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Live video streaming from mobile devices is an exciting field in an exciting time. It’s also a pretty crowded field with Qik, Flixwagon and Kyte among others all vying to lead the way. Today, Qik gained two key allies on its side: Ben Horowitz and Marc Andreessen.

The two have made an investment in the video streaming company and both will join its board of advisors. Financial details of the investment were not released, but are said to be “significant.”

Having worked together to build one early web technology, the web browser Netscape, into a powerhouse, Andreessen and Horowitz should be able to offer Qik good advice and perspective as it grows. The video streaming service recently opened its doors to the public with a beta program for certain mobile phones.

Qik has been in an arms race of sorts with competitor Flixwagon as the two mimic each other’s feature sets. A couple weeks ago, Qik announced its service was iPhone 3G-compatible (with a jailbroken iPhone), the following day, Flixwagon had the same announcement.

Andreessen is the co-founder of several companies including Netscape and most recently the social network-creator Ning. (A service which earlier this year got a $560 million valuation.) He also recently accepted a seat on Facebook’s board of directors.

Horowitz was an executive at Netscape in the early days and later co-founded the server and network software company Loudcloud (now Opsware) with Andreessen. Hewlett-Packard acquired Opsware in 2007 for $1.6 billion and Horowitz currently serves as the vice president and general manager of HPs Business Technology Organization Unit.

Also on Qik’s board of advisors are Marc Benioff, the chairman and chief executive of salesforce.com, Arjun Gupta, the founder of Telesoft Partners and George Garrick, the president and chief executive of Jingle Networks.

[photo: flickr/Joi]

Before the advent of the written word, the story goes, humans had to either store all their memories in their own heads, or by oral tradition passed down through designated members of their tribes. With trade came notation of facts and figures, and later alphabets, books and libraries. With them came the modern brain, which treats recorded knowledge as an extension of itself.

Throughout these developments, previous generations have grumbled that each new advance leaves us worse off — take this month’s issue of the Atlantic, which includes a feature story titled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” by Nicholas Carr. Yet Google’s search-and-retrieve functions are only the tip of the Internet iceberg, when it comes to memory. A whole new generation of efforts to move our memories online is in the works, and may represent one of the biggest upcoming movements in computing.

Pensieve, an IBM technology, is the latest project to unveil itself. The idea, being able to snap pictures of business cards and people with your cell phone for later retrieval, sounds almost identical to Evernote, a company I reported on a month ago when it came out of private beta. That doesn’t mean IBM is copying; rather, that IBM is taking the most obvious tack first. Business cards (as well as receipts and other short, printed matter) are easy for image recognition software to read.

The problem right now is that the low-hanging fruit is fairly limited. Recording is easy — so easy that a Microsoft researcher has been doing it for nine years, saving photos, videos, web pages, and nearly everything else he interacts with.

Each of those capabilities is now duplicated for regular people. “Life casting” became a minor fad with Justin.tv last year, and more recently Qik’s had its public launch. Other companies like Kyte also offering video and picture feeds from your mobile phone, all of which can potential be saved. Emails have always been possible to save, although companies like Zimbra and Xobni have since added much more functionality, while Xoopit helps search through mail. For web pages, there are bookmarkers like Delicious, and upcoming services like Twine, whose private beta I’ve started using to save my web ramblings, although the service itself still needs plenty of work.

However, there’s still a lot missing. First, you need an integrated storage spot for all this material. Hard drives die, photo sharing services go down, email accounts are hacked. It’s likely that in the future web companies will exist that offer ironclad storage for all your data — meaning the complete, unedited record of your life. Storage services abound right now, but users will want something special for storing their lives.

Almost as important are editing services to narrow all the incoming data to points, which can be disseminated across Facebook feeds, weblogs and other public forums. If you really did record your whole day today, you’d have to spend a lot of time searching out the moments that mattered and tagging or annotating them for immediate use or later retrieval. The more automation exists, the more people will record parts of their lives.

Search and editing, in fact, are choke points that may stunt the growth of a memory industry. But then, there are trends that suggest otherwise. Image recognition, driven by advertising uses, is advancing rapidly under the care of companies like Blinkx and Viewdle. Voice recognition has stalled researchers for years, but companies like SoliCall and VoiceBox may yet offer a working solution.

