VentureBeat

Prime Sense claims to have the best 3D game controller

A few months ago, VentureBeat editor Matt Marshall highlighted the various players in the gesture recognition technology space, speculating that “one day, very soon, you’ll be able to control an avatar or character on a screen with a mere gesture of your hands or body.”

That day is here, says Prime Sense CEO Inon Beracha. The Tel Aviv, Israel-based company believes it will be the “Intel inside” for the 3D peripheral world, and with a new… Continue Reading

Wildpockets to let marketers and game developers turn 2D photos into 3D apps

I ran across a pretty cool company last week at the 3 Rivers Venture Fair in Pittsburgh. It’s still in pre-launch, but I think it’s well worth taking a look at. The company’s called Sim Ops Studios, and its newest creation, Wildpockets, is a product that lets users convert 2D photos into embeddable 3D applications through simple drag and drop.

The company’s cofounder and CEO, Shanna Tellerman, demoed some of the potential uses for Wildpockets, from… Continue Reading

Profile of a South Asian music network: Jhankarbeats

Jhankarbeats, a social music platform for South Asian music, wants to break away from the pack of all-encompassing social music networks and focus on delivering a platform for artist discovery to the South Asian music scene.

Many social sites in the web 2.0 age try to be all things to all people, a la MySpace and Facebook, but Chief Executive Anand Subramanian says that Toronto-based Jhankarbeats is filling a much-needed niche by focusing exclusively on the South… Continue Reading

MySpace apps: SightSpeed releases video chat

SightSpeed, a desktop-based video conferencing application, tomorrow launches SightSpeed Light (see screenshot below), a widget video conferencing app, on the Myspace application platform.

SightSpeed Light provides a Flash-based free video chat and video mail between MySpace users, but it is also integrated with SightSpeed on the desktop. The company has plans to relase the widget on social networks LinkedIn, Salesforce, Plaxo, Orkut, Hi5 and others, but so far it doesn’t have a date for these releases.

Last… Continue Reading

Live video streaming company UStream.TV raises $11.1 million

UStream.TV, a live video-streaming application, has raised $11.1 million in a first round of funding from venture capital firm DCM, as well as previous investors Labrador Ventures and The Band of Angels.

Since its launch in March of last year, the broadcasting platform says it has had more than 260,000 broadcasters, 2 million viewer hours per month, 2.2 million unique visitors per month, and 400-600 streams at any given moment. It claims to have grown 325… Continue Reading

Social video startup uvLayer looks to be growing up fast

Social video startup Unknown Vector launched a browser-based version of its uvLayer application yesterday.

I covered the company back in February following the release of its uvLayer desktop-only app (built on Adobe AIR), and I was pretty impressed with it then. The application lets users create “stacks” of videos collected from YouTube and Truveo via simple drag and drop. 

You can also build collections of videos based on a search term, and when you access the video via that search term, you can drag and drop… Continue Reading

Covestor joins the ranks of funded investment sites

Covestor, an investing community site, has raised $6.5 million in its second round of funding. The London and New York-based company plans to build out its asset management platform, which helps its users make investment decisions.

Covestor targets both average investors and professional fund managers. The site mines information from real portfolios on online stock brokerages, giving a holistic view of different risk levels and investment strategies. In all, it tracks 150 variables

The fund management platform… Continue Reading

Facebook offers friend recommendations, another way to keep itself relevant

Facebook, one of the world’s largest social networking sites, is testing out a feature called “People You May Know,” that shows you the public profiles of people it figures you want to be Facebook friends with.

This seems like a smart feature to add. Every Facebook user has friends who they didn’t know were on the site. So helping these friend connections happen nearly automatically means Facebook becomes even more central to keeping track of all… Continue Reading

Flixwagon provides mobile live video streaming, joins Qik and Comvue

Flixwagon, a mobile live video casting platform, has just launched a “Flixee” widget that lets users stream video from a mobile phone to a blog, website, or social networking site.

Additionally, Flixwagon users can deliver their mobile-to-web broadcasts directly to YouTube through their Flixwagon account, thanks to YouTube’s recently opened API. The widget and YouTube uploading add to the platform’s previous ability to video stream from a mobile phone directly to Flixwagon’s website.

The Tel Aviv-based company… Continue Reading

Big Bear Entertainment, animated music video creator, raises $550,000

Big Bear Entertainment raised $550,000 in its first round of funding from El Dorado Ventures and Optix Pty Ltd., according to a regulatory filing.

The Tiburon, California-based company makes video mods — animated music videos — and produced a series for MTV2. The video mods are based on the convergence of animation for games and animation for television.

Nzone has an interview with Big Bear’s Tony Shiff, for those interested in the technical specs behind video mods.

