VentureBeat

Taboola, a Tel Aviv-based video discovery startup, has just launched its “ViDiscovery” product, which analyzes the context and content of videos, and the viewing and behavior patterns of users in order to recommend videos. It has also secured $4.5 million in a second round of funding. The company aims to make money by running targeted ads with relevant videos.

Viewers watching a Sarah Palin interview on CNN, for example, will see a gray pop-up tab that suggests similar videos and “People who watched this also watched” recommendations. Is it compelling? You betcha.

Taboola has also landed a deal with CNN to embed their recommendation tab in its video player, as NewTeeVee reported, joining the ranks of sites such as aniBoom, 5Min and Sclipo that do the same. Other companies working on video discovery engines include Vodpod and Mesmo, although they’re concentrating on services that are more directed towards consumers.

The investment was led by Evergreen Venture Partners (who backed the previous round) and American and Israeli angel investors. Launched in 2007, Taboola has raised $6 million to date.

In addition to its Magic Wall touchable maps, CNN is also using some cool hologram technology tonight to interview guests from afar. The guests appear to be in the room and move about in three dimensions, even though their images are being beamed in from somewhere else.

USA Today says CNN has 44 cameras and 20 computers in each remote location to capture 360-degree imaging data of the person being interviewed. Those images are processed by computers and cameras in New York. The interviewees will be able to see host Wolf Blitzer and other CNN correspondents as they’re talking. What will they say? “Obi-wan Kenobi. You are my only hope.” (A Star Wars Princess Leia reference, for those of you lacking in pop culture trivia).

By comparison, Comedy Central’s tech looks pretty tame: Comedy Central is teaming with social-networking site Meebo. The channel, which is home to political comedians Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, is using Meebo’s rooms to host political chats for its online audience.

Here’s the latest action:

Google starting to catch on to this TV ad thing? –It’s been almost two years since the search advertising giant made its first foray into television advertising. In order to grow, it’s going to need more time slots (inventory) to sell. It took a step in that direction this week, striking a deal with Harris Corp., a company that will help add and manage new inventory. Google TV Ads also made a deal with COREMedia, which will help measure the performance of direct response television ads. NewTeeVee has more.

CNN uses Facebook Connect to share debate comments — The cable news channel has an area on its site that allows users of the social network Facebook to use their logins to sign-in and leave comments about the most recent debate. Facebook Connect also made these comments viewable on both CNN.com and Facebook itself. Inside Facebook has more.

Flickr rolls out new homepage — The new landing page for the photo sharing site has been in testing for several weeks, but now all will see it. Basically, it looks more like a feed of information, like all other social networks have.

Nokia profit falls – The world’s largest handset manufacturer saw a 30 percent decline in profit in the third quarter. The reason? Competition and worldwide economic issues. The Wall Street Journal has more.

Will Wright weighs in on Spore DRM — The Spore creator wishes he paid more attention to it, but he didn’t realize it’d be such an issue. He also thinks this is part of the growing pains inherent to the transition from brick and mortar game sales to online, downloadable ones. Kotaku has more. Meanwhille, Gamasutra has Wright’s boss, EA chief executive John Riccitiello, talking about it.

The Weekly Standard discovers Twitter – The political magazine/site is clearly on top of things. The best line? “It’s an ingenious way of keeping in touch, particularly for people who need to expose as much of their lives to public scrutiny as possible.”

Glam hires a CFO — Former Shutterfly chief financial officer Stephen E. Recht joins the team.

A blogger has an idea — Allen Stern of CenterNetworks has launched CloudContacts, a service that allows you to send you business cards in and have them posted on the web accessible from anywhere. Sounds like a pretty good idea to me as I stare at a stack of hundreds of them which I will never go through — and then be annoyed when I need to find someone.

Brightkite for the iPhone looks great, is late — The service, which has a central focus on location, would have been perfect as a social network for the iPhone 3G. Too bad it took them this long to make an app while others like Loopt and Whrrl were ready to go on day one. See it in action below. Mashable has more.

