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We thought pretty highly of the online video mashup site Omnisio at this year’s Y Combinator Demo Day, and liked it even more after it launched back in March. Apparently, so did Google. Its YouTube property purchased Ominisio today as a way to expand how users interact with the videos they create online, according to the YouTube Blog.

Terms of the deal were not announced, though TechCrunch is hearing it was an all cash deal in the $15 million range. We contacted Omnisio co-founder and chief executive Ryan Junee, but he could not disclose anything about the deal at this time.

Omnisio works by allowing users to submit videos URLs from around the web. It then loads that video and allows you to do things such as crop it down to a certain length and merge it with other clips from around the web. This functionality previously worked with videos from YouTube, Google Video and Blip.tv, though it’s not clear that if with this new YouTube partnership companies like Blip.tv will be pushed out of the equation.

Not that it should matter all that much as YouTube is by far the dominant source of online videos. Hence all the lawsuits.

Omnisio also allows you to easily leave comments on videos that show up on the video itself during playback. This should work well alongside YouTube’s newer video annotations feature.

Update: Chris Sacca, an angel investor in Omnisio (and former Google employee) has a bit more on his blog.

Below find an example video from Omnisio:

If YouTube figured out how to get web video viewers to watch ads, it could enjoy a huge revenue stream from its tens of millions of users. Veeple is one of the companies that hopes it has figured this out. It’s not alone in this respect. But its technology is worth checking out.

The Los Gatos, Calif. company can embed anything — including advertising web page links — into videos. It does so by putting an interactive overlay on top of a video in the Adobe Flash format. It thus makes the video come alive with links and other creative features. Users can thus imprint their own thoughts on a video in the parts where they want and then share it with their friends.

You can place a “VeeSpot” on any part of a video and make that spot interactive. You can turn it into a speech or a thought bubble with a sarcastic message. You can also record a voice message that plays when someone clicks on the VeeSpot. If you want, you can quickly share that video with family, friends, or everyone you know.

Omnisio also uses its Flash overlay to allow people to make comments on videos. (Our coverage). PLYmedia also allows movie viewers to embed comments in speech bubbles in movies.

With Veeple, you can also embed an ad link, such as an eBay logo, into a video. Users who click upon Madonna’s sunglasses in a video can thus link directly to a site where they can buy those glasses.

Scott Broomfield, CEO of Veeple, says that Veeple can distinguish itself from its rivals in a variety of ways. The company has its own object recognition technology that it can use to find and recognize objects within a video. Hence, if an advertiser puts a VeeSpot on an object in a video, that VeeSpot will appear whenever that object appears in the video.

“We consider these links within a video to be unintrusive to the viewer,” Broomfield said. “Since viewers aren’t putting up with 30-second commercials, we consider this to be the next logical step for video advertising.”

Users can rate videos and the most popular ones can rise to top lists on Veeple’s site based on things such as “video most interacted with,” most viewed, or highest rated.  Broomfield said that the company is signing up partners. One is SoundFlavor, a music-buying site. If you click on a SoundFlavor link in a music video, you can go to a page where you can purchase the song. Licensees can take the code for the Veeple player and embed it on their own sites; users can also embed the player in their Facebook or MySpace pages.

“This is an example of how media companies can participate in the business model,” said Broomfield. “They can link back from a video on YouTube to their own site.”

The company has eight employees, mostly in Los Gatos, as well as consultants in Australia. The company started about 15 month ago and Broomfield joined a year ago. The company has raised money from angels so far and will raise a second round this summer.

Often I find myself watching videos on the web that contain parts which are extremely funny, but the rest is painful to sit through. A new online video mashup service, Omnisio, which launched today, hopes to change that by making it super easy to re-edit videos on the web.

The company was one of the ten we profiled in our post on the Y Combinator demo day. As we said then, the slick, easy-to-use interface is one of the strengths of the site. Getting started is as easy as copying and pasting a URL from an existing video on the web. The site only accepts videos from YouTube, Google Video and Blip.tv — but really, as long as your have online video king YouTube, the lack of other sites is forgivable.

Once you submit a video URL to edit, you are taken to a page with a simple cropping tool which allows you to select only the exact portion of the video you wish to keep. To merge this clip with another web video, simply click the ‘Add Video’ button near the bottom of the editor. Here, you’ll paste in another URL and follow the exact same process.