Once software can recognize pictures, video and audio in addition to text, the work passes on to the growing ranks of semantic startups. Twine itself isn’t just a storage point for web pages; it’s attempting to add structure through automatic, intelligent tagging so that when you’re trying to find something you’ve saved, it’s easy. (A similar effort not yet out of stealth is called Qitera.)

Such startups will represent the first set of technologies that can truly help establish external stores of memory. Simulating short-term memory early startups like ReQall and Jott, both now available on the iPhone, already help with day-to-day reminders.

Our long-term memories are the tougher nut to crack, but there’s a wealth of opportunity in automated journals, work streams and research logs, not to mention data mining services that can help us manage our time better (RescueTime is an early example). And a true integrated service may be closer than it seems; take a look at Numenta, which is working on a “hierarchical temporal memory system (HTM) patterned after the human neocortex.”

And when all these things exist, what will happen to our memories? As the Atlantic article suggests, we may find that the net effect is to “scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration,” — or, as it argues in another part, we could spur a “golden age of intellectual discovery and universal wisdom.” The result may well depend on the quality of the efforts.

As mobile phones become more powerful, and unlimited data transfer plans from carriers become widespread, technologies such as streaming live video from phones are becoming feasible. One of the most hyped players in this market is Qik. Unfortunately, so far Qik has only worked on select Nokia devices such as the popular N95 phone. However, starting tomorrow Qik is rolling out support for select Windows Mobile devices.

Initially this partnership will bring Qik services to the Motorola Q and Samsung BlackJack phones. I’ve seen an early build of the service running on a BlackJack, and it seems to work more seamlessly on Windows Mobile than it does on the N95.

The Windows Mobile compatibility should help bring the Qik service to a larger audience. While the N95 is a very expensive phone (usually around $500-$600), the Q and BlackJack can be found for much more reasonable prices. Also, Microsoft says that it expects to sell 20 million Windows Mobile licenses in FY08, so there will be potential for much more growth as well.

Unfortunately, the timing is poor for Qik. This announcement comes just days before Apple’s WWDC event, where it is expected to unveil the 3G iPhone. This device will simply overshadow all other mobile announcements in the industry for quite some time.

Another potential problem for Qik are the rumors of video streaming capabilities being a central part of this new iPhone. While it’s no sure bet, there have been signs that such functionality could be a key component of an iChat application Apple is working on for the device.

When asked about Qik possibly working on the 3G iPhone, Qik co-founder Bhaskar Roy gave a non-committal answer. “We are going to evaluate it once the [3G] iPhone gets launched next week to see what capabilities it has and what we need to do in order to support it. We’ll need to evaluate it and figure out the next steps therein,” Roy told MobileCrunch.

Given how long it took Qik to move beyond support for basically one phone, this is not a good sign. With the 3G iPhone, it could be an issue of being ready to support it or being left in the dust. Especially with competitors like Flixwagon and Kyte out there. Flixwagon in particular may be poised to break out beyond the elite tech crowd that Qik is currently popular with.

We first reported back in April that Qik parent Visivo had raised a new $3 million round to expand the service.

[Qik and Flixwagon are nominees for best mobile company at MobileBeat2008, VentureBeat's conference on July 24]

Video site Kyte has raised another $6.1 million in venture funding to push forward with a new broadcasting platform. Although anyone can use it, the platform seems targeted at big media companies, and Kyte says it’s already partnered with four major music labels, as well as hip hop star 50 Cent.

Kyte chief executive Daniel Graf says that since he unveiled the product last year, a number of media companies have approached Kyte about partnerships. There’s certainly no shortage of livestreaming sites (our overview of the field), but Graf says Kyte stands out because you can upload videos with just one click and because you can embed its channels (which update in real-time, unlike most embedded videos) pretty much anywhere online, be it your own site or social networks like MySpace and Facebook. (In our previous coverage of Kyte, we said it “appears to do everything.”)