Brightkite for the iPhone from Brightkite on Vimeo.

Twitter started out as a service in which you were given 140 characters to give mundane updates about your activities at any given moment. That’s why you still see the “What are you doing?” question above the text input box on the site. But somewhere along the way that input box evolved into a forum for more meaningful discourse. Political debate in particular seems to be popular and may be driving usage of the micro-messaging service, according to some new data released today by Twitter.

While the service claims that Fridays are normally a down day, last week, Friday marked the first Presidential debate between Republican candidate John McCain and Democratic candidate Barack Obama. Twitter notes that Friday’s overall updates jumped 18.5 percent from the previous week, with the time during the debates seeing a huge 160 percent surge in updates.

More promising to Twitter though has to be the number of users who signed up for new accounts. It claims that signups rose 23 percent last Friday, with signups during the debates rising 135 percent when compared to the week prior.

That would seem to make sense given the buzz and press Twitter has been receiving recently from the likes of CNN and CSPAN, which are both integrating Twitter into their news coverage. Friday also featured an event with digital media television and Internet channel Current teaming up with Twitter to showcase the debates. Former Vice President of the United States (and former Presidential candidate) Al Gore, who is one of the founders of Current, was on hand for the event. (Check out the picture below of Gore standing just in front of VentureBeat’s own Eric Eldon.)

Twitter also launched its own Twitter Election 2008 site last week in time for the debates. It’s promising to add a bit of “polish” before the next debate (a Vice Presidential one) that will take place on Thursday.

Certainly political debate is more intriguing (at least to some people) than mundane updates, so it makes sense that Twitter usage is surging around that. But it’s somewhat surprising that users aren’t more frustrated by the 140 character limit that Twitter imposes. Though, I guess that stops some users from being too big of blowhards or pontificators.

You can find me on Twitter here along with fellow VentureBeat writers Eric Eldon, Dean Takahashi, Anthony Ha, Chris Morrison and Dan Kaplan. Oh, and we have a VentureBeat account (for our posts) as well.

[photo by Scott Beale / Laughing Squid]

One anchor for the cable news channel CNN has become enamored with the micro-messaging service Twitter over the past several weeks. He used tweets (Twitter messages) to complement his coverage of the recent Hurrican Gustav and now the network has apparently decided to take it one step further, basing a whole show around the real-time citizen journalism/opinions that take place on Twitter.

The show, called Rick Sanchez Direct, is scheduled to debut this afternoon, Sanchez let his followers know last week in a tweet. There appears to be a slight problem though: the limits Twitter has in place for number of users you can follow.

The company implemented this limit several weeks ago to reduce the spam that had started to creep into the system. It’s not a hard limit (earlier reports of a 2,000 limit were false), instead Twitter limits this number by several factors including the number of users that follow you back. (It has more about it on its blog.) The problem, as related to this new CNN show, is that to get the best information from Twitter, Sanchez will want to follow as many people as possible.

Right now Sanchez follows 4,607 people and apparently cannot add any more. You can be sure that CNN will want this number to be much higher to make sure it doesn’t miss anything worthy of the show. Sanchez’s producers have contacted Twitter about raising this number, but the limit he’s running into right now may be a bug.

“Rick Sanchez is being followed by almost 10,000 people people on Twitter—he should be allowed to follow at least that many. We’ve told the folks at CNN that we’re fixing this bug and we hope to get to it today,” Twitter co-founder Biz Stone told me over email today.

Bug or not, if this show takes off it could push Twitter closer to mainstream usage. When that happens, the service will have a lot more users approaching the thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands and maybe even millions of followers/following users.

But that is a good problem for Twitter to have. It’s now about scaling up to that level.

You can find me on Twitter here along with fellow VentureBeat writers Eric Eldon, Dean Takahashi, Anthony Ha, Chris Morrison and Dan Kaplan. Oh, and we have a VentureBeat account (for our posts) as well.