Waywire, the hyped video site co-founded by Newark mayor Cory Booker, has released a new version of the service today that borrows plenty of design cues from Pinterest and adds some new functionality.

The service allows you to organize video clips from all over the web into custom “wires,” which essentially function like continuous online video channels. So for example, news videos from CNN, a short political awareness film on Vimeo, and some on the ground videos from YouTube will all play seamlessly within a Waywire channel without the need to advance to each video once its finished. So far, Waywire’s video partners include YouTube, Vimeo, NBC News, ABC, Wall Street Journal, Huffington Post, Buzzfeed, and many more. It’s like a bookmarking site that might actually be useful in replacing your morning or evening routine of watching the news after a meal, and the overall idea is that people can curate the news better than the main stream media, which in turn will abolish the practice of news organizations telling you what’s important everyday.

In version 2.0 of Waywire, users now have the option of adding hashtags to videos, mixing multiple “wires” into a single feed and set the top video thumbnail for each video. You can also pluck out wires you like from someone else and begin curating it on your own. Basically, all of these additions make each Waywire collection more compelling for users to go out and build a solid collection of videos that can be shared with others.

“We’re allowing people to arrange videos into relevant collections so they have context, which is something that a lot of video services can’t really do,” Waywire co-founder Nathan Richardson said in an interview with VentureBeat.

This is a significant jump for Waywire, especially considering the high amount of hype the group obtained early on because of its super-hero mayoral co-founder and all-star lineup of investors, such as Oprah Winfrey, Google chairman Eric Schmidt, music entrepreneur Troy Carter, LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner, Linkedin co-founder Reid Hoffman, and others. With Waywire 2.0, the site starts to take form as more of a platform for curating videos and less of a service that will invoke massive change in the world (aka social good). That’s not to say that Waywire won’t eventually bring change to the world in the same way Twitter has, but it’s yet to prove itself.

Richardson said Waywire users are gaining access to about 40 hours of new video content per day, which is significantly more than the estimated 1.5 hours perday it had access to about two months ago. By access, I mean videos that will seamlessly play on Waywire’s service without having to navigate to the site where the video is hosted to view it. And while the startup didn’t disclose many of its traffic stats, it did say that Waywire users are viewing an average of 13 minutes of content every time they visit.

As for being a platform, Richardson tells me there’s no reason Waywires can’t eventually become a place where music fans end up creating their own curated playlists. To do that effectively, the startup would almost certainly need to forge a partnership with music video king Vevo.

The new Waywire 2.0 also paves the way to advertising models, which include traditional pre- and post-roll video ads, in-player display ads, sponsored wires, and more. I asked co-founder Sarah Ross if the service could eventually mimic a model similar to StumbleUpon’s “Paid Discovery”, where content producers (or really any advertiser) has the option of tossing in their content into someone’s wire. It’s a possibility, but Ross told me “we need to scale much larger to see how our users are interacting with Waywire” before determining newer ways to sell advertising.

Want to find a video of the protests in Syria? There were more than 350,000 uploaded last year to YouTube alone. How do you find the best one?

That’s why Magnify, a New York startup, is betting online publishers will want to help viewers find the “best” videos, and it has built a platform to let them do that. It lets publishers curate videos, using their own judgment about how to order videos — giving them ways to profile certain videos by tagging and other variables, and letting them bury others. Magnify has almost finished raising $1M, as a first tranche of a total $7M planned second round of funding, VentureBeat has learned. Leading the round is Chris Kelly, the former General Counsel and Chief Privacy Officer of Facebook, who also ran for Attorney General of California in 2010.

The company, which until last year had served enterprise, is now focused on serving any publisher of content, including consumer sites. Aside from offering curation tools, Magnify also lets sites aggregate and host content. Take a look at the site of popular event company, TEDx, for example. Not only does Magnify let TEDx pull in all of its videos from YouTube in an organized way, it offers a nice index box on the left to help users find videos according to language, most popular, and so on. It supports the import of videos from almost any other site, including from YouTube.

There are a number of other video curation tools on the market: Vodpod and ShortForm, for example. There are also companies such as Brightcove and Ooyala, which are online video platforms for uploading, encoding and hosting video. While Magnify overlaps with several of these with its features, none of these competitors give offer curation tools to such an open and customized extent, says CEO Steve Rosenbaum. For example, if  a customer site already works with Brightcove, Magnify plays nice and lets the customer import the Brightcove player, but Magnify still manages the site’s video page design and aggregation. Magnify’s other customers include New York Magazine, Vibe.com, USAFootball.com, and the Lincoln Center in New York.

Magnify averaged 7 million video views a month across its customers, and expects to be profitable by the second quarter, Rosenbaum said.
The company will use the funds to invest in its technical team and sales efforts, Rosenbaum said.

Kelly, the former Facebooker, has made several strategic investments in web companies, including in Path in 2010, and more recently Evergram, Well and Galavantier.

In a statement to VentureBeat, Kelly said he thinks Magnify could become a sort of standard for publishers, or a “Wordpress for video curation on the Web.” He continued: ”The combination of human editorial and algorithmic automation is still in its nascent stages. When I saw Magnify.net, I was able for the first time to imagine a world of video content organization that could rival conventional television and cable by providing publishers and brands with the tools to create unique, targeted, contextual video.”

The new financing round represents the first West Coast money in the company, Rosenbaum said. Rosenbaum founded the company in 2006, and the company has since pivoted twice. The company previously raised $2.7 million.

Last year, Rosenbaum was named New York City’s first Entrepreneur In Residence

[Editor’s note: Rosenbaum will join VentureBeat in an invite-only cocktail event in New York City on Feb 20, where we will debate whether New York City will remain the media center of the world, or whether the programmatic ad buying algorithms of Silicon Valley players like Google will take over. If you’re interested in joining us, please contact Shannon Dow with your title and company name.]

Chill lets you curate YouTube and Vimeo videos much the way Turntable.fm lets you curate music.

Although the site is currently down due to an overwhelming response, you can gain access to Chill using Facebook Connect. Once inside, you’ll be prompted to join or start a Lounge (much like Turntable.fm’s DJ rooms) where you can begin to build a unique queue of videos by searching YouTube, Vimeo or entering a URL to a streaming video somewhere on the web. Users take turns playing their videos to those inside the lounge, and those viewing can vote on whether to keep it a video playing or skip it.

Chill’s founders, Dan Gould and Brian Norgard, spun the new video sharing service out of the startup Namesake. The service has received an investment offer from TechCrunch Editor Michael Arrington.

“We’re a small startup obsessed about building something that people really love. Video should be more social, immersive and fun,” Norgard said in a comment on the Chill blog.

The founders said they will begin allowing people to sign up again soon, but at a much slower pace to avoid the site crashing. Until that happens, they’ve posted a user-created video introduction to Chill, which we’ve embedded below.

[Image and Video via MrDocRock]