Minglei Xu, a San Francisco developer who sold his last company to Zynga, is back on the horse!

The dev just filed a Form D with the SEC, disclosing a $1 million seed funding round for his new startup, AirXP (no URL yet, folks). Its product is still in closed alpha, so all we know is that it involves live video, it’s social, and it’s consumer-grade — so we’re guessing smartphone video.

Also listed on the Form D are Ying Xie, another SF-area tech person of interest, and Rick Thompson of Signia Venture Partners. Thompson actually invested in Xu’s former startup, Wild Needle, and has particular expertise in mobile/social gaming.

Zynga bought Wild Needle in May 2012, giving Xu a scant year to recover from the founder experience before jumping back into the fray. The company was two years old at the time and cost Zynga around $3.8 million; it had raised a total of raised $2.5 million in funding from Thompson and Shasta Ventures.

Check out the filing itself below:

Image credit: Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Social video startup Viddy has certainly seen better days.

Viddy is apparently planning to reduce its operations and marketing workforce by cutting 12 positions (or a third of its total employees), reports TechCrunch. The news comes just weeks after CEO and cofounder Brett O’Brien was canned for reportedly turning down an insane buyout offer from Twitter.

Viddy produces mobile applications (iOS and Android) for shooting 15-second clips that you can enhance with video effects called “production packs.” The startup reported massive growth back in May that brings the total number of registered users to more than 40 million, as VentureBeat previously reported. The company, which launched about a year ago, has a star-studded list of celebrity investors, including Biz Stone, Shakira, Will Smith, and Jay-Z. But the service also has its share of notable users, such as Rihanna, Snoop Dogg, Katie Couric, Mark Zuckerberg, and an often shirtless Justin Bieber.

But now that Twitter has Vine for all its social video needs (not to mention the large number of social video competitors on Facebook), Viddy seems like it’ll have a hard time gaining enough popularity to stay relevant in the future.

Viddy’s board has confirmed the job cuts, and sent us the following statement:

As the board continues to review Viddy’s business, we’ve identified specific ways to streamline costs which include eliminating some positions. These changes will allow the Viddy team to be focused on bringing the most innovative and engaging social mobile video product to market. Viddy has a strong balance sheet and an exciting product roadmap ahead, including an upcoming new product release, and we have the right team in place to execute moving forward.

Mobile video recording service Streamweaver closed a $1.3 million round of funding today, the startup confirmed to VentureBeat.

Streamweaver is a free iOS app that lets multiple iPhone owners record a live video at the same time, which is then converted into a single, 60-second video with a split-screened view of each person’s camera angle. I previously described the service as an easy way to harness the functionality of a broadcast video news crew, but without the expensive equipment or time-intensive video editing.

Streamweaver’s focus on split-screen recording sets it apart from the many other mobile video recording apps on the market, most of which focus on creating a Twitter or Instagram for video (Viddy, Klip, Tout, etc.). Streamweaver’s only real competition in the split-screened video market is iOS app Vyclone.

“A lot of the innovation that’s happening in social video is focused on post-record, but we’ve always been intrigued by the social aspects and allowing people to create content together,” Streamweaver COO Jay Hake told VentureBeat, adding that the new capital will allow the team to continue doing just that.

Hake said Streamweaver will use the new funding for additional development and marketing. The startup is currently focused on producing a more feature-rich version of its iPhone app but does consider an Android version something that will eventually happen.

The new round includes a major investment by former Facebook Chief Security Officer Chris Kelly, who will join Streamweaver’s board of directors. Others that participated in the funding round include Byron Smith and INCITE Co-investment Fund, as well as previous investors Tennessee Community Ventures and Mountain Group Capital.

Founded in 2012, the Nashville, Tenn.-based startup currently has 8 full-time employees and is planning to release a new version of its iPhone app in the near future.

h/t to TechCrunch

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

The tsunami of video available online is both a blessing and a curse. While there’s a ton of free content out there, it’s tough to just sit back and enjoy online video as you would a traditional TV channel.