The company is also launching some new features today that make its platform even more flexible and attractive. Rather than uploading prerecorded videos, you can now send footage live from your phone to a Kyte channel. Graf downplays the importance of this new feature, saying that most users are more interested in prerecorded video, but this is still an innovation — other sites can livestream from a phone or from webcam, but Kyte is the first to do both. (See screenshot below, in which Graf broadcasts from a webcam while showing off the mobile phone he was broadcasting from earlier.)

Kyte users can now also turn their video channels into a Facebook application in a few minutes.

There are already some complaints that the new site for Kyte’s video platform is too tough to navigate, and Graf acknowledges it could probably be improved. He also argues, however, that the site shouldn’t be a destination for most users — instead, they should be visiting the sites of its media partners. (You can also view a video demo of Kyte here.)

Graf says his long-term vision focuses more on partnerships with other companies than on the user-generated content at Kyte.tv. Kyte isn’t moving completely away from UGC, but more of it will be tied into a specific brand or partner, Graf says, such as fan videos for 50 Cent.

The new funding completes a $21.1 million second round, bringing Kyte’s total funding to $23.3 million. The money comes from Steamboat Ventures and Swedish mobile operator TeliaSonera.

updated
Thanks to the meteoric rise of YouTube, anyone with a video camera and an internet connection can be a star. More recently, they can live stream themselves to you 24/7, even from a mobile phone. Here we take a look at 14 companies competing in this sector.

Justin.TV, featuring a live cam of a guy named Justin in San Francisco, helped spearhead the new wave of popularity, but a host of other companies are battling for a piece of this market.

Hand in hand with the popularity of video streaming and downloads comes questions of legality. ViaCom, this past March, filed a lawsuit against YouTube for $1 billion for alleged copyright infringement, and the issue will only be exacerbated as users broadcast and stream live video from anywhere they can get a satellite signal or an internet connection, even, in fact, especially, from their mobile phone.

Lawsuits will arise as individuals find ways to usurp copyright material by taking their mobile phones to sporting events, movies, concerts or other events. Take the Patriots-Giants finale, originally scheduled to broadcast on only the NFL Network, but later opened up to simulcast on both NBC and CBS — raising the ire of some regional New England TV stations. Imagine a fan with a mobile device being able to live stream the game directly to an account with one of the services listed below.

For now, Live TV is just starting to take off, and below I present a select list of competitors, and why I love ‘em, hate ‘em and sometimes both. I prefer Kyte and Mogulus for being able to create and broadcast an innovative show, while UStream.TV has aligned with big-name personalities like The Plain White T’s that are fun to take a look at. In the Mobile sphere, Qik seems to be the dominant force, allowing users to stream mobile to internet with only a 5-second delay, but FlixWagon will be hot on its tails when it releases a public alpha in January. All companies should be on the look out though, as AT&T with its VideoShare allows mobile-to-mobile streaming, and while I resist listing a cell phone company as one of the most innovative, from what I’ve seen, it is the most impressive video-streaming technology so far.

Note: One common feature I noticed when checking these sites is that the user-generated content is often silly, bordering on the inane.

FlixWagon, a Tel-aviv company which has raised $1 million of funding, is a live video streaming service, allowing anyone with a 3G or WiFi enabled phone to broadcast live video on the web. According to SMS Text news, the company plans to support mobile-to-mobile streaming. Their alpha goes public beginning this new year.

The Good. Video seems to have higher quality than competitor Qik. Users can edit video info from their phone. Users don’t lose precious moments of broadcasts, thanks to a feature that stores video and saves for later viewing. Users can also broadcast alerts to friends and family and automatically upload their video to YouTube or Facebook.
The Bad. For the average user, their name and logo provides no clue about what the company’s purpose is.
The Ugly. FlixWagon supports only Nokia and Sony Ericsson handsets. Users have to download a mobile application.

Justin.tv helped launch life-casting into the consciousness of mainstream America. The company, founded in San Francisco by Justin Kan and Co. after selling Kiko on eBay, received $50,000 from Y Combinator and an undisclosed amount from Alsop Louie in October, and was originally a 24/7 window into the life of Justin. In October, it expanded into a public network, allowing anyone with a camera and computer to videocast their life.

