VentureBeat

Sprout, the startup behind an easy-to-use tool for creating Flash applications, has been having a very good year. It launched in January at DEMO (where it snagged a “DEMO god” award), made its app builder publicly available in March, then released a bunch of new features in April. Now it has raised $5 million in a second round of venture funding.

Through Sprout, you can use a “what you see is what you get” interface reminiscent of Photoshop to build applications that the company calls “sprouts”. The apps are basically widgets, but with the interactivity of a Flash website. The process is made especially accessible through Sprout’s templates, which can be customized with just a few clicks.

Sprout added compatibility with a number of other sites and applications in April. Now, you can use your sprout to display your Twitter messages, make phone calls via Ribbit and feed user survey information directly into Google Spreadsheets. Even better, Sprout released a software developer kit that allows other web services to integrate with Sprout’s platform.

The release of Sprout Verision 2.0 is imminent, says chief executive Carnet Williams, and the new funding will be used expand the engineering, business development, marketing and support teams. The round was led by Polaris Venture Partners, with participation from existing investor Global Venture Capital and Lotus founder Mitch Kapor. The San Francisco- and Honolulu-based startup was previously raised $3.3 million.

Web video may seem like a tough field for any company to enter, much less a nonprofit.

But the Participatory Culture Foundation, a 501(c)3 organization, says its Miro video player can play RSS-enabled videos hosted anywhere — and offers advantages over most of the for-profit video companies on the market.

For starters, it offers open standards and open source, and is a standalone player.

The player took another step forward this week, by launching a co-branding service with German broadcaster Deutsche Welle, Web TV network Revision3 and the interdisciplinary TED conference.

In order to use Miro, you need to download it from the Miro’s Web site or the site of the co-branding partners — TED will also be distributing it on USB sticks at the next conference — and then install it on your desktop. Once installed, the player uses RSS, BitTorrent and media-player technologies to let users download videos from anywhere on the Web. Through a range of RSS-based “channels,” Miro users can download new videos as they become available. (See screenshot below.)

The Web TV company that may come closest to Miro’s model is VeohTV, a standalone player that downloads any video off Yahoo’s video index. When it launched, VeohTV took jabs at Joost’s limited library, which we reported here. But Miro still has an advantage, because it plays more formats, supports the BitTorrent peer-to-peer protocol (lowering costs for producers and increasing download speeds for viewers) and is open source, says Business Development Director Jesse Patel.

Miro’s model doesn’t just make for a better player with more content, he argues — by separating the viewing and the hosting of online videos, it also encourages free expression and creates a more diverse and vital “online video ecosystem.” If a popular player can view movies hosted anywhere, no single host — the obvious example being YouTube — controls access to a mass audience.

As an example, Patel cites journalist Wael Abbas, whose YouTube account was suspended after he posted videos documenting police brutality and torture in Egypt. YouTube said the videos were “gratuitously violent.”

The problem isn’t YouTube’s content guidelines, per se (which you can read here), but rather that one host can essentially decide what a large audience does or does not see, Patel says. If Abbas posts his videos anywhere else, his audience would have been dramatically smaller, so he has to play by YouTube’s rules. (The argument may be weakened since Abbas’ account was eventually reinstated.)

Miro, on the other hand, doesn’t have any content restrictions, and will play any RSS-enabled video, regardless of where it’s hosted. It’s also working on a plug-in that will download almost any video online. So if its viewership grows — the player currently has around 400,000 regular users — Miro will give producers access to a potentially vast audience, no matter where their video is hosted.

The player doesn’t raise any legal questions, either, Patel says, because it’s not promoting the download of any material with copyright issues, although such downloads are possible.

But will people even bother to download a separate player? That, in part, is where the co-branding comes in, Patel says. Through the new campaign, Deutsche Well, Revision 3 and TED will distribute versions of Miro redesigned with each company’s branding and preloaded with the company’s content. TED, for example, now has an easy way to distribute videos of its talks, while Miro benefits from the increased exposure — and some revenue too.

Similar announcements are coming soon, Patel says. The Participation Culture Foundation argues that the co-branded players also push forward the group’s mission, because the players will allow a much wider range of companies to provide content through customized desktop video applications.

If Miro is successful, Patel adds that other video players may also adopt more open standards in order to compete.

That’s big talk. Does the player live up to it? Well, I downloaded a version for myself and nothing jumped out as particularly mind-blowing. Still, I didn’t spend enough time exploring to get a sense of the breadth of the video library, and I like Miro’s rhetoric enough that I’ll keep poking around.

My goodwill aside, Miro will need to see some dramatic growth before it really starts living up to the foundation’s promises. The co-branding campaign does seem like a step in the right direction.

The Worcester, Mass.-based foundation also has some big names on its board, including Mozilla CEO John Lilly and BoingBoing blogger Cory Doctorow. The Participatory Culture Foundation draws most of its funding from donations and grants. Donors include Lilly, Mitch Kapor and the Knight Foundation. Patel says the foundation hopes to eventually become self-supporting.

updated

Auction giant eBay has acquired StumbleUpon, an San Francisco company that helps people “stumble upon” and share new sites related to their interests, for about $75 million.

In a statement this afternoon, eBay said the acquisition will give it “exposure to a fast-growing community-based service” that has around 2.3 million users, and that StumbleUpon is attractive because it shares similarities with eBay’s concept of community.

The deal size is not large relative to other deals we’ve seen lately, but it is a big coup for the founders, who moved from Canadian to San Francisco more than a year ago, and were self-funded until March of last year. They raised a round of $2 million or less (update: $1.5 million, we’ve confirmed) from Google’s founding investor, Ram Shriram, Lotus founder Mitch Kapor, Topic founder Ariel Poler, angel investor Ron Conway. (Update: First Round Capital also invested.)

Indeed, they reap a massive profit, something that most start-ups taking venture capital can not afford to do. Companies like Digg, for example, are rumored to be valued by venture investors at more than $75 million. Because VCs have bought shares at such a high price, they won’t let a company sell at such low levels.

The StumbleUpon deal was expected, rumored by several sources, and the price was reported accurately by the WSJ earlier this month.

Once people download is toolbar, StumbleUpon shows you Web sites that you can rate as good or bad. It starts showing you more of the types of sites you appear like, based on those sites have been rated highly by other people that have voted similar to the way you have. It does the same for videos, people and product information.

It makes money by showing an ad every hundred or so stumbles.

With no marketing, the StumbleUpon community has grown 150 percent from last year and
delivers some five million new recommendations a day to its user base, the company said.

As mentioned earlier, StumbleUpon could potentially let people stumble upon eBay products they’ve bought in the past, though the eBay did not mention this in its statement.

StumbleUpon launched in 2001, but only recently caught on in a major way.