VentureBeat

Eatlime, a video uploading and sharing service, says its application delivers video uploading speeds one hundred times faster than its competitors, including Yousendit, which just raised another round of funding.Eatlime has raised more than $400,000 in its first round of funding, with $300,000 from Tim Draper at Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and the rest from Amidzad, Rajeev Motwani, and a trio of ex-googlers: Aydin Senkut, XG ventures, and Georges Harik.

Don’t confuse video uploading technology with YouTube: YouTube caps video uploads at 100MB and doesn’t allow video downloading, while Yousendit and Eatlime allow 1GB videos.

Eatlime accomplishes these speeds by letting users download video while it’s still being uploaded. Users can then publish and share their videos on their social networking profiles, blogs and personal web sites.

While a song, a picture, or a document would normally take less than a minute to upload using most any web service, videos on the web (specifically videos between 100MB and 1GB in size) were seeing upload times of ten minutes — sometimes even an hour — says cofounder Adil Lalani.

The company, incubated at Amidzad in Sunnyvale, Calif., built the patent-pending technology platform in about four months, and Lalani says the company has essentially created a new type of streaming for video on the client side, while the video being uploaded is converted to flash and syncs with the playback experience.

This means that as soon as you begin uploading a video, and say, 5 percent of that video has been uploaded, you can share the link with a friend who can watch the video as its simultaneously uploading. Compare that to popular video-sharing site YouTube, which usually has a 10-20 minute lag time between video upload, and video playback.

The cofounders demoed the technology for me via web conference, and it’s just as fast as they say it is.

The startup is not going unnoticed. Several video sites have approached the young team to consider licensing the technology, although Lalani and cofounder Mohammad Al Adham have had their hands full closing the investment and bringing in the company’s first hire, an engineer from Canada, while still in search for more talent to help build out their product.

Lalani, 21-years-old, founded his first web service when he was 16 years old, and later sold it for a cool $1.25 million while a freshman university student in Canada, where he also met Adham.

Nextbio is a new search engine for the biotech-health industry, something you could have seen coming a mile away.

The nation’s multi-trillion dollar healthcare industry is the equal sister to the information technology sector. In IT, you have plenty of niche search engines, such as Koders and Google Code Search. On the healthcare side, you’ve got a bunch of search engines focused on consumers, but few serious sites oriented to the biotech business-research community.

There’s the Canadian site, Lifesciencesworld.com, and German site, Bionity, but Nextbio appears to be going a level deeper, focusing first on gathering all freely available biological research on the Web, and organizing it so you can search for experiments or studies related to specific genes, proteins, or diseases. It then plans to move into chemical search, and then clinical search. The two-year-old Cupertino start-up is seed-funded by Amidzad, a venture capital firm in Palo Alto, and by Mostafa Ronaghi, a member of the Stanford Genome Technology Center at Stanford’s Medical School. The company sells subscriptions to big pharma companies and academic labs for $10,000 per user per year ($5,000 for academic user). The company says it has 100 paying customers, some of them with multiple users. Customers are evenly split between pharma and academic labs — meaning it has close to about $1 million in revenue.

The company is raising a first round of venture capital.

Midomi, a new company in Silicon Valley (Sunnyvale), has just launched an impressive musical search service.

If you hum, or sing a song, Midomi will likely recognize what you’re singing. So if you get a song in your head, and you don’t know what it is, go to Midomi. It will show you the most likely results, based on the signatures of songs it has in its database, and lets you go to a store to buy them.

That’s just the beginning. Midomi lets you see the people who have hummed the same songs, showing you those who sang most similar to you. It lets you chat with those people through a message box. It also lets you store your tune in its database for others to hear.

For example, see the screenshot below for Midomi’s results when I sang “Morning has Broken” into a microphone. At right, it shows that Cat Stevens was the original singer, and lets me buy the song at Amazon.com. At left you’ll see the profiles of the people who sounded most like me. At bottom, it gives other possible results. I can click on their profiles, listen and message them.

Midomi blows away Nayio Media, the San Mateo company that launched a humming search last month. If Nayio recognizes your tune, it cross-references with Napster’s library of songs. But the trouble is the recognition part. We tried humming “Morning has Broken,” but the song wasn’t represented on the first page of results. On Midomi, it was the first result, even when we hummed. Midomi gets better when you use words.

It was launched by two engineering PhDs from Stanford, Keyvan Mohajer (who studied music recognition), and Majid Emami, along with Stanford science grads James Hom and Michal Grabowski. The technology is self-built, called MMARS, or multi-modal adaptive recognition system. Midomi looks at pitch variation, like Nayio does, but it goes deeper, looking at tempo variation, phonetic content and location of pauses. If you hum a wrong note, it will often find ways to override it, by filtering it with other close signatures in its system. It isn’t perfect. While it recognized me humming “I Just Called to Say I Love you” immediately, it failed to do it on a later try when I hummed it quickly, without care. But once I added the words to my tune, it picked it up even when I sang quickly.

It gives you a studio, too, where you can pick out songs to sing — to help, it lets you play a 30-second track and see the lyrics — and lets you tag them, so that they are stored in the database. See a tour of the Midomi service here.

For copyright reasons, Midomi won’t let you upload your own songs, though that may change in the future. We did encounter a few bugs. Some sample tracks (it has licensed two million 30-second clips) didn’t play correctly (the audio didn’t come through). And one major caution: When we tried to download a software required before you can buy the songs, Midomi shut down the entire browser without warning. We still haven’t been able to download that software. We’ll update once Midomi fixes this.

The company’s goal is to become world’s most comprehensive database, Mohajer tells VentureBeat.

The Midomi service is their first product. They’ve formed a company called Melodis, and they want to move into other areas, such as speech recognition that will beat existing players like Nuance or Tellme. They’ve already implemented text recognition in Midomi. If type a search term “Ooops Britni Spirs,” it will recognize you are searching for the song by Britney Spears. Midomi also wants make the service easy to use for mobile devices.

The company has 15 employees in Sunnyvale, and another dozen developers in Eastern Europe and India. It has raised “multiple millions” from Global Catalyst Partners, and angel funding from Amidzad and former Googler, Aydin Senkut.

Yahoo has acquired Bix, the Palo Alto start-up that lets people compete in online karaoke, hot or not and other contests.

The amount was undisclosed, but this acquisition was fast; Bix launched barely three months ago.

It is the latest sign of focus by Yahoo in its acquisition strategy. Its purchases have slowed to a trickle, but the deals it has completed concern community, user-generated sites (Flickr, del.icio.us, Upcoming.org and Jumpcut), which stands in contrast with Google, which has focused on applications.

Bix raised $6.77 million in a first round of funding from Sutter Hill Ventures, Trinity Ventures and Stanford. It is yet another win for angel investor Amidzad, the separate venture fund created by the Palo Alto rug merchants who, aside from various international investments, also own lots of office property in Palo Alto. They invested in Bix when it moved into their property on Florence Street, and saw a nice profit on this investment, we’re told.

The idea behind Bix was to let companies sponsor the competitions online, handing out gifts to the winners. Bix is also planning to let users embed a widget on their own Web sites featuring the Bix contests.

We note the rather overt reference to its mature content on its home page (see below).