VentureBeat

Despite the occasional late night hiccup, micro-messaging service Twitter has been largely stable for the past few weeks. It’s been refreshing to have the service working, some would say downright boring (as indicated by the calls for the Fail Whale) — so what’s next?

I’ve argued that it should be a serious move into the mobile sphere, while others are clamoring for monetization. Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey sat down with Vator.tv’s Bambi Francisco to talk about Twitter’s present and future. He revealed some interesting things, including:

• Dorsey wouldn’t put a number on the Twitter/Summize deal or on Twitter’s valuation after its latest funding round, but when Francisco asked “$100 million valuation?,” Dorsey just smiled and said, “that’s what people say.”
• Twitter is making some revenue, but not any money. This has been known for a while but is worth repeating. Twitter makes revenue from mobile carriers due to SMS usage. Perhaps it should be no surprise then that Dorsey is excited about the possibilities of SMS and Twitter. I, for one, still think SMS is one of the greatest rip-offs in the world of technology.
• Usage of the API is 20 times that of the main site’s web traffic. That site traffic has been going up very quickly so the API traffic must be huge.
• Of those sites and clients using the API, the desktop clients are the biggest in terms of usage.
• Dorsey says that Twitter always thought that mobile would be huge for Twitter, but that has not really been the case thus far (again, I refer you to my thoughts on Twitter mobile). “We could be better at that,” Dorsey says.
• Dorsey more or less says that embeds should be coming to Twitter. This means that if you were to paste a link to a YouTube video in your tweet (Twitter message), Twitter would recognize it and allow it to expand into an embed playable in the Twitter page or Twitter client. Pownce and FriendFeed have both been doing this since their inceptions, and I’ve been calling on Twitter to do this for a while. It will make for a richer experience within the Twitter community.
• Dorsey says that Twitter will not consider hosting its own videos. So, those hoping for an actual “Video Twitter” better get used to Seesmic or the newer startup 12seconds.
• On the topic of rivals, Twitter views services like FriendFeed as complimentary.
• Specifically on Identi.ca, the current flavor of the week for Twitter exiles, Dorsey says: “We’ve seen a lot of Twitter clones.”
• And finally towards the end Dorsey notes that he hopes Twitter will keep seeing “more and more mainstream usage.”

Monetization, Summize, mainstream usage, Twitter rivals/”killers”, uptime, valuation, Dorsey hit on it all. Watch the full video below. And if you still want more information on Twitter, check out USA Today’s feature on the company that is in the paper today.

You can find me on Twitter here along with fellow VentureBeat writers Eric Eldon, Dean Takahashi, Anthony Ha, Chris Morrison and Dan Kaplan. Oh, and we have a VentureBeat account (for our posts) as well.

Vator.tv’s Bambi Francisco interviewed CBS Interactive mergers and acquisitions head Mike Marquez following the company’s $1.8 billion purchase of CNET. Marquez notes that this deal will open up the door to even more acquisitions as the company looks to expand its interactive empire.

So what is CBS looking at? Anything in the video, mobile and local space, according to Marquez. In fact, it didn’t sound like there was anything he didn’t like and wouldn’t look at. CBS is hungry!

Watch the video below:

Widget mashup site Mixmonsta has won a startup competition organized by startup pitch site Vator.tv and well-funded domain purchaser Demand Media, with participation from blogs including VentureBeat.

Huntingdon Valley, Pennsylvania-based Mixmonsta lets users mash together songs, videos and other images from their computers and phones within its flash-widget interface. Then, users can send the mashup clips to friends by email or by phone (see sample, below). It has been showing some decent traction, with more than five million video views, 380,000 total users and 30,000 registered users. Since many of the mashups are from music videos, some record labels have also been displaying Mixmonsta creations on their artists’ sites.

Runner-ups in the competition were NowLive, Zipidee, Clupedia and Woome.

Mixmonsta has won a range of things useful to any startup. Its chief executive, Voit Damevski, is getting flown to LA to meet with Demand Media’s merger and acquisition team, which could lead to an acquisition or investment. Demand Media, as our readers may recall, has raised a total of $355 million to buy up valuable domain names then run ads and content on them, and has been busy buying up other startups.

MixMonsta has also won six months of free hosting and streaming services from Verisign’s CDN network, a Sun Microsystems server and traffic analysis from Visible Technologies valued at $25,000. It has also won coverage on blogs like VentureBeat: Priceless.

Enterpreneur pitch site Vator.tv has raised another $1 million in funding, Beet.tv is reporting. Entrepreneurs upload videos of themselves to be seen by investors and entrepreneurs, or do interviews with the staff of Vator.tv.

