VentureBeat

Doug Anarino, a New York Web developer, has just put his video site, Movie Masher, up for sale at VentureBoard.

It is notable because it is the latest example of the explosion of creativity going on in the Web 2.0 area, but where innovation is so incremental that new companies or their products no longer can afford to wait around for user adoption.

We’re pointing to Movie Masher because it does offer users some new video features. Movie Masher leverages technology made available in Adobe Flash 8 architecture to offer so-called “compositing” tools, which let you overlay videos on other videos in sophisticated ways. There are other sites, such as Eyespot and Jumpcut, which give you limited ways to overlay flash animation on video. But they restrict you to set templates, letting you add things like dancing girls or snowflakes, for example, but not your own customized logo. They don’t let you do things like choose or resize fonts. Movie Masher lets you change such variables, including contrast and brightness, on a sliding scale — and allowing you to adjust them as the video plays, for transitions.

Doug has worked on the site’s code for two and a half years, he says. He reckons the site has about a three- to six-month jump on competitors, and that a large company with resources will therefore be in a much better position to market the product (see VentureBoard listing here).

San Francisco photo editing start-up VideoEgg has raised $12 million from a team of investors led by Maveron, the venture capital firm of Starbucks Chairman Howard Schulz.

The funding, reported in BusinessWeek (worth reading, for the background) comes hours after news emerged that Yahoo had acquired Jumpcut, another San Francisco video editing company.

VideoEgg and Jumpcut are part of a crop of sites that have emerged lately — including Eyespot and Motionbox — that offer a range of tools for users to edit video, add sound, insert ads and so on. Another of these sites, Grouper, of Sausalito, was just acquired for $60 million by Sony. With acquisitions still happening, and providing a way for venture capitalists to make money, it is no wonder that VideoEgg is getting more. The difference, of course, is that Jumpcut was lean and low-burn — it hadn’t raised any venture capital, and so could sell to Yahoo without worrying about getting a price that would please investors. VideoEgg is spending money, having acquired a company. VideoEgg may pay the price of this, if its technology becomes a commodity. VideoEgg previously raised an undisclosed amount from August Capital.

At the same time, VideoEgg is going for the bigtime. By working with other sites to make it easy to upload videos, VideoEgg is used to download 15 million videos a day. With recent agreements with more sites, VideoEgg plans to hit 50 million downloads a day by the end of the year.

Yahoo has acquired San Francisco start-up Jumpcut, the online video editing company, for an undisclosed amount, we’ve just been told. (See here for more).

It could herald the beginning of consolidation in the video area, which has become filled with similar companies. Jumpcut’s video editing tools are based on Adobe’s “flash” technology. Jumpcut is different because it is a fully-featured video editor, which sits in the browser, and there’s nothing to download. With built-in flash technology, the editor lets you see everything you do immediately: changes in color, sharpening and so on. You can host your videos at the site, and pull in videos from other video editing companies — and of course, share them with all your friends.

Jumpcut raised an undisclosed amount of seed money from Westlake Venture Partners and Great Oaks Capital, and two individual “angel” investors, and was in the process of raising another round of capital when Yahoo came in with an offer.

We mentioned them here.