When you have the clip you want, you hit ‘Publish’, enter elements such as a title and description and you’re done. Your video now exists on Omnisio and can be shared or embedded just as you’d expect from any other video site.

As mentioned, there are other sites that do this, such as Searchles (our coverage), but Omnisio has pushed forward with more features. Viddler is another online video company that allows for user commenting within videos, like Omnisio does.

Unlike many other online video startups, Omnisio has a smart approach in terms of keeping costs down: They don’t host any of the videos. Instead, the video still resides on a site like YouTube while Omnisio simply pulls in what it needs for the new video created off of it.

One of the best feature of the site is that you don’t have to create an account to use it. While Omnisio recommends you create one so you are able to come back and edit your videos later, if you know you just want to make a quick and dirty mash-up to use once, Omnisio is the place to go.

VentureBeat Editor Matt Marshall and I attended the Spring 2008 Y Combinator Demo Day yesterday, where we were both pretty blown away.

Okay, so I’m easy to impress, but Matt’s a tougher nut to crack — just ask some of the start-ups who’ve been on the receiving end of his criticism. Yesterday, however, both of us found ourselves constantly saying, “Wow, that looks cool.”

Y Combinator is a Mountain View-based incubator company that funds and nurtures early-stage start-ups, then unveils them twice a year at its demo days. Of today’s 19 presenting companies, here’s our roundup of the 10 most promising, innovative or just plain cool ones (our favorites, from top down), followed by brief descriptions of everyone else.

Matt and I argued this out between ourselves, and we also tried to get some sense of the buzz among others who attended. Still, these are just first impressions. If you’re impressed by any of the companies, let us know in the comments.

The Top 10:

1. Deluux — Deluux’s goal is to bring the functionality of Facebook and other social networks to any page on the web. The company is in stealth, so all we can say is that it’s very promising. Co-founder Paul Mckellar says the company’s goal isn’t to replace Facebook, but rather to extend its “viral mechanisms” to the web at large (which is a vision that Facebook itself has, in some sense). Mckellar previously developed Socialmoth, a freestanding website that became a successful Facebook application last year.

2. 8aweek — 8aweek wants to make you (or, perhaps, your employees) more productive, and tracks your web-browsing habits to do so. There are plenty of other companies claiming to do this, including another one presenting today (see below), but what 8aweek adds is a bunch of other tools that will make greater productivity a reality. For example, you can draw up a list of sites you’ve identified as addictive, but giant time sinks (Myspace, Facebook, for example), and then set a timer that reminds you or even boots you off entirely when you’ve been on for too long (you choose when the timer goes off; see screenshot below). 8aweek does a lot more. It can also filter out a lot of the “noise” on a website by removing the items you’ve already read, and it can point you to those items and links that are the most popular. For a job like mine, where procrastination and research start to bleed into each other, I can definitely use 8aweek to make sure I don’t spend too much time on Valleywag. The service launched last month.

3. Wundrbar — Wundrbar bills itself as a next generation search bar. It looks a lot like the main Google page, but instead of just using the bar to search for results, it makes the bar a command line of sorts: For example, you can type “Amazon Harry Potter” and it’ll take you to the Amazon search results for Harry Potter. It allows you to perform basic tasks on other websites too, interpreting words in a way that is most intuitive. In some cases, you don’t even need to leave the Wundrbar home page — you can type “twitter going to san diego!” and it’ll automatically send out a Twitter message about your trip. The service is available now, and the company hopes others will use Wundrbar as a platform, adding the functionality of other websites. It wants to make money from referrals and targeted advertising.

4. FathomDB — We can’t say anything about this company, because it’s still in stealth mode, but keep an eye out. It’s definitely drawing a lot of buzz. A venture capitalist with DFJ remarked that it was his personal favorite.

5. 280 North — 280 North hopes to create a full suite of online tools that have the richness of desktop applications like Microsoft Office. So far, the company has made a PowerPoint-style presentation creator. The founders cop to the fact that they’ve aped PowerPoint’s interface, but the product benefits from being online. The great thing here is that you can build it all online, but ship presentations as PowerPoint files to people (something you can’t do with, say, a Google presentation).

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