Slideshow creator Animoto syncs business model and traffic, raises $4.4M
Animoto is one of those companies that makes my job fun. It’s a web-based slide show company that has figured out what looks to be a sustainable business model — and it has just closed a $4.4 million round of funding.
I first covered the company in August of 2007, when it launched its patented slide show-video technology. The product, a tool for creating your own multimedia slide show, stood out from other slide show widget… Continue Reading
With Flex, Engine Yard targets Rails applications in Amazon’s cloud
Engine Yard, a startup that manages web applications built using the Ruby on Rails programming framework, is planning to expand its services for applications running on Amazon’s infrastructure, adding to its existing Solo product (for smaller developers) with Engine Yard Flex, for larger, industrial-scale deployments.
The goal of companies like Engine Yard is to remove much of the difficulty from deploying and scaling web applications (so they work across lots of users) — once someone has… Continue Reading
Domo arigato, Mr. Animoto, for adding text to videos
Forget those awful photo montage videos on YouTube that teenage fans make for TV shows like “Gossip Girl” and “One Tree Hill.” Animoto, the company that allows anyone to become a music video producer by syncing up photos with tunes, now lets users add text to their videos. Text that more closely resembles sleek, movie-esque sequences, not static captions or titles. Combined with the motion graphics, effects and transitions that are the signature of an… Continue Reading
Online video-based marketplace The Talk Market raises funding from Amazon
The Talk Market is trying to create a video-based marketplace, where users can customize their self-created informercials. As a seller, you shoot a video of what you’re selling, then use The Talk Market to add graphics, including customized motion graphics, and music to your videos.
The company has raised an undisclosed round of equity funding from Amazon. Also, it uses Amazon Web Services Flexible Payment service, providing its merchants with free (but mandatory) Amazon Payments Business… Continue Reading