Bambi Francisco

Plaxo's newest employees

Five fratenity brothers created the online calendar HipCal in their fratenity house at RPI. The unique calendaring service caught the eye of Plaxo, who acquired the company in May 2006 and offered all five co-founders new jobs at Plaxo. Meet the five founders in this video of their coast-to-coast road trip.

 

Riya visual search

In September, Riya will launch a service that will let you upload an image and search for similar images. It's a radically new approach to image searching. In many ways, it's far more efficient. For instance, you wouldn't get a page with photos of the feline mammal alongside the car if you search for "jaguar," like this page from Google images. There is a slght downside to this service, however. But it's probably something that can be easily tweaked. Nonetheless, it's a great new way to search! Read my thoughts on my MarketWatch blog for more.

Also, here's a video of Riya's CEO Munjal Shah speaking very personally about how Riya got its name. He also shares other interesting background information about the company.

More video-related columns

1) NBC has its own user-generated site called www.dotcomedy.com, where aspiring comedians can upload their own videos. But starting a video-sharing site isn't that easy.  On Tuesday, NBC struck a marketing deal with YouTube to tap into the video-sharing site's booming and active community (YouTube had 20 mln unique visitors in May, according to Nielsen//NetRatings). The partnership will allow NBC to test video-sharing sites as a means to promote shows, and it will allow NBC to test user-generated participation in the promo-creation process.  Still, new user-generated services continue to emerge, like Yahoo's user-generated video service. With more than 100 of such video-sharing sites cropping up, it's a wonder anyone bothers to launch another one. But Yahoo did.  For more of what's behind Yahoo, read my commentary on MarketWatch, or visit my official MarketWatch blog.

Net Sense: Yahoo's openness

My official blog on MarketWatch

2) What are people watching on the Web? Are they watching amateur or home-grown video or big-media video? They're watching home-grown video. For more, read my Net Sense column on MarketWatch, or go to my offfical MarketWatch blog.

Net Sense: Your video vs. big media video

3) The trick to making sure that video ads won't be skipped over online is to make sure they're compelling enough to share. The way you can do that is to make the video provocative, if not nearly X-rated. A couple weekends ago,  HuffingtonPost.com started displaying video advertisements created by ad agency JWT for a week-long pilot program. I won't be explicit about the various ads. Suffice it to say that if you watch the one created for Scruffs Hardwear, you'll know what I mean about video ads that have crossed the line of appropriateness. Am I surprised? Actually, I'm no less surprised about salacious video ads on these emerging online publications than  news that a U.K. doctor is conducting an historic full-face transplant, which will undoubtedly ignite a truculent ethical debate. I'm no less surprised about such ads than I am about scientists attempting to write a "code of ethics" for robots, for the anticipated day when robots are not only smart, but possibly sexier than us humans. Read Australian News article. I'm no less surprised about such ads because we live in a world where we're always entering new frontiers, are in need of constant stimulation, and the fact of the matter is that soft-porn ads already exist in respectable magazines and television, say for example the Carl's Jr. hamburger ad, starring Paris Hilton. Anything goes on the Internet when no one is really watching. For more, read my Net Sense column on MarketWatch, or visit my official MarketWatch blog. 

Read Net Sense: Video goes viral

NBC embraces YouTube

YouTube - the online-video sharing service that exploded in popularity after showcasing unlicensed NBC content - managed to ink a marketing deal with the network.  As part of the deal, NBC will make a "small advertising buy" on YouTube's site. The deal runs for a season and includes a cross-marketing and a user-generated video component.   

It's not surprising. YouTube, along with every other emerging video channel or video-sharing service, has been trying to strike such marketing deals with major studios. Guba.com signed with Warner Bros. earlier this week. (Watch my video with Guba.com founder and CEO in my earlier post.)  But Google inked a deal with CBS earlier this year. And, that's not exactly working out so well. Who watches CBS shows on Google? That said, NBC is only putting promotions on YouTube, and not entire  programs.

To read more, go on my official MarketWatch blog at Bambi's blog on MarketWatch

Meanwhile, Guba.com also inked a deal with Warner Bros. earlier this week.

Watch my interview with Guba founder/CEO Tom McInerney

Search: "The Brain"

Baynote is an 18-month-old enterprise search engine trying to improve upon the work of first-generation enterprise search companies. It just officially launched this week. Unlike some other social search companies that pride themselves on letting people manually rank or cast votes about particular results, Baynote relies on its Affinity server. Founder Jack Jia affectionately refers to this server as the "brain." This brain is no more than a "memory-prediction machine," Jia said to me, adding that he and his team tried to mimic the brain structure. Hence, the name. The brain segments searchers into peer groups, based on what they had searched for in the past and which pages they browsed, and the route which they took to find certain pages. The brain then looks at how long users stay on certain pages. The pages on which a user spends the most time is deemed the most relevant and then shown to others in that users' peer group. In theory, it sounds like a good methodology. In the commercial world, it seems to be working itself. If you don't believe Jia, just go to Interwoven and LSI Logic. Search for stuff and you'll see that Baynote will rank results based on what a certain group of users deemed relevant (based on that particular peer group and their activity). You can also compare Baynote's results with the results of the other enterprise search engines. Based on some of the searches I conducted with Jia on the phone guiding me, Baynote's results actually did seem more relevant.