… Continue Reading

Wikia partners with Kaltura to let video makers collaborate

Wikia today announced a partnership with collaborative video site Kaltura that will allow the more than a million users of its MediaWiki software to post and collaborate using Kaltura content.

Kaltura, the self-proclaimed “YouTube meets the Wiki” (previous coverage here and here ), has a video extension that lets its users start a collaborative video project by uploading video clips, photos, or audio tracks to its wiki. Users can then edit collaboratively using Kaltura’s browser-based video editor. Users can import their video creations… Continue Reading

Adconion snaps up direct marketing co. with new funding

Germany-based ad network Adconion Media Group is moving quickly to spend the $80 million it raised a few weeks ago.

The company just announced that it has acquired Frontline Direct, a data management and direct marketing company, for $20 million.

Adconion, which we reported Fox Interactive was interested in, is using the acquisition to expand into North America. The company plans to open an office in San Diego and has existing offices in New York, Toronto, Santa Monica, and… Continue Reading

Guitar playing startup hopes to cash in on instructional videos

Wannabe guitar players seem to have become a promising market lately.

Last year, popular console music games Guitar Hero and Rockband outsold digital music sales by over $100 million, according to sources cited by game-review site Primotech.

Now, Atlanta startup iVideosongs is trying to tap into the market with its guitar instructional video site, which launched just a few weeks ago at the DEMO conference.

iVideosongs lets musicians (primarily guitarists) of all ability levels play complete songs… Continue Reading

DVD Jon strikes again, to “liberate” music and video

Companies still releasing music and movies locked with digital rights management technology may have one more software application to worry about.

DoubleTwist, Norwegian programmer Jon Lech Johansen’s (aka DVD Jon, pictured here) latest startup, yesterday launched a beta application that lets users “liberate” their media, be it music or video.

DoubleTwist’ free desktop application lets users transfer and sync their media, regardless of device, file format, or social network. For now it’s available for Windows XP and… Continue Reading

Overlay.tv launches new platform for video ads

Overlay.tv today launched a video-commerce platform that may give marketers a new way to monetize on online video.

Even online video mammoth Google/YouTube hasn’t successfully implemented a way to extract revenue from its billions of user generated videos. A number of sites have taken to inserting “pre-roll” ads into the videos they offer — ads that viewers are forced to sit through prior to watching the featured content. But the big video sites haven’t adopted pre-roll… Continue Reading

Startup wants to help you build and manage video-clip collections

Video is getting a lot more social — and a new startup is trying to make it even easier to discover and share videos. The company’s called Unknown Vector, and it launched its social video desktop application, uvLayer, just a couple of weeks ago.

Users download the uvLayer desktop application (for Mac OSX or Windows XP and Vista) as well as Adobe AIR, which UV’s technology is built on. From that point, users can import their Facebook… Continue Reading

Music publishing: Kobalt banks on broadening revenue streams for artists

updated

There are five arms to the music industry: The record label, publisher (sometimes combined), managers, artists, and fans. While we’ve previously examined labels, and surveyed numerous sites that help fans in their attempt to get music, companies that focus on getting profits to artists (who struggle to manage copyrights and track down royalties globally) are a bit harder to find. But one such company — Kobalt Music Group – is starting to make some noise.

The London-based company, whose… Continue Reading

A survey of social investing sites: 11 contenders

We’ve seen social editing, social networking, social news, social bookmarking, and even social music take off. Now a social shock to the system is coming to a market usually dominated by insiders and experts: the finance industry.

Online trading brokerages have existed since E*Trade pioneered the market in the early ’90s, but now an onslaught of entrepreneurs, new media experts, and financial analysts are once again rebelling against the traditional investing model on Wall Street. They… Continue Reading

UStream.TV looking to raise round, may be getting acquisition offers

Lifestreaming site UStream.TV is rumored to be in talks with Microsoft, for a purchase price of $50 million. However, the company’s chief executive, Chuck Wallace, tells us only that the company is open to offers, and is otherwise talking to VCs about raising a round of venture funding.

Like many competitors, UStream.TV lets you use a webcam and broadcast everything you do, in real-time, over the web (see sample, above), although its particular focus is broadcasting… Continue Reading

MTV, Flixwagon partner for Super Tuesday mobile news

Live video mobile broadcaster Flixwagon has partnered with MTV in an attempt to promote citizen journalism today, Super Tuesday.

MTV is using Flixwagon’s mobile-to-web broadcasting platform for its “Street Team” of youth journalists covering the primaries from 23 different states. The live broadcasts will be available on ChooseorLose.com and MTVnews.com, while MTV will periodically run edited snippets on its TV channel.

The citizen journalists, backed by MTV through a $700,000 grant from Knight News Challenge, are using Nokia’s… Continue Reading