The Good. Youtube meets Big Brother. Life-casting made simple.
The Bad. Why stalk friends through status updates if you can watch them everywhere they go? This site takes the word “voyeurism” to a whole new level.
The Ugly. Seriously, how exciting is it to watch and chat with Justine as she struggles to set up her vidcap or iJohn sleep?

LeWeb conference organizer, Loic Le Meur , with the backing of Ron Conway and Techcrunch’s Michael Arrington, founded Seesmic, which is sometimes described as a “video twitter.”

The Good. Users can stream straight to twitter, as well as borrow video from YouTube and place it in a personal video stream. For the future, Seesmic will enable users to record Skype conversations, video, chat, as well as share a piece of the revenue pie with content creators.
The Bad. Seems to be Last.fm meets Video Twitter…very confusing what the actual purpose is, and as many non-techies don’t even know what Twitter is, may take a while to catch on.
The Ugly. The links don’t seem to work on their page.

UStream.TV, a Riverside-based company with an undisclosed amount of funding that lists General Wesley Clark on its advisory board, is a site for live Web video broadcasting. They claim to be broadcasting 5,000 hours of video daily, with 300 broadcasts taking place at any given time. Ustream says 115,000 people have used the service, and that it has hosted entertainers including a Plain White Ts live concert as well as politicians, like Mitt Romney and GOP candidate Gov. Mike Huckabee.

The Good. Having big name stars such as Mitt Romney and Soulja Boy could perhaps give them an edge on competitors Live and recorded content. Easy search and categorized videos.
The Bad. Profile pages and design are a bit bland.
The Ugly. They seemingly don’t own UStreamTV.com

Kyte, the San Fransisco-based company launched December 2006, is also funded by Ron Conway (in Conway’s classic spread-your-bets fashion; he is really doubling up on video). Other backers include cellphone giant Nokia, as well as a long list of others, including Howard Hartenbaum, an early backer of Skype. Total backing is a significant $17.5 million. It allows users to create their own live TV shows and broadcast them on a live interactive channel, website, blog, social network or mobile phone.

[Update: The Good. Supports Windows Media and Symbian s60 phones. Presenting WIMAX enabled support at the CES, and also a Mobile Streaming/ Map mash-up.
The Ugly. Website is clunky.]
The Good. Slide meets CurrentTV. The “produce a show” feature using drag & drop is very easy to use. Kyte mobile is definitely a huge plus. Lets you chat (IM) as you watch. Easy to post everywhere.
The Bad. The video player itself is a bit too busy.
The Ugly. Some elements show design by a techie– TV littered with trackback comments. They also do not seemingly own their name-sake URL.

Developed by Visivo Communications in Santa Clara, Qik has been testing since November. Qik streams the video directly to the site, with only a 5-second delay. Robert Scoble has gone crazy about them.

The Good. Simple design. Almost Instantaneous. Qiks to Twitter, Facebook, and blogs.
The Bad. Several bad-quality videos. No mobile-to-mobile.
The Ugly. Requires a Nokia S60-enabled phone and must download software, barriers to entry for mainstream audience). Like other mobile products, you’ll require data plan (preferably unlimited).
[Update: Qik is working on both the Bad and the Ugly features that I didn't like about them].

ComVU, a Vancouver-based company, launched the world’s first mobile Webcasting service in February 2005. ComVu PocketCaster streams video from your phone to your video blog or homepage.

The Good. Supports a wider variety of phones.
The Bad. The website surprisingly has no video player on its home page. Qik and Flixwagon are better choices for the average user, but PocketCaster studio seems impressive.
The Ugly. Monthly subscription fee– a barrier for mainstream, but maybe worth it for enterprises. Website is clunky.

Floobs, an upcoming company from Finland, allows users to create a free television channel for broadcasting live, or prerecorded shows.

The Good. I wish there was something to put here.
The Bad. This is their about page.
The Ugly. A beta that doesn’t know whether it’s public or private and hasn’t been completely translated to English.
[Update: Is in closed beta during spring '08 before actual launch. Doesn't change what I said about it now knowing whether it's private or public]

Starting at $5.00/month, AT&T is letting users can share video mobile to mobile while on a voice call. See an example on the Tyra Banks Show.