Now, would I recommend using Baynote's technology? I guess it depends on the site. I'd imagine a person on a retail site has a different pattern of navigating than a person on a financial services site.  To that end, I'm sure lopping people into peer groups would take some tweaking depending on the site. For corporations, the service costs $950 per month. For small businesses, the service costs $95 per month.

One-off moments in time

Compared with whimsical one-off moments in time captured on video, big media productions just don't seem to matter online. Take a quick scan at the top 100 most popular clips viewed on Google Video, and you'll note that a large majority are far from professionally produced. The No. 1 video, at this juncture, is a 13-second clip, titled "Girl caught cheating." Of all video sharing sites out there, one would think that Google's would be a place where branded productions could get attention. Yet without promotion on Google, CBS content apparently is getting lost in a sea of colorful photo thumbnails, seemingly far more popular if only because they ask little of our time. Consider another example.  The most recent Apple data shows that 30 million videos -- music videos as well as episodes of popular shows, like Desperate Housewives -- have been sold since October 2005, when Apple's store began to offer video. YouTube, the fast-growing video phenomenon, claims that 50 million videos are viewed each day on its site. Put another way, more than 2 million videos are viewed per hour on YouTube vs. 5,000 videos purchased per hour on iTunes, arguably the most successful distribution platform for digital content.

To be sure, statistics barely exist for video streaming and downloading. We rely on companies, like YouTube, to give us their internal numbers without really knowing what they're counting exactly. So, for now, we have to settle for video viewing stats that are decent at best, or entirely inaccurate at worst. The result: misguided conclusions.  For instance, MSN Video was the No. 1 video site ranked by unique visitors, followed by Video@AOL, YouTube and then Google Video. According to comScore, MSN Video had 14.9 million unique visitors in January 2006, or 5 times more than YouTube, with 2.7 million visitors. Yet over at Nielsen//NetRatings,

YouTube's audience figures were nearly twice as high, and MSN Video was doing worse. YouTube had 4.9 million unique visitors in January while MSN Video had 9.6 million, according to Nielsen//NetRatings. For those watching traffic data over the decade-long commercial life of the Internet, it's not a surprise that the numbers vary since the methodology at the research companies is different.The point remains that the imperfect data likely misstates the real activity of these self-produced, non-copyrighted videos.

While it's hard to be sure, I'd say there is a lot of overstating of true demand going on. That's because at least some of the activity at these video-sharing services can be attributed to spying (hundreds of rivals trying to find out just how video services are working), experimenting, pirating and double counting (the same video sent around and viewed on multiple sites or platforms). This is not the kind of activity one should extrapolate from; the Internet bust taught me that.

Read Net Sense on MarketWatch

Life is a stage

Pretty soon, our entire life will be a movie. Creating our own slide show and mini-movie just keeps getting easier. Next-generation photo/video-sharing services like One True Media  should help mainstream America move beyond static photo sharing to storytelling through video montages. I tested One True Media by uploading photos of my nieces and nephew, and a video of a friend and his son (see my examples to the left).  It took me about 20 minutes to navigate through the site, figure out which videos were compatible, select videos and photos, create a music video montage and  upload to my blog. Now that's quick.  The service is fairly straightforward. There's music to choose from to accompany your video montage, and you can upload with one-click. Another feature that's useful is that you can mail all your old video tapes - beta or VHS - and have OTM transfer them into a DVD. We've come a long way from the early days of photo sharing. One True Media's business model is subscription, the sale of hard goods, and soon it'll begin testing out advertising as well.

Interviews with video startups

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

Wiki world

If you haven't noticed, Silicon Valley giants, like Google and Yahoo, and a host of two-man shops are attempting to fuse and apply the user-generated Wiki-model, the expert-driven About.com model and the social-networking News Corp's MySpace blog model. Whether all of this turns out to be the next growth engine for online advertising remains to be seen, but the end results are beginning to remind me of that most prosaic advertising vehicle, the brochure.

In some ways the collaboration involved in these efforts recalls the efforts needed to compile any reference work. In particular, it reminds me of Simon Winchester's two books: "The Professor

and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary" and "The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary." I'm reminded of these books because in them we learn that it took hundreds of volunteers (including J.R.R. Tolkien) to contribute their knowledge to create this Bible for grammarians. In like vein, the Web services in development today - Google Co-op, Yahoo MyWeb (and other social media services), ShopWiki, Squidoo, JetEye, Plum, Kaboodle, WikiOutdoords, Wikia, WikiHow, WikiTravel, World66, to name a fraction of the ones that exist or are in the making -- expect contribution from passionate people who will share knowledge simply for the sake of sharing. But unlike that massive undertaking to publish one universal reference for words, today's Web efforts aren't a comprehensive dictionary so much as a tapestry of, well, online brochures.

Admittedly, the creation of brochures sounds absolutely boring. And any contribution to such promotional material seems far less noble than submissions to the next edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. But it doesn't make these brochures less useful. They're big money generators too, though did you know that a 20-volume OED edition costs $1,600 a pop? Last year,

$31 billion was spent in direct marketing (which includes pamphlets, postcards and brochures), according to the Direct Marketing Association.

Read Net Sense on MarketWatch

 

MSN video originals and Warhol

MSN's user-generated upload service - code name Warhol - is still on track to be available this year, according to Rob Bennett, who heads up MSN's entertainment and content unit. He also talks about what kinds of original Internet programming we can expect out of MSN. Will any of these made-for-the-Net videos go to the networks or cable, where there is a larger audience today? Watch my interview with Bennett to find out.

Watch my interview with MSN's Rob Bennett