That’s a problem that Showyou, a free video discovery app from Remixation, has been trying to solve since it launched last year. Now with Showyou 4.0, the latest version of the app launching today, the company has finally crafted the ideal app for kicking back and and enjoying popular online videos, as well as videos shared by your friends.

“The reason we got excited about [the iPad] originally and started building specifically for it was because it was the most likely to have that [prime time TV watching] characteristic,” Mark Hall, chief executive of Remixation, told VentureBeat in an interview. Not surprisingly, Hall notes that Showyou’s peak usage is from 9 p.m. to midnight.

Instead of piling on new features that make the app more complex, Remixation focused on simplifying the overall experience of the app. News users can log in and start finding interesting videos quickly. And returning Showyou users will find a more useful video feed, dubbed the “Smart Feed,” that does a better job of picking the best videos for you; more than 100 new content channels; and the ability to switch between a grid view and a more information-soaked “feed view.”

Many of the features hitting Showyou’s iPad app today first appeared in its iPhone app, which received a significant revamp in July. That makes a certain amount of sense: As the company learned how to optimize its interface for the iPhone, it was able to translate many of those lessons to the larger-screened iPad. It’s app design is reminiscent of trimming a bonsai tree.

Showyou is now approaching 100 million indexed videos, the company says, with 250,000 to 300,000 videos added every day to its search index. The company has compiled more than 1.5 billion “social signals,” which include data from tweets and other services, in its index.

There have also been lots of changes to Showyou that simply makes it easier to use. Instead of swiping its video grid in four directions, which was cool but kind of confusing in prior versions of the app, now you just have to swipe up and down. That makes using Showyou more like Pinterest, Instagram, and other popular social services. You can also swipe left or right while a video is playing to move to the next one, or have the videos automatically play (so it really does feel like a TV channel).

When I tested out the new Showyou app, finding and watching videos just felt more seamless. You can select video topics within the new feed view, which can easily send you down a rabbit hole of interesting videos. There are also more ways to share videos with your friends, and you can now multitask while using Airplay on the iPad to push videos to an Apple TV.

San Francisco-based Remixation has raised an undisclosed amount of funding in a first round from True Ventures and other investors.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Video-sharing application Viddy landed on Android devices today after long being available only on the iPhone.

Los Angeles-based Viddy makes a mobile application for shooting 15-second clips that can be enhanced with video effects called “production packs.” The company touts 40 million registered users and is often referred to as the “Instagram of video.”

The startup, which historically only supported uploads via iPhone, is traversing the mobile chasm with its first native application for Android that is said to support more than 757 different Google-powered smartphones and tablets. The release, several months in the making, comes more than 19 months after Viddy first landed on Apple devices in April 2011.

Viddy for Android follows the same 15-second shoot-spruce-and-share model as its iPhone predecessor, but it comes with 10 fresh video effects. The application also includes 16 soundtracks for adding audio to your clips, supports background processing (unique to Android), and is optimized for HD cameras on Android devices.

In a perfect world, Viddy for Android would help the young startup double up on users, content, and activity, but reality may be more bleak.

Competitors Klip and SocialCam, now an Autodesk property, already have a presence on Android, as do a number of other mini-video apps and services. Viddy co-founder and CEO Brett O’Brien believes, of course, that his app is better than the rest on the extremely popular platform because the company took the time to understand Android’s differences.

“Android has great technology, but developing a superior social mobile video product which exceeds user expectations on this platform is complex. There are different form factors, different versions of the operating system, challenges in accessing hardware acceleration for editing, etc,” he told VentureBeat. “We are the only company to even attempt this, and we think we have created a great experience for people.”

Viddy was all anyone could talk about in the first half of the year, but it’s hard to get an accurate reading on its level of hotness these days. Press attention peaked shortly after the company raised a $30 million round in May, partly because Viddy’s meteoric rise was driven by Facebook’s Open Graph and seemed unsustainable (it was).

