VentureBeat

Pluggd, a Seattle company that lets you search audio and video files for words or themes, has raised just under $6 million in financing.

Pluggd is a hot company because it does something well that few others have been able to match. You can search for “iPhone,” and Pluggd will give you a heat map showing all the places in the video file where iPhone is mentioned or even themes related to the iPhone. Click on image below for a demo.

See our previous coverage of the company.

Intel Capital, the venture arm of chip company Intel, led the round. Intel had earlier invested in the company’s seed round. Other investors include DFJ Frontier, Labrador Ventures and the Band of Angels. We’re hearing the company received an acquisition offer, but turned it down after receiving multiple favorable offers from venture capital firms.

The company is moving quickly. Last time we covered the company, it searched only audio files. Now it searches video.

It also offers a widget to search audio and video on third-party sites.

Other companies offer competing technology, but none distribute the same heat-map precision features. One is YuMe, of Redwood City, Calif., which also uses speech-recognition technology to allow advertisers to decide which videos to advertise on. That company employs people in India to make sure that videos are about what they say they are. It has received more than $7 million in funding from Khosla Ventures, Accel Partners, and BV Capital and others. Another is EveryZing, which raised $10 million in June.

Pluggd and YuMe were both voted “best in show” at July’s Under the Radar event.

Pluggd, a Seattle company, has delivered a widget that lets you search audio (and soon, video) on third-party sites in more sophisticated ways.

It has been working away on a technology that allows you to search for specific terms or themes within audio. We wrote about the company six months ago, when it launched a few test audio files to search.

The service debuts on CNET. Pluggd is signing up other partners too. Notably, the service is not free (Pluggd is negotiating prices with partners).

You can try it out over at CNET’s property ZDnet.

Go here for example, and try a search for iPhone — Pluggd will give you a heat map showing all the places in the audio file where iPhone is mentioned or even themes related to the iPhone are discussed.

The company has focused on audio files for now, but will be moving to video shortly, Pluggd’s chief marketing officer Cornelius Willis tells us.

Other companies offer competing technology, but none distribute the same heat-map precision features. There’s Everyzing, which offers similar search feature at its own site, and which is gearing up to deliver to more third-party sites. That company just raised lots $10 million to do so.

We’re hearing that Pluggd, meanwhile, is about to raise a significant round of capital too. The company would not comment.

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.

Here’s the latest wrap-up of Silicon Valley tech news:

Cisco sues Apple over iPhone name — Who cares? If Apple loses, it will come up with a different name. Like, ApplePhone, or iPodPhone. Details of suit.

Yahoo signs deal with Akimbo to deliver video to televisions — Just the latest move in a huge number of deals pushing video to your TV. More details here.

Avvenu shares music via link in email — Avvenu, a Palo Alto start-up has been around for a while, but has introduced a new service for sharing music. By downloading a free music player, users can select tracks they wish to share (250 for free) and send links to friends via email. Recipients click on the link to listen for up to five days. Users sharing their music must have iTunes software downloaded, though recipients don’t. Works on Windows mobile software, too.

The latest on Jeff Bezos’ space project – Here’s the scoop from Amazon.com’s Bezos on Blue Origin, which reveals a cone-shaped vehicle to be used “to lower the cost of spaceflight so that many people can afford to go and so that we humans can better continue exploring the solar system.” Tests have already been made, though the program has some ways to go.

MyBlogLog sold for reported $10M, after no venture capital, and then spammed — The service, which lets bloggers and others see who is reading their blogs, and where those readers tend to go afterward, has sold to Yahoo for a reported $10 million. MyBlogLog became popular last year, after its little widget started showing up on blogs with the pictures of their readers. Some 45,000 bloggers had signed up for it. Om talked with chief exec Scott Rafer. Lately, though, some have showed it is relatively easy to spam.

Update on Techdirt’s analyst service — As reported (see here), Techdirt raised $600,000 to build out its Insight Community product, which hooks up expert bloggers with companies that seek their advice. Mike Masnick (left), of Techdirt, who has built the company without outside investments over the past decade, tells VentureBeat he finally bit the bullet, realizing it made sense to raise money to help build out the project — given all of the interest he’d received in it. It is still in testing mode, but he’s now building more interactive features, letting people in the network communicate with each other, rather than limit it to one-to-one relationship originally envisioned. Entrepreneur Mark Fletcher, one of the investors, joins the board. Also, investors were all outsiders. Insiders didn’t participate, as suggested earlier by the PEhub report, Masnick said.

Slideshow company Slide raised $20 million — We’d reported Slide’s venture round last year. Reports suggest Slide raised $20 million, giving it a valuation afterward of $60 to $80 million. This gives it some runway, even as competitor Filmloop lays off most of its workers. Here is our earlier story.