The Good. Mobile-to-Mobile beats pointing your mobile browser to a Live TV site (and without investing in a data plan). Works with phones of different brands: (LG & Samsung). Going against a US mobile giant will be no easy task if the service isn’t better and/or cheaper.
The Bad. Five bucks a month (or pay as you go) is too much IF another service can deliver for free. No Website to view/archive videos.
The Ugly. Many people are wary of new contracts…you must have AT&T (or switch over) to take advantage — this may not create as much demand as the iPhone.

Mogulus, a New York startup which received $1.2 million back in May, is focused on live video production tools. The Mogulus tools allows users to “storyboard,” which allows for more TV-like content as users can drop recorded videos into the feed at cue and overlay graphics such as logos or titles.

The Good. Collaboration tools. One of only two companies with a Facebook application. Easy access to 26 videos. Nice editing features. Create a real channel. Very clean design/ presentation.
The Bad. I was getting slow load times to watch. A lot of steps just to start a channel.
The Ugly. Even slower load times when trying to produce a video.

Stickam, a Los Angeles based company that launched in March 2007, enables users to host live show stream and chat on their site as well as embed the stream in a personal site or blog. When not live, users can show pictures, audio, or recorded shows on a MySpace-like profile page.

The Good. More than just live streaming video, includes photos, videos, and audio right into profile.
The Bad. Pop-out boxes and opening new tabs almost never works.
The Ugly. If the average user waits 2.4 seconds for a page to load before skedaddling, I don’t know how Stickam has so many users with the very long load times.

Launched in May out of Israel, Blog TV, which received $3 million in seed funding from an Israeli VC, lets you start your own live show and chat. Users can record, broadcast video live, as the video will be automatically archived. The site also allows users to embed, rate, and recommend the videos.

The Good. Facebook app. Easy to watch, comment and share live video stream. [Update: The company has just added a feature letting you do a live split screen interview from different locations, record it and embed it in your site, which is new from what we can tell.]
The Bad. Design is a tad busy and rough on the edges.
The Ugly. The tag cloud for popular tags in the channels section need some serious fixing (-000 0000008august252006 01 does not help one find a channel)

Operator11 launched an Alpha version of a service that has been described as a “cross between MySpace, Jumpcut, YouTube, and AOL chat rooms.” The site allows users to not only live cast themselves, but also mix the live feeds with that of their friends, as well as upload videos to mix in the production.

The Good. Quirky but innovative — one of those hit or miss things. The reverse web-conferencing tool and video-commenting are simple and useful.
The Bad. Eight months in alpha — when will it become a Beta version? The name’s a mouthful — and it has numbers, which is always confusing.
The Ugly. Video quality is sketchy, and the main page has no volume control. Needs some structure — when entering the site, you’re not exactly sure of it capabilities/purpose.

David Adewumi is a contributing author for VentureBeat.

Want to author a piece for VentureBeat? Get in touch with us at venturebeat at gmail dot com.

Online video has never been hotter, and investors are frantically searching for new deals — absurdly so.

See the piece we just wrote about prolific investor Ron Conway, who says the competition for deals is so intense, entrepreneurs are commanding the “dining room table.” Third rate venture capitalists, in desperation, are bribing entrepreneurs to take their money by giving them cash bonuses upfront.

We’re not certain which deals he was referring to specifically, but today sees more action in the online video area area:

1) First, Waltham, Mass-based PermissionTV, which enables companies to add video distribution on their own sites, will announce it has raised $9 million from Castile Ventures and Point Judith Capital.

PermissionTV operates behind the scenes, providing a back-end that simplifies the creation and management of branded internet TV channels for companies such as Adobe or even Presidential candidate Mitt Romney. PermissionTV comes with its own video player and content management tools. PermissionTV is different from Me.tv, which lets users create their own video channels. PermissionTV focuses on working with name brands and professionally produced video. PermissionTV ’s customers also include Fox Interactive, FHM Magazine, and Bob Vila.

2) San Francisco’s YourTrumanShow has unveiled yet another platform from which amateur video producers can share themselves with the world.