Here’s Beet’s interview with John Shinal, a former reporter who’s managing editor of Vator.

The San Francisco company makes money from advertising, where it says its audience brings in high CPMs (ad impressions), and from sponsorships. The company previously raised $1 million. Our coverage here.

Angel investors include Peter Thiel, Richard Rosenblatt, Georges Harik and other investors.

Vator.tv, a company that lets entrepreneurs upload videotaped pitches to potential investors, is doling out cash prices to winners of pitch competitions.

Over the next few months, selected winners can net anything from an Xbox or an iPhone to over $10,000 — it depends on the contest — and a chance to present their ideas in person to an audience of investors.

You qualify if you’re in one of the following sectors: gaming, clean tech, Office 2.0, or wine. Yes, wine. All you have to do to enter is make a tape yourself explaining your concept, package it with any relevant documents — and send it in. More on the site.

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Vator.TV, the video site started by Bambi Francisco, the former MarketWatch columnist, officially launches tomorrow.

It is designed for people to share ideas about their companies, to investors and others. From the main page, you can select “My Vator” to create a pitch and manage your profile. Outsiders can use a search bar to find pitches. There is also a text news section and a place where pitching competitions are listed.

While the site has been up in a test format for a couple of months, Francisco has been busy building out the platform and striking deals with advertisers and others. Above is an example of the sort of video you’ll find from Vator.TV — this one is by Francisco herself, together with her CTO Cyril Brignone, explaining what their company is all about. Here is their own pitch page on Vator.

We mentioned earlier that Francisco had raised a seed round of capital. She confirmed tonight the round was about $1 million, and that she may be raising more.

Bambi Francisco, the former MarketWatch columnist who left last month amid a stir to form her own video company, has finished raising a round of capital.

The round includes Richard Rosenblatt, the former chief executive of Intermix, owner of MySpace, Georges Harick, a former Google engineer who helped develop Adsense, and Matthew Hill, early investor of Shopping.com and, as expected Peter Thiel, former chief executive of PayPal. She is keeping the amount confidential, but we expect it is at least several hundred thousand dollars.

Click on the image above for a link to a video showing Bambi talking about her company Vator.TV with Rosenblatt, after he steals the mic from someone else (Andy Plesser, of Beet.TV).

Entrepreneurs will be able to pitch their ideas in video, Powerpoint or other document. They can then upload it to Vator.TV, either password protected (where chosen investors can view the pitch) or publicly. In other words, a video form of RaiseCapital.com (see VB coverage). The site will soft launch next week, with a more formal launch later on. Early videos will feature Francisco and Thiel.

Rosenblatt is chief executive of Demand Media (see our coverage), which is buying up generic Web sites and searching for content to fill them up with. He’s also been marketing the .TV domain category, and Francisco said Vator.TV will likely be participating in that, though specifics haven’t been agreed. She said Rosenblatt is a significant investor.

Francisco said she was able to access Amazon’s EC2 offering, which will lower the costs of streaming the video.

The WSJ and Zdnet have published oddly incomplete stories about Bambi Francisco, a reporter at Marketwatch, who they say “invested” in a side company called Vator.tv.

They suggest scandal, because she reported at Marketwatch about people who also invested in Vator.

Bambi’s employers requested that she not to talk with reporters about this, but we’ve talked with Bambi over the past few months, so know what she’s been up to. Fact is, Vator is Bambi. This was not a side investment, so much as her own company. Her investment was mainly sweat equity. Read the stories above carefully with that in mind, and it becomes largely a non-scandal. If Vator became a success, the understanding was that she would leave and do it full time.

There are clearly issues she could have handled much better though. The one for us, was that she reported on the activities of venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who also is an investor of Vator. In those stories, published on Vator itself, she should have disclosed his investment more clearly in the story/video itself (he is listed as an investor elsewhere on Vator). We’ve talked with Bambi this morning, and she agrees now that she should have been clearer, but that the site was so small and had so little traffic she just didn’t think of it. Personally, we think she should take the dive into independence (easier said than done), and break altogether from DowJones/Marketwatch, because of the significant complications caused by staying there.

As for her coverage of LinkedIn, Powerset, and Facebook while at Marketwatch, those are all legitimate stories for anyone to be covering, and we understand that she had an agreement with her employer that she could write stories — even those involving Vator’s investors — once they became legitimate stories in their own right. And it was difficult for her to disclose her Vator activities while reporting at Marketwatch, because the point was to avoid using the Marketwatch platform to publicize Vator. Where the ethical line is crossed is hard to tell under these conditions — another reason Bambi should cut and run.

Update: Later Friday, Bambi resigned. See Mercury News.