Third-party tracking service AppData pegs Viddy’s monthly active Facebook-connected users at just 600,000. The startup does continue to see a healthy influx of videos from its celebrity members; the ever-influential Justin Bieber still uses Viddy to reach his 328,000 followers on the service. Meanwhile he has 4.2 million followers on Instagram.

Viddy also has an influential cavalcade of A-listers who want to see the app succeed. Biz Stone, Shakira, Will Smith, and Jay-Z are among the service’s celebrity backers.

What did you do in 2012? Chances are your Facebook Timeline remembers more than you do. But when end-of-year nostalgia strikes, and it will, skip the endless status-update sifting and turn to startup Animoto, which just released a collection of video options for reliving your top moments of the past year.

With its “Best of 2012 Facebook Videos” launched today, six-year-old Animoto has found the perfect application for its patented automatic video-generating technology. Facebook members can now turn to Animoto to outsource the creation of their 2012 highlight reels.

Best of 2012 video

Animoto will pluck a person’s top moments from Facebook, set the montage to music, and spit out a shareable video in a matter of a seconds. The end result is a short and sentimental video for reflecting on your life in 2012, as documented on Facebook.

Yes, the stock videos — you have five to chose from — are pretty cookie-cutter, and only 30 seconds in length, but Animoto offers plenty of customization options for those who want to take the extra time to adjust the style or music, select different pictures and videos, and write their own captions. Just note that should you wish to add in more content, Animoto will ask you to pay up for the privilege.

New York-based Animoto was founded in 2006 and competes with Stupeflix and Magisto. The video creation service, which has raised $30 million in funding to date, has 5 million users and 60 employees.

Memory lane photo via Shutterstock

Social video-chat company ooVoo has added 7 million subscribers in the past 100 days, an impressive increase of 1 million users every two weeks, the company announced today.

New York City-based ooVoo offers people 12-way video chat across Facebook, web, desktop, iOS, and Android applications. The company saw substantial growth this summer, a sign that its 12-way video chat app for Facebook and iPad has found a receptive audience.

And a young audience at that. Notably, ooVoo claims that 65 percent of its 58 million users worldwide are under 25 years old, while 55 percent of its U.S. subscribers are under that age.

“With over 58 million subscribers, and adding millions more every month, ooVoo is the social video chat service of choice for a new digital generation of youth who live their life through mobile,” ooVoo president Jay Samit said in a statement. “ooVoo is growing exponentially, and our strong momentum is another proof point that users find ooVoo a powerful and must-have way to stay connected on mobile, Facebook, PC, and tablet.”

Check out a recent celebrity ooVoo chat with pop singer Kat Deluna below.

Keek has eked out an additional $7 million in funding to support the promising growth of its web and mobile service for sharing 36-second video clips.

Keek plays in the crowded but still nebulous sandbox of services betting that mobile users will soon trade in photo sharing for video posting. The social network encourages users to post short video updates, called “keeks” and follow or subscribe to the updates of other users.

The Toronto-based company, founded in 2011, released its video-sharing apps for iOS and Android in March. Keek users have created a total of 6.4 million videos to date, but are now posting 66,000 videos per day. In August, Keek racked up 21 million visits and 250 million pageviews.

“We are committed to delivering the fastest, most engaging social video experience,” Keek CEO Isaac Raichyk said in a statement. “This new funding will allow us to keep the momentum going, accelerate product development, scale the infrastructure, and expand globally.”

Keek’s latest round was led by Cranson Capital Securities, and included participation from Pinetree Capital and Whitecap Venture Partners. The startup has raised more than $12 million to date.

Photo credit: Chris JL/Flickr

Capitalizing on a successful past few months, Viddy has launched a public API that will allow developers to use the social video service within third-party apps, the company announced today.

