VentureBeat

Ten companies presented during today’s morning portion of Techcrunch40 conference in San Francisco. If we were able to have stock in these companies, here’s how we’d rank them: CastTV, Cubic Telecom, Yap, Cognitive Code, Viewdle, Powerset, Trutap, Faroo, Ceedo and Loudtalks. Summaries of each company follow.

CastTV, the video search engine — We’ve written about the company before, and it still hasn’t launched publicly. The development today is that it showed live demonstrations for the first time. It showed how a search for someone like “Britney Spears” yielded better results than Yahoo, Google or YouTube. For example, unlike YouTube, which showed primarily dated videos of Britney, CastTV showed more recent videos of Britney, and a mix of things like her in movies, or dancing, or in the news. Even Marissa Mayer, Google’s top product executive, one of the panelists chosen to ask questions of the companies, conceded that its interface, timeliness and clustering were strong. Not that she had any choice. CastTV showed a search for “Colts Titans” on Google video, and it showed a video of last year. CastTV has a game from yesterday. CastTV is different because it searches all sorts of surrounding code on pages to tell it what a video is about. It also indexes videos that may not have unique URLs. This may not become the biggest company of the bunch, but is likely to be bought by one of the bigger players — and so a good bet.

Cubic Telecom, a mobile company for international calling — Essentially, cheap overseas calls from anywhere, or at least cheaper than most calling plans. Their service, MaxRoam, is clearly well planned-out. For a more in-depth analysis, check out VentureBeat’s separate post today on the company. Competing mobile VoIP services are cheap or even free, but are unreliable. Its offering you a chance to take your regular phone oversees, without worrying about hassles.

Yap, speech recognition software for mobile phones — Yap’s application is aimed primarily at people who use text messaging. When the user speaks into their phone, Yap instantly translates what they say into a text message (although, in their demo, the translation was noticeably laggy). Aside from instant messaging, Yap also connects to various services, including Twitter, Digg, Wikipedia and commercial sites like Amazon and Ebay, sparing the user the need to type queries or messages. The text messaging service is monetized through suggestive text ads. For instance, if the user mentions a movie in theaters, Yap will suggest a theater to see it in. Although Yap comes with an all-star cast of developers who have worked on projects for AT&T and Apple, the question is whether the big mobile carriers will be interested enough to include Yap software on their phones, or whether the market will be restricted to people who download it themselves. There are other recognition technologies, so the risk is whether it will be adopted quickly enough.

Cognitive Code, offering conversational artificial intelligence – This company is newly launched. During its brief demo, the company’s executives asked questions of “Sylvia,” an artificial intelligence software that answered in a female voice to questions such as “Please close the Word file.” This is very early, but it was impressive that Sylvia seemed to understand some lengthy conversation questions (she’s doesn’t try to merely understand key words, but also the context provided by various words together). Sylvia worked half the time, but failed the other half. She’d do things like open documents instead of closing them as asked. It’s hard to see how much depth the company has, without someone not related to the company trying it out. The company wants to embed the service in other applications. The company says it wants to target 2009 (during CES conference) for hitting the market, and is aiming to embed the technology in toys and games.

Viewdle, a facial-recognition site for video search engines — This company recognizes images and faces in videos around the Web. It advances on what companies like Polar Rose are doing for images. The demo was notable. If you search for Britney Spears, the engine churns out a list of clips as a results. Select one of the clips, and it will open directly at the point in the video where Britney appears, even if only momentarily. More interestingly, the demo showed that if you searched for well-known models, it would pull up videos where all three appeared. You can then zoom in on one of the models, and search for videos only of her. It also provides names for other people it recognizes in images. The big question, however, is how the engine will recognize anyone who is not a star or famous. It counts on folks like you and me sending video links of ourselves, so that it can put us in the database.

