VentureBeat

Motionbox, a video-sharing site focused on trusted family use, said it has raised $7 million in a second round of financing.

Motionbox is one of several companies that is turning away from the YouTube model and the public expression that comes with it. It lets you shoot video, upload it to its Web site and then edit it — and the share it privately with family and personal friends. OneTrueMedia is a similar company, by Kleiner Perkins (see our coverage).

The Motionbox round was led by new investor Constellation Ventures, a unit of Bear Stearns Asset Management, and previous investors Canaan Partners and SAS joined in. The company said the round was raised at a higher value than its initial round.

Motionbox launched a free service last year, which lets you upload 100 megabytes per video, and store 300 megabytes. On November 13, Motionbox launched “Motionbox Premium,” the subscription service of $29.99 that includes unlimited storage and “TV-quality” downloads for watching on various devices. It also launched Motionbooks, video flipbooks you can make with your personal videos.The service will eventually cost $34.99 a year

New York company Veotag has raised an angel round of $750,000 to build out its nifty video time-stamp tagging feature.

By time-stamp tags, we mean that Veotag lets you list the different events or subjects appearing in your video — according to the exact time they appear in the video.

The concept is instantly understood by clicking on the screenshot below, or here to see a demo of how it works. Surprise — an attractive blonde is hired to do the demo :)

Our arrows point to some of the tags. You can click on these tags, and they are made into link that you can send to your friends. Moreover, the tags are searched by search engines, so that if there’s a very popular five-second part of the video, that tagged part can be linked to by bloggers and other people — thus making it rank high within search engines. This allows the imagination to wander. If videos are tagged, they’ll be brought into that nirvana of search advertising. Google could contain these little video snippets (corresponding to the tags) within its search results, and make serious money with ads beside them.

Anyone can take a video (Windows Media, QuickTime and Flash formats), create the tags and publish.

No one is doing tagging as simply and straight-forwardly with text as Veotag. Motionbox lets you tag with visual stills, and Viddler also has tags, though not as neatly portrayed in a separate window as done by Veotag. Pluggd does a cool search of files, but searches for words you are looking for within the video, and is not an indexing tool. Click.TV, meanwhiles, does get close, but its tags are comments left by other people. You’ll have to take a look at each of these to understand the distinction.

Here’s an example of an authentic veotagged video: A speech by investor Guy Kawasaki, featured on Veotag’s homepage.