Weatherbill, an online site to sell weather insurance policies to individuals and businesses — Sounds boring, but it has all the Map mashups and other Web 2.0 candy to make it worth a look (via Techcrunch)
It has raised a first round of round of financing from NEA, Index Ventures and a number of angel investors.

Second Life has opened its application to developers — Many people find the virtual world Second Life difficult to get the hang of, which has no doubt limited its growth. Now it has opened its software for developers to provide alternatives. It isn’t clear whether this will spark a vibrant developer community or not.

Podzinger searches words in YouTube videos — Podzinger gives you a way search for words that are mentioned in YouTube videos. Podzinger has a tab letting you do this on its front page, and it tells you how many minutes and seconds into the video the reference is (although we couldn’t figure out how to zip automatically to the reference, like Pluggd does). More details here, at Splashcast blog. Blinkx is another company that searches audio and video files.

PayPerPost drops its purchase of Perfomancing assets — Details here.

Aaron Swartz, of Reddit, not done dreaming — Good piece in the Chronicle mentioning the impressive rise of Swartz, who built his first web site at 13, got bored, and then, circuitously, ended up building Reddit, which was bought by Wired Digital. Now 20, he says he’s headed back to academia soon. Re hanging out: “I’m so shy I don’t even hang out with the people I know now.”

Hype at Asiatech? — Days ago, we reported on the purchase of software developer Mediabolic by Macrovision. Sources told us the return was marginal, giving later investors slightly more than the money they invested. But it was no where near a two-fold return claimed by AsiaTech investor Katherine Jen in an interview with VentureWire recently, they said. Jen did not respond to a request by VentureBeat for comment about her “2x return” claim.

See Jobs’ demo of iPhone — It is striking, and worth it. See here, and click on “touch navigation” for starters.

Declaring it has “perfected the user experience” for audio and visual search, Seattle start-up Pluggd has raised $1.65 million from Intel and angel investors to help it start distributing its technology.

If you haven’t played with Pluggd, you should. It provides that “wow” experience, giving you what you intuitively want when searching video: a way to skip forward to the exact part of the audio or video file you are looking for. We’ll be hearing more about Pluggd next year, as it begins to cut partnership deals with major publishers, and comes out of the testing phase it launched two months ago.

Let’s take an example.

Take this ESPN radio recording from yesterday. Select the “find” tab, and type in the word “Marlins.” Pluggd will show you in the heat map the places most likely to be interesting to you. Orange shows a very high match. If you move the cursor there, you’ll hear the part about the Marlins. (You can do this by clicking on this image at left. You may be prompted to update your Flash player; go ahead and do so.)

But it gets even better.

Pluggd finds related words. Let’s say you’re looking for anything to do with injury, because you’d heard that Kobe Bryant might be injured. You type in “injury,” and Pluggd locates the part where the radio mentions his sprained ankle, even though the word “injury” is never mentioned in the audio. (Again, you can try this by clicking on image at left.)

This is impressive. Pluggd can do this by analyzing pages and pages of sports articles, and finding the statistical relationships between words. Its crawler finds that sprained ankle is very clearly correlated with the word injury over time. It does this without any sort of human domain experts. No one is doggedly typing in these associations behind the scenes. It is all automated, relying on the great database called the Web. “The Web itself represents mankind’s knowledge,” says Alexander Castro.

Right now, this cool search is only available at Pluggd’s demo site. And in case we’ve lost you, here’s a screencast tour.

Meanwhile, Pluggd has also building an inventory of ESPN and other files — now numbering more than a million — and it is busy indexing them all, so that it can make them available for crawling with its technology. Like Google, it wants to become a destination site. Also like Google, it wants to offer its technology to publishers, too, and Pluggd says it will be announcing various deals next year.

The company has boot-strapped itself until now, and the $1.65 million can be considered a seed round, to be converted into a first VC round sometime next year.

Intel made up a good portion of the investment, but more than half was contributed by a group of angels, including Scott Oki, former senior vice president for sales, marketing and service at Microsoft and Paul Maritz, former Microsoft group vice president of systems and applications. Other angels include:

–Brian Magierski, CEO of Kalivo, former co-founder/CEO of iMark (acquired by Ariba);
–Fraser Black, technology investor
–Bill Bryant, founder and investor in numerous search-focused startups including Netbot, Medio and Singingfish;
–Alex Alben, former executive at Starwave and RealNetworks;
–Barry Newman, venture partner at NeoCarta, former vice chairman of the technology group at Bear Stearns;
–Mark Klebanoff, former chief financial officer at RealNetworks.

There are a multitude of other companies focused on audio and video search (Pixsy, Podzinger and CastTV, for example), but none that are using Pluggd’s heat map approach that takes you directly to where you want to go.