Powerset, the semantic search engine we’ve written about before — The company is developing a way to understand the meaning search queries. So if you type in “What do politicians say about Iraq,” it provides results that don’t necessarily relate to those exact words, such “politicians.” For example, one result is an article with the words “President Clinton explains Iraq strategy.” The only new development today, however, is that Powerset announced three demo sites, including “Quotes,” “Business,” and “Powermouse.” The latter gives you insight into Powerset’s semantic database, so that you can see what things it associates with people or things. President Clinton for example, is a politician, lives in the White House, sets policy, etc. The question is whether people will use Powerset, when Google is so good.

Trutap, for mobile social networking — We’ve also written a separate post about this company here. It offers social networking over mobile phones. Features include messaging to groups, text messaging, instant messaging, and blogging in a reasonably straightforward phone application. Launches Friday. Although Trutap can rank xx place in this lineup, its future as a company is as hazy as any of the upcoming social networks. It’s looks functional, but the demo didn’t blow me away. Their focus seems distinctly British. During their presentation, the CEO sent a message to a “Friday Night Crew” planning a visit to a pub. Although it’s not an unreasonable scenario for American users, small social differences can mean popularity in one market, but failure when translated to another.

Ceedo, a lightweight visualization platform for mobiles — The term “visualization platform” doesn’t exactly inspire excitement, and neither did the company’s product. The platform transfers self-contained desktop environments from computer to computer; users can, for example, plug their USB dongle into a rented computer at a cafe and have their home software available. Ceedo has offered such software, for enterprise or personal use, for some time. Their product launch at TechCrunch is a similar platform for mobile phones. The software allows users to run their mobile phone platform on their computer, sending messages or downloading music. Or they can run their home desktop environment on a different computer by plugging in their phone. Although Ceedo’s platform appears to run seamlessly, it just doesn’t strike us as a must-have — and since their job is to convince mobile carriers to include their application on cell phones, that may be a problem. It has plenty of competitors, too.

Faroo, offering a peer-to-peer search engine — The service lets people download an application, so that they can contribute their searches and computer power to a shared search engine. Faroo follows what people search for, what result pages they look at, how long they they look at them, and whether they bookmark them. That way, they use people’s actions to rank a page higher in results. The company’s founder says that one million people using it can index 10 billion pages, meaning the entire Web. The big question, is who on earth would use this? How does it seed the engine with results so that they are relevant from the get-go, without forcing the early adopters to wade through painful early steps and making pages relevant? It is based in Erkrath, Germany. Long shot.

Loudtalks, an “internet walkie talkie” — Perhaps it was just bad luck, but Loudtalks’ presentation fell flat, between technical difficulties and the thick accents of its (apparently) Russian founders. The company’s computer software offers a way to instant message your friends with voice, speaking to them just as you would if you were sitting next to them. You can do this whether you’re on a computer or mobile phone. Loudtalks could prove to be a good idea, but numerous pitfalls spring to mind, among them having a hundred buddies simultaneously blabbing at you. It’s notable that while Loudtalks focuses on simply conveying a user’s voice, other services like Yap work to translate speech into text. It’s often most convenient to give the receiver a text message, even if the sender would prefer to speak. Finally, the voice market is crowded. Why would you download a separate program for this, when there are so many alternatives you’re already likely to be using.

(This was co-written with Matt Marshall.)

Corrected: Motwani is merely an advisor

San Francisco’s CastTV, a site that says it can search video better than leading players like Yahoo and Google by turning up Javascript-hidden files and other information, has raised $3.1 million from well-known venture capitalists.

Video search is a huge potential market: Lucrative advertising can be displayed by the search results. Predictably, a gaggle of players are targeting this area. CastTV has yet to launch — it will do so next month with a testing version, and in summer with a fully public one — but it has taunted with promises it can do much more than its competitors.