YourTrumanShow, which is currently in private beta, is positioning itself as a “bridge between blogging and video and storytelling” that aims to produce the next generation of reality TV stars. Instead of focusing on non-stop action like Justin.tv or everything-that-comes like YouTube, YourTrumanShow wants people to use its site to tell videotaped stories, fictional or real, and carry them through many episodes. It’s hard to imagine that the internet needs another outlet for user-generated video, but YourTrumanShow is, at the very least, a legitimate and endearing attempt at squeezing some hokey juice out of internet TV. More here.

3) Invasion of video players continues. Kyte got funding yesterday. Rifftrax has acquired Cuts, another video player company we wrote about here. The cool thing about Cuts is that it lets you grab video from any site — with help from a bookmarklet — and lets you edit it at Cuts.com. You can send the code to friends, who can make changes to the video, rolling back your edits and making new ones. And there’s Chime.TV, another player that lets you create your own thematic channels, share them with friends, search through videos on sites such as YouTube and Google Video. The site is somewhat confusing, however.

Here’s the latest (updated) action:

Geomas says it has location-based search patent — The London based company says its patent is being infringed upon by some 20 large internet players, and this probably includes Google and Yahoo. Here’s a description of the patent. The company says it raising $20 million to help it extract licensing deals. It started by suing Verizon. (Via Techdirt).

KyteTV gets investment from Nokia — See our story here.

IPO market sees strongest month since 2004, but not for buyout firms - Eleven venture-backed companies raised $1.6 billion through initial
public offerings (IPOs) on US exchanges in May, higher than any other month since Oct. 2004, according to data from Thomson Financial and the VC lobby, NVCA. However, IPOs of companies backed by buyout firms have actually declined, raising questions about whether the bubbly investment activity in that sector is sustainable.

A PayPal-only search engine — TheFind, a shopping search engine launched paypal.thefind.com, a new shopping search engine built solely for browsing products from merchants who accept PayPal payments.

Google’s privacy upgraded — Google said it will keep the Web search histories of users for only 18 months instead of 24, responding to pressure from EU authorities. See story here. Meanwhile, search engine expert Danny Sullivan discovers Google is considering creating a dashboard (scroll to near bottom) where people can decide what aspects of their search and surf behavior Google can access.

Google opens the veil for advertisers — Google released its Placement Performance Report, which enables AdWords advertisers to see the exact sites on the Google content network where their ads appear. It also provides “site-by-site performance metrics – including domain, URL, impression, click, conversion and cost data – as well as aggregated metrics for traffic generated from AdSense for domain sites.”

Google powers search on Sina — Google will place its search box on the Website of Sina, China’s third largest site in terms of traffic. Marketwatch reports here. In return, Sina gets a share the search advertising revenues Google collects. This is the latest move by Google to try to catch Baidu, China’s leading search engine.

Technorati’s mysterious traffic surge — Techcrunch has details on why the traffic surge may be somewhat misleading.

[Updated: YouTube's video-music filtering technology not reliant on Audible Magic -- Google's video property YouTube will soon test a new video identification technology with two of the world's largest media companies, Time Warner Inc. and Walt Disney Co. It will be built by Google's own engineers, and not be solely reliant on Audible Magic, as we'd previously believed after this report. Audible Magic has had filtering problems, as earlier reported. It turns out, Audible Magic is being used for music filtering only; see Elise Ackerman's follow-up today,who also points to an agenda by Google to use the copyright controversy to build up a massive database of videos.]

Former Engadget editor Pete Rojas to form company focused on ad-driven music label — He teams up with Downtown Records to launch a new music label, dubbed RCRD LBL, that will offer the music of artists for free, but paid for with ads. See story here.

Quzhai latest foreign clone — Quzhai is a clone of StumbleUpon, with a little Digg thrown in. Notice how most clones seem to originate in Germany and China, somewhat understandable since they have two of the largest domestic non-English internet markets. Quzhai raised RMB 1 million seed funding from BV Capital.

Biomass it steaming hot — Bull Moose Energy gets $60 million for project in San Diego and other cities. See our story here.

There are a ton of “video player” companies out there, and they’re starting to blur.

