I’ve always thought skunkworks projects were pretty sweet.

As a kid, I earned the name Fingers Armon because my friend Jimmy Fiddler and I disassembled lamps, radios, and other gear – rarely managing to put them back together properly.  My respect for electricity came early, too, as I occasionally touched the wrong two wires and sustained some nasty shocks.

Fortunately, a career in media and PR has allowed me to avoid 110-volt jolts in favor of the intellectual and commercial buzz emanating from skunkworks inside the larger service providers and smaller shops alike.

Here are three innovations that PR practitioners should consider trying:

• Meltwater Press is a radical new take on building a media list.  The tried and true method of pitching a story involves a PR pro targeting journalists and bloggers based on their geography, the type of media outlet for whom they work, and their assigned beat.   The approach Meltwater is advocating doesn’t involve searching a media database.  Instead, PR pros are asked to upload the content they plan to pitch — a press release, backgrounder, speech or other similar text document – for analysis by a natural language software program.  Meltwater then spits out the bylines of reporters who have written about similar topics.  The concept is not new.  When I was still with PR Newswire, we cobbled together a test that used content from eWatch and Dialog, and journalist contacts from MEDIAtlas to see if we could generate relevant media lists using natural language processing technology.  The results were underwhelming and the product was shelved.  A few years later, PR agency veteran Peter Himler teamed up with a firm then called ENR to introduce MatchPoint, but I haven’t heard boo about the product since then.  While I have not seen a demo of Meltwater Press, I’m guessing that artificial intelligence software is getting better and better.  In an era when IBM’s Watson can win against Jeopardy’s top champions, it’s only a matter of time before a media list can be churned out by a machine.

• Times Square sign placement of PR content evokes a kind of visceral reaction from clients.  No one can make the argument that posting a photo on an electronic billboard for a few seconds can drive sales, build a brand or repair a reputation.  But clients love this service. Since Times Square photos were suggested by former PRNer Jonathan Evans, who now works for the press release aggregation company Noodls, tens of thousands of bright, digital photos and captions have appeared on a sign that’s 20 stories tall in the “Crossroads of the World.”  The cost is negligible – just a few hundred bucks.  PR Newswire client images appear on the Thomson Reuters Building for a few seconds at a time, and clients receive an email showing their image as it is being displayed (with passers-by, buses and the occasional Naked Cowboys appearance adding a bit of extra sizzle).  PR images may also be projected on sign at the impressive NASDAQ Market Site in Times Square.  That service is available through NASDAQ’s GlobeNewswire.

• dotSUB eliminates language as a barrier for web video.  Any organization, product or brand whose consumers speak multiple languages should consider posting their video to the dotSUB site.  This New York-based company offers a free tool that allows users to upload a script or type in the words spoken on the video, and to match the video to the precise time each word is spoken.  The result is instant subtitles, just like the closed-caption feed on TV.  After one language is subtitled, users can select additional languages and Google Translate will go to work.  Not happy with the accuracy of machine translation?  dotSUB offers really inexpensive professional translation services for clients from Sony to Nokia to the famous California TED conference. The founder of dotSUB, Michael Smolens, is PR-savvy and has been known to offer ingenious ideas for the best use of this world-flattening technology to communications pros who take the time to ask.

There you have it:  Three off-the-beaten-path tools from smart folks who have produced skunkworks projects that merit attention.

I’d love to hear your nominations.

New Yorker Sandy Cohen has started an unconventional translation company, Speaklike.  Rather than thriving on the conversion of encyclopedia-sized documents from English into Arabic or Portuguese, Sandy’s start-up offers Twitter users an inexpensive way to translate their 140-character messages into just about any language.

At about 25 cents per language per tweet, this can add up in a hurry.  But it’s a godsend for B2B and B2C users of Twitter who cater to multicultural and global audiences.   His service could also be used in the email and Web fulfillment world.

In another departure from the mainstream, Sandy is taking a play out of the Wikipedia playbook by crowd-sourcing his network of translators.  The similarity to Wikipedia ends there, though, as a fraction of each micropayment  will trickle down to the translations.  (Will this be the basis for a new Twitter economy in Brazil and Belarus?)

I just started using SpeakLike today and look forward to seeing if anyone in the Spanish-speaking world cares about my tweets.  My new Latino persona is @SenorDaveArmon.

The other interesting crowd-sourced translation business model involves Web video.  dotSUB , created by Michael Smolens, is free for users to upload video and a transcript so each spoken word appears as closed-captioning on the bottom of the video  (click on the “CC” button at the bottom of the player).  Those two steps opens up your video to the hearing-impaired audience.

For video producers who want to reach those who speak another language, dotSUB has a network of professional translators who will do the work for a few bucks (the charge was around $10 a video minute the last time I checked).  There are free translators who know how to use the dotSUB tool, but the content has to be interesting enough for someone to volunteer their time to convert your video into something that will win an Oscar in the Ukraine or Nepal.

There are already a few examples of marketing programs taking advantage of dotSUB and Speaklike.   Use the Comment function below to let me know your thoughts about these tools.

The world is full of creative and interesting people.

Some of them will be on stage in the next 24 hours in Long Beach, California, at the annual TED conference:

• The creator of the first African online ad network and the African equivalent of The Huffington Post

• A New Zealand physicist who discovered the hidden mathematical patterns of warfare

• The founder of an international women’s inventor network

• An Indian design researcher dedicated to improving the lives of children

• A Korean-American actress whose one-woman show tells the story of a North Korean spy”

Even though it’s virtually impossible for ordinary people, and even for some CEOs and dignitaries, to score tickets to TED, organizers of the event have worked extra hard to show their commitment to the Open community.  Today, I spotted a list of movie theaters across the United States that would be beaming in a live broadcast of the Ted Prize, for the admission price of $20:

When: Thursday, February 5
Start time: 5pm Pacific / 7pm Central / 8pm Eastern
Tickets: $20
Theaters include:
Laemmle Music Hall, Beverly Hills, CA, 310-274-6869
Laemmle’s Playhouse, Pasadena, CA, 626-844-6500
Michigan Theatre, Jackson, MI, 517-783-0962
Bryn Mawr Film Institute, Bryn Mawr, PA, 610-527-9898
Jane Pickens Theater, Newport, RI, 401-846-5252

There’s also a webcast, which is free.

Of course there are many Twitter users and bloggers at TED, so we’ll get the back story alongside the more polished content on the web and in theaters.

My friend Michael Smolens, founder of the translation and subtitling community dotSUB is there.  Through Michael, I have met a number of remarkable individuals who are committed to shaping their careers around open access, globally, to quality media content that can lower communications barriers and maybe even make the world a better place.

Before last week, I only knew Jesse Dylan as Bob’s son.  Now I have deep respect for his documentary filmmaking and activism around the topic of medical information.  After all,  “Yes We Can” helped get Barack Obama elected.

Rob Hof also uses the art of filmmaking to tell his stories, captured aboard railroad trains in foreign lands ranging from Turkey to Cambodia.  I can’t wait for his Future Express series to debut this spring.

Today, I started looking over the work of Neil Sieling, who shared an amazing story about the cable TV industry grousing to the FCC that it wanted to be freed from having to allocate precious channels for community access.  DirecTV and Dish Networks don’t have a similar public service requirement, the cable guys argued.  The unintended result was that Wayne’s World and local PTA meetings stayed on cable and the satellite TV industry was forced to add public service programming for the first time.  LinkTV was born.

The common thread with these individuals is that they like to share.  They welcome newcomers to their network and don’t throw an NDA in front of you before ordering lunch.  It’s a refreshing way to do business, and to learn.