Viddy produces an iPhone application for shooting 15-second clips that can be enhanced with video effects called “production packs.” The startup reported massive growth back in May that brings the total number of registered users to more than 27 million, as VentureBeat previously reported. The company, which launched less than a year ago, has a star-studded list of celebrity investors, including Biz Stone, Shakira, Will Smith, and Jay-Z. But the service also has its share of notable users, such as Rihanna, Snoop Dogg, Katie Couric, Mark Zuckerberg, and an often shirtless Justin Bieber.

In addition to the API, Viddy is launching a contest that gives developers a chance to win $10,000 and an interview with Viddy for permanent employment. To gain access to the API, developers need to contact Viddy via the new developer portal.

Some have speculated that Viddy has a good chance at dethroning YouTube as the king of user-generated video, and this very well could be the case for smaller scale clips. YouTube is currently focused on the bigger picture, which includes enhancing the site’s content to the caliber found on cable television. So Viddy, especially with its new API, certainly has an opportunity to become a powerful force if it continues growing.

Founded in 2011, the Venice, Calif.-based startup has previously raised a total of $36 million in funding from Battery Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures, Greycroft Partners, and others.

Software company Autodesk has agreed to buy quickly growing video app Socialcam for $60 million, the company announced Tuesday.

Socialcam, along with video sharing rivals Viddy and Klip, aims to be the next “Instagram for video,” but the startup’s buy offer is considerably less than the $1 billion Facebook paid for Instagram. That said, Socialcam launched just 18 months ago as a part of Justin.tv, and then split into its own organization last August. $60 million for 18 months of hard work isn’t too shabby.

“Socialcam shares Autodesk’s mission of helping everybody imagine, design, and create a better world,” said Socialcam CEO and founder Michael Seibel, in a statement. “Autodesk has a proven track record of acquiring and scaling fast-growing, early stage consumer businesses while staying true to their core audience and vision. With products like Pixlr, SketchBook and 123D, Autodesk is empowering creativity in millions around the world by making their award-winning technology accessible to everybody. We’re excited to join them and introduce this global community to simple video creation, editing, and sharing.”

Socialcam is currently the most popular application on Facebook, with about 54.7 million monthly active users, with TripAdvisor and Yahoo Social Bar in second and third. While Socialcam has that coveted No. 1 spot, its active number of users is now trending down, which might explain why Autodesk offered just $60 million. However, social video apps overall do appear to be rising in popularity and could become a problem for YouTube.

Photo credit: Socialcam

Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning’s new social video startup Airtime launched today with a celebrity-studded event, but no matter how many times Jim Carrey praised the service it was clear that it liberally borrowed the basic idea of Chatroulette and added Facebook to the equation.

But, as you might remember, Chatroulette had a serious “penis problem.” The more random people you connected with, the greater the likelihood that your eyes would be assaulted by the sudden sight of some stranger’s male organ. While Chatroulette gave birth to some great videos, the penis problem essentially killed Chatroulette’s once-big dreams.

So how does Airtime plan to keep its users away from all those pesky penises?

Airtime told VentureBeat that it uses a combination of automated facial recognition technology and user and moderator review. While it didn’t get into specifics, everything points to Airtime’s in-house technology detecting if a face is on-screen and if it does not see a face, a warning light goes up. There are also moderators from Airtime who are constantly looking for inappropriate content and users can flag people too. Airtime is also more than willing to terminate your account and report illegal behavior to the authorities.

Despite that, as BuzzFeed hilariously reports, it is definitely possible to flash someone using Airtime. [Update: Airtime has informed us that people who are Facebook friends with each other do not have their video messages screened, so feel free to send your closest friends pictures of your junk whenever without worry.]

Related: Hands-on with Airtime

Airtime’s biggest guarantee of decency is probably the fact that your Airtime account connects through Facebook, so if you don’t want images of your private parts associated with your Facebook account (like most sane people), you won’t be flashing the random strangers you meet. You could theoretically start a Facebook account just for your male organ (names like “Richard Long” and “Peter Johnson” spring to mind), but you’d have to be pretty dedicated to flashing the Internet.

