Mark Pascarella, Gotuit's president, talks about the company's strategy to compete with other emerging video networks. One thing Gotuit has going for it is a sophisticated user interface. It's the difference between going to a rock concert (YouTube) and the symphony.
During the first six months of this year, the amount of venture dollars invested in Internet video startups rose 45% to $156 million, according to Dow Jones VentureOne. Nineteen companies received that funding. If the investing continues apace, the dollars pouring into this sector will surpass the $267 million million invested in 40 startups in 2005. All told, since 2002, 139 video or video-related startups received a total of $954 million in venture financing.
Some of those companies include MeeVee, Revver, YouTube, Video Egg, Brightcove, CinemaNow, FeedRoom, and Veoh.
Watch my interview with MeeVee President Michael Raneri
Watch my interview with Instant Media CEO Andy Leak
Watch my interview with Veoh CEO Dimitry Shapiro
Watch my interview with MobiTV CEO Philip Alveda
Also watch my interviews with two social search startups, Eurekster and PreFound
Watch my interview with PreFound CEO Steve Mansfield
Watch my interview with Eurekster CEO Steve Marder
VideoEgg co-founder Kevin Sladek talks about how he spent 18 months building a publishing tool that transcodes video on a user's machine rather than on VideoEgg's servers. In this way, the upload time is faster. He said video uploads take about 2 minutes over a DSL line. Well, the video of his interview took me about 20 minutes on a DSL line. Nonetheless, the service does work. And, VideoEgg is one of the few companies providing private-label video-uploading services. For instance, VideoEgg is powering AOL's Uncut user-generated video service. Both companies will share ad revenue.
Bebo is set to overtake MySpace in the UK for visits before this fall, according to Hitwise. Bebo climbed to take
the No. 2 spot, in the Hitwise Net Communities and Chat category last week, second
only to MySpace. MySpace still leads social networking sites. Bebo is No. 2, but Bebo is fast closing the gap.
Watch my interview with Bebo founder and CEO Michael Birch
Want to know how Plaxo started? Watch this two-part story I did during Plaxo's early years. It aired on MarketWatch's business magazine show on CBS, when the founders and venture investors were seeking a CEO. The story includes the Plaxo founders, Todd Masonis and Cameron Ring, and VC backers, such as Mike Moritz and Ram Shriram.
Technorati's David Sifry talks about the many one-hit wonders in the blogosphere. Yikes.
So you want to share your videos? You can earn $250 if you submit your video to Atom Entertainment, which operates AddictingClips and AtomFilms. If you're serious about a making movies, you might want to consider this service, given Mika Salmi's track record. AtomFilms helped launch JibJab into stardom. I asked Salmi, who started Atom Entertainment about 8 years ago, how he was going to compete for user video when YouTube seems to be the place to be seen. File-size limit at AddictingClips is 100 megabytes.
Kaboodle CEO and founder Manish Chandra took $3.5 million in funding from 10 strategic angel investors. It's a large sum for an angel round, hence the large number of angels. In our interview, I asked Chandra why he chose this route over the VC route, and whether he received a valuation in this round. He did. Post-money valuation = $9.5 million. I also asked him why a Web 2.0 startup needed so much cash to operate a business. After all, don't Web 2.0 companies outsource all the content creation? Chandra has some interesting ideas he needs to build out. For instance, he's working on integrating product feeds from comparison-shopping engines and comparison-shopping travel sites. No partnerships to announce just yet. The goal? To get consumers to create pages of shopping or travel lists and to match these consumers up with the vendors.
So you want to share your videos? You might win $250 if you submit your video to Atom Entertainment, which operates AddictingClips and AtomFilms. If you're serious about making movies, you might want to consider this service, given Mika Salmi's track record. AtomFilms helped launch JibJab into stardom. I asked Salmi, who started Atom Entertainment about 8 years ago, how he was going to compete for user video when YouTube seems to be the place to be seen. File-size limit at AddictingClips is 100 megabytes.
Jahah, which received several million from Sequoia back in October, is getting traction these days. Co-founder Roman Scharf says his voIP service is as easy as searching on Google.
Can't read what Mark's shirt says? It says: "My mom thinks I'm cool." This is an interview at the MarketWatch offices in the fall of 2005. Facebook has come a long way from its $100 million valuation back then. Viacom offered $750 million for the startup earlier this year, according to someone close to the situation.
