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Cielo24 is a high tech research and development company (R&D) that has developed technologies for multilingual searchable captions.

The core services include captioning, indexing and transcription services for large media data and media intelligence organizations in the education, enterprise, government and entertainment markets.

The company was founded by Brian PlakisCheng in 2012 from Santa Barbara, California.

Cogi
Cielo24 is a corporate spin-off of Coji sharing several key members with the company. Cogi is an award winning annotation tool for iOS and Android. Prior to starting Cielo24 Brian PlackisCheng served as a member of the Board of Directors for Cogi from November 2010 to November 2012. He also served as the CEO from March 2011 to November 2012. Cielo24 COO Shanna Johnson also served as the COO for Cogi from April 2011 to November 2012. Engineer, Vietor Davis served as the vice president from April 2011 to December 2012 before transitioning to Cielo24 as CTO.

Cielo24
In 2012, while researching Cogi's user base, PlakisCheng discovered that professors were using the tool to record their lectures and distribute them to students. He pursued them and started Cielo24 in fall of 2012. That was when massive open online courses (MOOCs) were starting to become a major focus of learning; UC Berkeley and Coursera were among Cielo24’s first customers. Cielo24 began operations in fall of 2012 from Santa Barbara, CA with the core crew carrying over from Cogi. Initial investment of 915 thousand dollars was secured from QueensBridge Venture Partners.

In the initial phases Cielo24 hired part-time marketing associates or contracted other companies to market. While successful the strategy was not able to keep up with their rapid growth. PlakisCheng consulted Chief Outsiders a firm that helps start ups resolve rapid growth hurdles. Stijin Hendriske was appointed temporary CMO in July 2014 to January 2015. His instrumental contribution was to separate the sales department from the marketing department through his help Cielo24 were able to increase revenue by three hundred percent.

In February 2012, NAD (National association for the Dead) filed a lawsuit against Harvard and MIT. As of February 2016, Cielo24 has raised $5 million in a Series A round led by ff Venture Capital. North Base Media, Pereg Ventures, Indicator Ventures, Wavemaker Partners and Educated Ventures also participated. The focal point of the suit was making learning more accessible to the hearing impaired, this on going lawsuit has yielded a surge in educational institutes investing in captioning services which has facilitated the rapid growth of Cielo24.

Features
Every human word, utterance and tag is timed stamped at the beginning and end, verbatim. Customized index, caption and transcript data extends audience reach and enables content search. It also has it's application towards bridging learning gaps for the hearing impaired. As well as translated captioning.

The platform creates high quality, searchable data from unstructured media including but not limited to indexes, transcripts and captions. It offers a JSON API to integrate transcription, captioning, and word extraction into applications and services. Developers can generate an API Key, control jobs, and work with output formats. Samples explain how to request from media file only, request from corresponding transcript, and request from existing job.

Supported languages
Cielo24 is is available in over a dozen native languages:


 * Arabic
 * Chinese
 * English
 * French
 * German
 * Hindi
 * Japanese
 * Korean
 * Portuguese
 * Spanish

Reception
Cielo24 has been positively received for its compliance to American Disability Act section 504 and 508. Searchable captions enable people suffering from hearing loss to read what they cannot hear.

Notable clients

 * Brightcove
 * Coursera
 * Kaltura
 * New York University
 * MediaCore
 * Ohio State University
 * Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
 * Stanford University
 * University of California
 * University of Michigan
 * Wall Street Journal