We asked Airtime to go into more detail on how its technology worked, but a company spokesperson said Airtime doesn’t want to “share too much about the risk scoring to prevent people from circumventing the system.”

That caginess makes us pretty sure that Airtime doesn’t actually have a “penis detection algorithm” to stop flashers from spoiling the service.

To dig a little deeper, we decided to ask Denis Brulé, the CEO of French image-matching startup Moodstacks, if it was possible to create such an algorithm. He said you could theoretically use “color and texture” to create a filter that would detect dangerous images. He said some startups are already tackling this specific problem.

“In France, there are some companies working on porn movie detection,” Brulé said. “The point would be to analyze videos in real-time to prevent porn content from showing up on a screen. This could keep kids safer as they browse the Internet.”

Maybe Airtime should hook up with one of these French startups to keep us safer.

Airtime, the social video chat startup created by Napster founders Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning, unveiled itself today after a long period of poorly-kept secrets and barely-muted hype.

Think of it as a less-icky Chatroulette with a $33 million wind at its back. And today, we finally got to see it in action.

Parker calls Airtime the “best and fastest way to video chat with your friends on any platform.” It’s web-based, so you don’t have to download a separate applications; frictionless, since you can get started immediately without much setup; and perhaps most importantly, it relies on Facebook’s social graph, so it’s connected to identities people are already using online.

At Milk Studios in New York City’s Chelsea neighborhood this morning, Airtime gathered press and notable NYC personalities to officially unveil Airtime.

Late night star Jimmy Fallon first hit the stage to introduce Parker and Fanning, calling them the “Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren of the Internet.” (If you don’t get that reference, watch some 80′s action movies, kids.) Parker told the tale of how they first met online in a chat room and bonded over their interest in hacking and computers.

“We understood the potential,” Fanning said when Fallon asked if they realized how important Napster was at the beginning. But he went on to say that the pair were mostly just having fun by developing the music sharing service.

What the heck is Airtime?

“We’re actually building a network service,” Parker said as he began a presentation explaining Airtime. “This is different from a consumer hardware product or a consumer software product… We’re actually opening up to the world and beginning the process of constructing that network.”

Parker went on to say that despite the massive rise in social media popularity, he can’t help but feel we’ve taken a step back. Many online services have us spending more time processing information than interacting with information, he said.

With rise of both broadband and webcams, Parker says now is the perfect time to pursue true social video chat.

He railed against social games from companies like Zynga that aren’t exactly real-time, but are instead all about taking turns. “There’s all kinds of things people could be doing if there was a platform for synchronous interactions,” Parker said. This seems to be the crux of what Airtime is all about.

Security is a big part of Airtime’s core principles (Parker listed it four times on his slide for emphasis). The service avoids the problems of Chatroulette (inappropriate behavior, indecent exposure) since it’s tied to your Facebook identity. If you’re a bad actor, Airtime can easily kick you off the service. The company also has people monitoring the service for bad behavior.

As for utility, Parker stresses that Airtime is all about making new friends.

“Facebook isn’t helping you make new connections, Facebook doesn’t build new relationships,” he said. “Facebook is just trying to be the most accurate model of your real life social graph.”

When your demo fails, call the celebrities

To demonstrate how Airtime works, Parker called actress Olivia Munn using the service. The call connected quickly, but it may have helped that she was just sitting backstage. Airtime’s interface is fairly simple: your video video is on the left side, the person you’re calling is in the center, and your list of friends is on the right. When the call first connected, Airtime displayed a few related interests (which slowly faded away) and then Parker seamlessly shared a few web videos with her.

Munn came on stage and tried to surprise the audience by calling rapper Snoop Dogg. Her first few tries failed (I think because she was trying to call a Facebook user pretending to be Snoop Dogg), but eventually Snoop himself called. Munn showed off her Snoop impressions, the crowd politely laughed, and we moved on.

Munn then called comedian and actor Joel McHale, who ended up coming onstage instead of chatting over Airtime. Unfortunately, his appearance set off a string of technical errors that halted the demo for several minutes.