A year ago or so, I said that Google's index of 8 billion pages was nothing compared to what would be created if tools were given to the people on the Web. Organizing this digital mess would present a big opportunity. And, it has. There are a number of companies trying to help us organize, including Plum. It's an invite-only service that will launch April 1. It's actually a great service, in my opinion. I asked Hans Peter how he plans to differentiate his company from the pack.
Watch interview with Hans Peter of Plum
Of all the media and Internet companies out there, I'd say Yahoo, Fox and CBS are the ones I'd consider aggressively trying to define the new media landscape. I asked Neil Budde of Yahoo news what his plans are for the service.
Watch interview with Neil Budde, head of Yahoo news
In stealth mode for now, San Francisco-based Plum is an easy-to-use service that lets you mash up -- to use the au courant term -- what's on your desktop and what's on the Web, putting all of it on one Web page that's not only for your own use but for the perusal of family members, friends and acquaintances, and other potentially interested parties. That is to say: the entire world. Plum definitely exploits the user-centric mindset that's swept the Web in recent months and years. Read about Plum on MarketWatch.
What will eventually become of blog-hosting sites backed by venture capitalists? They'll fail; they'll be sold, or they'll go public; No doubt, a public offering for anything blog related would recall the days of GeoCities, eToys and Pets.com. But I don't think there are any blog-like IPOs in the queue. In some cases, they just keep operating, growing, acquiring other blogs, and testing out new models. Consider Six Apart, the owner of TyePad, which hosts this blog. The company just bought SplashBlog, which is great for me, since it's a lot easier to post a photo from my mobile phone onto SplashBlog than it is on TypePad. Six Apart is also now offering TypePad hosting services for big companies, like Amazon, Disney, MSNBC and Viacom, to name a few. I asked Six Apart CEO Barak Berkowitz how businesses are incorporating blogs today and what he's charging them. I also asked him whether Google's decision to place ads on any blog - regardless of traffic - affected TypePad's advertising strategy. Want to know what's happening at TypePad?
Max Levchin co-founded PayPal, and stayed with the company through its IPO and sale to eBay. Clearly, Levchin has experienced building a startup in a very competitive sector. Now he finds himself in yet another crowded sector - photo sharing. I asked him if he's applying any lessons he learned from his PayPal days. He said that what's he learned is that having an idea is 2% of what it takes to win, 98% is execution.
At $140 billion, Google is now worth more than IBM. It's twice as large as Apple, and it's equal to the market values of Yahoo, eBay and Amazon.com combined. If you're an entrepreneur, should you try to create a company to sell to Google or the other big Internet companies, or should you be more ambitious and set your sites on building more than a feature?
For that I asked Guy Kawasaki, a venture capitalist at Garage Technology Ventures.
In 2005, U.S. venture-capital funds raised $22.4 billion, up 32% from a year ago, according to Dow Jones Private Equity Analyst.
Search is the No. 2 activity on the Web behind e-mail. As every searcher knows, it's not perfect, especially when it comes to video search. Truveo is a new video search engine. Truveo founder Tim Tuttle gave me his elevator pitch recently while we were at the Dow Jones Consumer Venture Technology conference.
I also caught up with Ron Conway, an angel investor who was lucky enough to invest in Google when the company was just $70 million. Ron said that he's looking at companies that are creating services/software that enhances the services already provided by Google, Yahoo, MSN and InterActiveCorp's Ask Jeeves. He believes it's better to sell to those big established Net companies than burn millions creating a competitive offering.
How did Facebook manage to gain traction and get a $100 million valuation? Watch the interview with the 21-year-old founder who started the company in his college dorm last year.
Watch interview with founder Zuckerberg on starting his company
Also read Net Sense on MarketWatch
Fox Interactive's Ross Levinsohn talks about Web strategy
Feeva CEO on funding free WiFi access with targeted ads
Meetup.com CEO on poker meetups, and other popular groups
Draper Fisher's Tim Draper on China startups and innovation
Yahoo chief data officer on tech talent wars in Silicon Valley
American Greetings Interactive CEO on SI's swimsuit edition on mobile phones
Are interviews with startup CEOs, venture capitalists and other movers and shakers in Silicon Valley of any interest to you? Who else would you like to hear from?
