New companies launch: Yap, Cognitive Code, Viewdle, Faroo & more
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…. Continue Reading
CastTV raises $3.1M to launch better video search
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… Continue Reading
Roundup: Bombs, don’t do Delaware, MySQL IPO & more
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… Continue Reading
Pluggd “perfects” audio and video search, raises $1.65M
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… Continue Reading