It digs up online videos buried behind Flash, Javascript and related plug-in technologies. CastTV can find copies of Grey’s Anatomy that Yahoo can not, for example (we saw a demo; see our coverage). It crawls and extracts metadata about files from code contained in their surrounding pages — all of which supplements the things it knows about the video files. This is significant, because some major sites such as USA Today have intentionally stiffed Google and others by hiding behind Javascript. The funding is also notable because the founders last year said they were not looking for capital for the time being.

Details of the investment are here. Draper Fisher Jurvetson led the round. Other investors include Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen and angel investor Ron Conway. Stanford professor Rajeev Motwani is an advisor.

Among CastTV’s competitors are Blinkx, Clipblast, Pixsy, PodZinger and Truveo (bought by AOL). Many of these players have been encouraged by Google’s failure to offer its video search capabilities to third-party sites, and hope they can license their technologies before Google does the same.

The latest Silicon Valley round-up:

Correlation between bomb building and entrepreneurship? — Former PayPal chief executive Peter Thiel reportedly says four of six founders of the online payment service built bombs while in high school. Meanwhile, Silicon Valley venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson designs rockets.

MyYearbook.com, a social networking site for teens, raises $4.1M – The site looks like a Facebook knock-off. It raised the first round of finance from U.S. Venture Partners (USVP) and First Round Capital. The site, hq’d in New Hope, Penn., is nothing to sneeze at: It boasts 1.7 million members globally, and over 5 million unique visitors per month. It prides itself in shunning banner ads of the kind that run on Facebook, saying teens like more interactive, social ads.

Don’t incorporate in Delaware — We know that’s what they all tell you to do, because of Delaware’s business-friendly laws. But a U.C. Berkeley study shows that an entrepreneur who incorporates in California may make $1.75M more in the event a sale triggers a preference clause, or otherwise leads to a showdown with an investing VC. The threat of a suit in your home state is enough to make the VC back off. Via Paul Kedrosky. Valleywag mentions it too.

SIPphone latest company to launch a new browser based calling service — as it tries to answer rivals such as Jajah, Jaxtr, Wengo. The company’s chief exec Michael Robertson told VentureBeat yesterday that “the call is made via the browser, like Skype, but unlike Skype there’s no big software download/install and registration period. You can walk up to any computer and call any phone number in the world. No mobile or landline is required to play.” More details here.

Latest on Google’s social application — Google’s Niniane Wang (left) is currently leading a team of Googlers to develop a new product in the social application space. Via Blogoscoped.

Google puts Wikipedia definitions at top of search results — Details via Rubel. This is the latest sign of continued momentum for Wikipedia, and comes as founder Jimmy Wales rolls out a Google competitor. Oh, and then there’s Amazon.com’s Wikipedia-clone for products, Amapedia. Confused yet? If not, read on…

Proliferation of Web site review and rating sites — Here’s a summary by Gigaom of the growing number of competitors to Amazon.com’s existing review service. There’s PowerReviews, a Millbrae, Calif. company that raised $6.25 million last year from Menlo Ventures and Draper Richards, and which is a Web-based portal for consumer reviews of products. There’s new player Ratepoint. Not mentioned is MerchantCircle, which lets businesses being reviewed keep up with these proliferating ratings.

Ironkey, a Los Altos, Calif. file encryption company, raises around $2.6M – The funding, apparently part of a larger second round of capital, is led by Leapfrog Ventures, reports Alarmclock.

Amie Street, the company that sells DRM-free MP3s at prices dependent on their popularity — It is looking to raise a first round of capital, reports Techcrunch.

We’re not raising VC! Well, maybe we are.. — CastTV, a video search engine company, which told us in Oct. it was not looking for cash, is reportedly about to close a first round of capital,.

TechStars is a new startup fund/incubator like YCombinator — It gives 10 start-ups a summer camp in Boulder, Colo. and $15,000 in seed funding. TechStars will take 5 percent of the equity in each startup. More at Techcrunch.

News Corp. to invest in ROO — The media giant will invest $12 million for a ten percent stake in the New York online video technology provider, according to the WSJ.