“Sean Parker is literally a genius and I love it that he has to pull wires out of the back of the computer to make it work,” McHale quipped as several event staff members tried to get the demo going again. Once things started working, he called actress Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who then came on stage to ring up fellow actor and comedian Ed Helms. (We get it Sean Parker, you have many very important friends.)

Helms called singer Alicia Keys over Airtime, and they were able to successfully chat for several minutes. (Unlike most of the other celebrities, she wasn’t hiding behind the stage.) Helms then tried to call Parker’s Airtime offices, but unfortunately nobody picked up. Eventually, a disheveled Jim Carrey wearing a gas mask successfully called Helms.

“So where do I click to download music… to destroy the music industry,” Carrey quipped while chatting with Parker.

Throughout all of the demos, there were occasional connection and network issues. It’s hard to blame Airtime for all of the trouble, since relying on venue Wi-Fi for demos is often a disaster.

Wrapping Up

Parker capped off the demo with an obligatory video featuring a catchy indie song, which shows the potential for Airtime much better than the on-stage demos.

In the end, it was probably a good thing Parker had a bunch of comedic geniuses to help distract from the buggy demos.

“I can’t actually thank you guys enough,” Parker said to his celebrity crew, the Huffington Post reported, “because you took a completely fucked-up situation where everything was going to shit and actually salvaged it.”

Despite the trouble with the service today, it’s clear to me that Airtime has a lot of potential. Perhaps it’s because there’s a big idea driving Airtime: Technology is here to help us, not to flood us with information. Airtime is the logical evolution of social media technology — it’s something that actually brings us closer together, even with complete strangers thousands of miles away.

Fresh after receiving a vote of confidence from Silicon Valley venture firms and rocketing to fame through Facebook, social video application Viddy is getting the red-carpet treatment from Hollywood.

Singers Shakira and Jay-Z and actor Will Smith join other high-profile entertainment and technology types as investors and partners in the Los Angeles-based company, Viddy announced Monday.

Viddy is the short-and-sweet, shoot-and-share video application for iPhone that has experienced a remarkable uptick in usage and new users since it integrated with Facebook’s Open Graph platform for Timeline and Ticker in February.

The one-year-old company, which surpassed 4.5 million users 11 days ago, now has more than 10 million registered users and is adding 300,000 new users per day. The company partly attributes its recent rapid user growth to its status as the number one free app on Apple’s App Store, a place it’s held for nearly a week.

Now Hollywood has come a-calling. Will Smith’s Overbook Entertainment and Jay-Z’s Roc Nation, along with Shakira, skateboarder Rob Dyrdek, soccer star Gerard Pique, and Skull Candy chairman Jeff Kearl have all invested or partnered with Viddy, the company revealed today. Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, ShoeDazzle founder Brian Lee, and Omniture founder Josh James have also hopped on Viddy’s bandwagon.

In a rather odd move, the startup is not disclosing which of the heavy-hitters are investors and which are merely partners, nor is it going on the record with how much funding it has raised — but the latter we can determine for ourselves.

In Viddy’s Form D, filed Feb. 12, the company indicated that it had sold $5.75 million of a $6 million Series A offering. And a company spokesperson told VentureBeat that, ”This group expressed interest in participation toward the completion of Viddy’s Series A round in February.”

We can deduce then that the new investors pooled together the remaining $250,000 to fill out the round.

As Viddy sits comfortably in the top spot at Apple’s App Store, continues to spread on Facebook, and has the backing of celebrities, we can well ask if the app now has what it takes to achieve Instagram-like success.

Photo credit: Thomas Hawk/Flickr

Social video sharing service Twitvid is launching an update to its website today that will transform it into a full-fledged social network.

Previously, the site was used as little more than a place to upload videos for Twitter and Facebook. Users could refer back to those videos at any time and share them. With the latest update, users can now follow topics, people, or brands that interest them and see a personal feed of video. They can also watch videos from YouTube, Vimeo and Twitvid.