It takes a lot to impress these days. A video player in 2007 should be able to upload any video file — from your desktop or from the Web — and then have it run from any Website from a widget.

Just when we thought innovation was running out, we hear about Kyte, a video player that allows live video and chat communication over the Web and mobile phones, and is quite unlike anything we’ve seen before.

It is the latest investment by Howard Hartenbaum (pictured left), the early investor in Skype (see our blog about him here, and Mercury News story here). Hartenbaum has been on a tear recently. We mentioned his investment in the new behavior advertising engine, Wunderloop, yesterday. He’s also an investor in DimDim, the new open source competitor to WebEx, which we’ll get to in a sec.

We first heard of Kyte a couple of weeks ago. We followed up with Daniel Graf, founder and chief executive of Decentral.TV, which owns Kyte.

Graf, who is jealously guarding Kyte’s distribution, until public launch sometime this quarter, has delayed release. The product is in closed testing, so we haven’t gotten our hands on it. You get an idea, though, by perusing examples on the Web (click on image below, for example. There are others here, here and here.)

These Web examples are just half of it. The other half is mobile.

Here’s how it works: The Kyte player is your own interactive TV channel. You can distribute it on the web, or through the mobile phone. On it, you can host videos and photo slide-shows — uploaded from your computer, or elsewhere on the Web, such as YouTube. The most recent content shows in the player, but you can use a back arrow to see earlier content. The example above is player of MySpacer Justin, 26, of San Francisco, and his videos are interesting.

Ok, so what? Well, Kyte appears to do everything. It lets you brand the player as your own. It gives you drag and drop tools to make uploading files easy. You can overlay questionnaires on the player’s screen. Friends can follow your channel on their phone. There’s an IM mashup, too, so friends can respond with messages instantly, and other people watching the video see those messages in real time and can respond. Photos are transferred real-time, says Graf. In other words, if I have Jason’s player on my phone, and he has it on his phone, we can not only live chat about it — more significantly, if Jason turns on camera and takes photos, I can see his surroundings live. “If you see a hot girl on the beach, boom, you can ask him take more shots,” says Graf. [Clarification: He wants to make videos live, too, but that will take some time]

Graf stresses the significance of Kyte as a “full-blown interactive application on the phone.” While Skype, and IM work real-time on the web, this is a real-time, or live video and chat over the phone and the Web. The players get their own URL. You can also open your player channel, so that others can load information too.

Kyte has just signed a deal with a major European carrier, which makes this easier; but it can work without a carrier. The big question remaining for Graf is whether he can actually get this product out of the door!

For now, Kyte supports Java-enabled phones. The product is developed on Flex2 and the latest versions of Flash.

We’ve talked about other mobile video players, including Radar, which transfer mobile videos and photos on mobile phones, but none do this live.

Graf raised $2.3 million from Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Hartenbaum’s firm Draper Richards, Skype co-founder Niklas Zennström and several others.

DimDim, meanwhile, is an open-source version of Web conferencing software WebEx.

It is Hartenbaum’s other investment. DimDim is free, and so plans to disrupt WebEx — just as Skype undercut telecom providers. WebEx charges a significant $39 a month, which is out of reach for many cost-conscious companies. DimDim is still mulling its business model, but plans to place ads in the video, and/or offer premium services. (If you’re an employee being forced to watch a boring training video by your company, perhaps ads might break the monotony?) There are other competitors in this area, but DimDim is the first to go open-source.

It is the second startup of CEO Deb Dutta Ganguly. He founded Advanced Internet, which he sold to Computer Associates in 2001, and built a team of 1,000 people. DimDim is ready for use now, though your firewall may get in the way (DimDim is fine-tuning some of these compatibility issues). This month, downloads are reportedly hitting 2,000 downloads a day.

DimDim has raised $2.4 million in a first round from Hartenbaum’s Draper Richards, along with Index Ventures and Nexus India Capital. The DimDim financing was first reported by PE Week. WebEx controls more than a third of the Web conferencing market, according to research by Goldman Sachs cited by PE Week. Microsoft follows, with 13 percent.

The company is based in Burlington Mass. Our big question for this company is, how do you make money?