Global warming alert — Six years ago, scientists predicted global temperatures would rise at least 1.4 degrees by 2100. Now, they expect at least 2 degrees. Sea levels will rise between 28 and 43 centimeters. Time to wake up. And it’s not going to be easy.

Mozeen, the stealth mobile web portal — The company, mentioned by AlarmClock, is funded by big-name venture firm Sequoia Capital and the company reportedly claims “top talent from YouTube, Yahoo, Nokia, and Facebook.”

Mobile payment service Obopay has acquired social payment service, Billmonk — Details here.

Pickspal creates popular culture betting site — We covered Pickspal, which raised $6 million for a site where sports fans can bet on event outcomes. Now it has launched Pickspop, which lets you predict, say who will be on this week’s cover of people.

MySQL, the open source database company, is in talks with bankers about going public — Details here, but question is, will Oracle kill it first?

Declaring it has “perfected the user experience” for audio and visual search, Seattle start-up Pluggd has raised $1.65 million from Intel and angel investors to help it start distributing its technology.

If you haven’t played with Pluggd, you should. It provides that “wow” experience, giving you what you intuitively want when searching video: a way to skip forward to the exact part of the audio or video file you are looking for. We’ll be hearing more about Pluggd next year, as it begins to cut partnership deals with major publishers, and comes out of the testing phase it launched two months ago.

Let’s take an example.

Take this ESPN radio recording from yesterday. Select the “find” tab, and type in the word “Marlins.” Pluggd will show you in the heat map the places most likely to be interesting to you. Orange shows a very high match. If you move the cursor there, you’ll hear the part about the Marlins. (You can do this by clicking on this image at left. You may be prompted to update your Flash player; go ahead and do so.)

But it gets even better.

Pluggd finds related words. Let’s say you’re looking for anything to do with injury, because you’d heard that Kobe Bryant might be injured. You type in “injury,” and Pluggd locates the part where the radio mentions his sprained ankle, even though the word “injury” is never mentioned in the audio. (Again, you can try this by clicking on image at left.)

This is impressive. Pluggd can do this by analyzing pages and pages of sports articles, and finding the statistical relationships between words. Its crawler finds that sprained ankle is very clearly correlated with the word injury over time. It does this without any sort of human domain experts. No one is doggedly typing in these associations behind the scenes. It is all automated, relying on the great database called the Web. “The Web itself represents mankind’s knowledge,” says Alexander Castro.

Right now, this cool search is only available at Pluggd’s demo site. And in case we’ve lost you, here’s a screencast tour.

Meanwhile, Pluggd has also building an inventory of ESPN and other files — now numbering more than a million — and it is busy indexing them all, so that it can make them available for crawling with its technology. Like Google, it wants to become a destination site. Also like Google, it wants to offer its technology to publishers, too, and Pluggd says it will be announcing various deals next year.

The company has boot-strapped itself until now, and the $1.65 million can be considered a seed round, to be converted into a first VC round sometime next year.

Intel made up a good portion of the investment, but more than half was contributed by a group of angels, including Scott Oki, former senior vice president for sales, marketing and service at Microsoft and Paul Maritz, former Microsoft group vice president of systems and applications. Other angels include:

–Brian Magierski, CEO of Kalivo, former co-founder/CEO of iMark (acquired by Ariba);
–Fraser Black, technology investor
–Bill Bryant, founder and investor in numerous search-focused startups including Netbot, Medio and Singingfish;
–Alex Alben, former executive at Starwave and RealNetworks;
–Barry Newman, venture partner at NeoCarta, former vice chairman of the technology group at Bear Stearns;
–Mark Klebanoff, former chief financial officer at RealNetworks.

There are a multitude of other companies focused on audio and video search (Pixsy, Podzinger and CastTV, for example), but none that are using Pluggd’s heat map approach that takes you directly to where you want to go.