One of the biggest changes to the new version is the ability to easily create, organize and share public or private channels. Each channel operates as its own separate stream of content that gets curated by an individual. All the videos within that channel come from uploads to Twitvid or shared videos from YouTube and Vimeo. There’s even a setting that allows the channel videos to automatically play consecutively, mimicking the functionality of a traditional television channel.

With the number of high-profile accounts on Twitvid, the new functionality has plenty of opportunity to keep people entertained. The site already has celebrity account holders like Justin Bieber, Dane Cook, Tyra Banks, LeBron James as well as politicians Al Gore and John McCain.

As for the future, Twitvid plans to add support for more video services like Hulu and Blip.tv, Twitvid CEO Mo Adham told VentureBeat. He also said the service will gain more social features that will allow people to watch the same videos at the same time.

“When you watch most video channels online with friends, the experience kind of sucks. You can’t actually be in the same room as them so there’s always a disconnect,” Adham said. “We want to change that and make our video channels truly social on another level, too.”

Founded in 2009, Twitvid has over 12 million monthly unique visitors. The startup closed a $7 million round of funding from Azure Capital and Draper Fisher Jurvetson in September 2011.

[Screenshots via Twitvid]

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

As people’s pockets fill with camera-enabled smartphones the rush is on to be the top dog in social video sharing. Palo Alto video startup Klip announced today that it has raised $8 million in a second round of funding,  just two months after launching and raising $2 million.

The money will help Klip solidify its position against competitors such as Socialcam, recently launched by Justin.tv, or tools such as Vimessa, which let users share video messages with friends.

Since launching in September, Klip has consistently ranked as the top social video sharing app in the iTunes App store. The company’s team includes former employees from Apple, YouTube, Yahoo and Google.

“From the start, it’s been amazing to see how people have embraced Klip and the product’s many social features,” said Klip chief executive officer and co-founder Alain Rossmann in a statement. “We look forward to building on the incredible momentum generated over the past two months and driving more innovations in the mobile video market in the years to come.” The company also said that the money will go to fuel future product innovation.

There are expected to be more than 1 billion smart phones on the market by 2016, according to a recent Gartner report from April, which means that if a winner emerges, there’s an enormous potential market.

Benchmark Capital led the funding round and was joined by previous investors including Matrix Partners and co-founder Rossmann.

This will probably resonate if you’ve ever been sent a link to a video that you or a friend appears in, or if you’ve been tagged in a video on Facebook. In fact, Bliss said the idea for the company came from his own experience of being sent a video of a bike race. He shows up briefly in the video, but he said it was “very frustrating” that had to watch minutes of semi-related video to find the relevant portion, since there was no easy way for him to figure out where he actually appeared. (At best, you can include awkward comments when you send a video, like, “Skip to 1:30″.)

The BlipSnips solution: You can tag people, or anything else, at any point in the footage. If your friend appears three minutes into a video, you can tag the spot where they actually show up. Or if the real highlight of the video begins 30 seconds in, you can add a tag to communicate that. The tags also create searchable data, so you can look for all the videos featuring a certain person or location.

The Boulder, Colo. startup’s tagging tools were already available on its website, but today it’s launching an iPhone application (so you can film and tag videos from your phone) and a Facebook app as well (so that you can tag and share videos on the social networking site).

Apparently, Bliss wasn’t the only one who felt there was a need here. Chris Kelly, Facebook’s former chief privacy officer (who launched an unsuccessful bid to win the Democratic Party’s nomination for California Attorney General last year), was the lead investor in BlipSnips’ angel funding, and he’s also an advisor to the company’s board of directors.

“The idea of social photography has existed for many years, but as video grows into such a dominant medium on the web, BlipSnips has brought much of that same social functionality to video for the first time,” Kelly said in a press release.

Bliss said he plans to keep BlipSnips free for consumers and to explore other revenue options like advertising and selling a customized service to businesses. BlipSnips was incubated by TechStars.