True Ventures in a Series B financing. In February, 2010, competitor Yammer raised a $10 million Series B.

Socialcast previously got $1.4 million from True Ventures and angels a year ago. Blogger Om Malik of GigaOm, who is also a VC partner at True, sits on Socialcast’s board. He will be joined by Menlo’s Sonja Hoel Perkins.

The startup’s service combines a corporate activity stream that ties into CRM and ERP systems with social bookmarking, Outlook and SharePoint integrations, mobile (iPhone and Blackberry) and desktop (Air) apps, and analytics. Co-workers can share knowledge and updates in a semi-private setting. Socialcast moved to a freemium model last summer, offering the basic service for free, and charging for upgrades and premium features. The company offers both hosted and behind-the-firewall options. It boasts 7,000 corporate customers, including Guitar Center, turner Broadcasting, and Avaya, and an 1,100 percent growth in users from a year ago (albeit off of a small base). Yammer, by comparison, claims to power 60,000 corporate networks. The realtime enterprise is obviously a growth industry.