You’d think Twitter cofounder and Square CEO Jack Dorsey would be a whiz at social media. But his posts to Twitter’s young video-sharing service Vine are a mix of weirdly creepy and just-plain-boring clips.

Vine launched in January and carries an official description in the iOS app store as “the best way to see and share life in motion.” The app appears to have had a profound effect on Dorsey.

Back in late April, Dorsey admitted that he has a hard time simply taking pictures anymore and thinks Vine’s 6-second videos have changed how he sees art. He said: “I think it’s an entirely new art form, and I think it’s amazing — every picture I look at right now, I want it to move; I’m waiting for it to move. Where’s the sound?”

But Dorsey doesn’t appear to know what’s worth capturing in motion, and sometimes he’s being downright creepy.

I’ll be the first admit that I’m not that great at Vine. We all can’t be majestic Vine artists. But I don’t post Vines often, and I certainly don’t spam my Twitter followers with Vine videos because I’m bored.

For example, just today Dorsey has posted three relatively dull Vines from the same plane window:

A cursory look through Dorsey’s other Vine videos isn’t much better. Often he takes Vines where a picture would have been sufficient. Instead of a snapshot of a moment, we’re subjected to 6 seconds of some ho-hum event.

Here’s Dorsey standing in a line:

Here’s Dorsey showing off the “energy” of the Square NY office:

Here’s Dorsey looking at a street in Manhattan:

Here’s Dorsey looking at some “street art”:

Here’s Dorsey in a cab:

And then there are these creepy Vines, where Dorsey looks into the camera and captures other people behind him:

Occasionally, Dorsey does use Vine in a way that goes with the spirit of the service.

It’d be nice to see Dorsey post more Vines like these. We’re wishing you luck, Jack.

Top screenshot via Jack Dorsey/Vine

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Expect to see short, repeating videos all over the place now — the Twitter-owned firm announced today that you can now embed any Vine video on the web.

It’s a small update, but it opens up the Vine ecosystem in a dramatic way. Instead of being limited to the Vine app, Twitter posts, and standalone Vine web pages, you can now share the videos on your blogs and websites as well.

You can embed any publicly available Vine video use the button at the bottom of their Vine page, or via the “…” button in the Vine app. Embeds are available in a “Simple” style with no border, and a more traditional “Postcard” style. (Ironically, WordPress VIP doesn’t allow us to embed Vine videos just yet.)

“When we launched Vine, we described posts as ‘little windows into the people, settings, ideas and objects that make up your life,’” wrote Vine co-founder and general manager Dom Hofmann. “With today’s update, you can display them almost anywhere.”

Basically, if you thought Vine’s short videos resembled animated GIFs before, prepare to feel vindicated.

Twitter-owned video sharing application Vine has raised its age rating from 12+ to 17+ following controversy surrounding pornographic clips shared widely on the service.

Vine is one of the hottest new video-sharing applications, and its quick rise in just a few weeks led to the ouster of rival app Viddy’s CEO. But Vine has had a problem with users submitting easily searchable clips of porn, which was highlighted when someone at Vine accidentally placed a hardcore porn clip to the top of every user’s feed. Twitter responded to that incident by making Vine porn harder to find.

But it looks like that wasn’t enough to please Twitter (and perhaps Apple, who has blocked certain iOS apps for making risqué images and videos available). Now Vine has been bumped up to a 17+ age rating, likely to make sure parents will know questionable content can be found on the service. When you download or update the app, it now warns that the app contains “age-restricted material” and says you need to be 17 or over to download it.

On top of bumping up the age rating, the latest Vine update adds sharing to Twitter or Facebook after you post to Vine. The update also lets users report or block an abusive profile and fixes bugs.

Check out some recent Vine videos below to get a feel for the uses of the service besides porn:

Time for a little Puppy Bowl action. vine.co/v/b106vu7w5jV

— Sean Ludwig (@seanludwig) February 4, 2013

Get off my pier. vine.co/v/bnB7WUW3XUv

— Buster Heine (@BST3R) February 4, 2013

Top image via Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat
Thumbnail image of sexy couple via lenetstan/Shutterstock

Viddy CEO and cofounder Brett O’Brien has been ousted from his role as head of the company after losing much of its buzz to Twitter-owned Vine and reportedly turning down an insane buyout offer from Twitter.

First reported by PandoDaily, this story is a surprising and sad one. Video-sharing app Viddy attracted $30 million in funding in May because it had 30 million users and was growing quickly. By December, the service was still chugging along but with less momentum, so it finally released an Android app.

But the game for social video changed when Vine launched a few weeks ago. You use that service to share six seconds of video, and you can cleverly piece together these videos to tell stories or do other creative things. (I posted a Vine about the Puppy Bowl during the Super Bowl blackout last weekend.)

But Viddy could’ve potentially been where Vine is if it had accepted an offer from Twitter. PandoDaily reports that it was a “high eight- to low nine-figure acquisition offer.” Battery Ventures general partner and Viddy board member Brian O’Malley told Pando that that offer never happened.

But if the offer did happen, it’s a little crazy to consider that O’Brien turned that down, and a decline of that sort of offer could explain O’Brien’s ouster. Perhaps he thought Viddy was going to be the true “Instagram for video” app that would eventually own the landscape. Arguably, that title may now be Vine’s, but its porn problems could hurt that perception.

Now Viddy is left with “4 to 5 million uniques a month,” which is down from its high of more than 30 million, and facing strong competition from Vine. It will need to do some magic to return to the spotlight.

O’Malley indicated that version 2.0 of Viddy will launch in the next few weeks. Viddy also circulated a statement that it is conducting a search for a CEO.

But will that be enough to turn it around?

Updated at 7:38 a.m. Pacific with comment from Twitter.

Users of the popular video-sharing app Vine got a surprise this morning when a short clip of hardcore pornography appeared as an “editor’s pick” and placed at the top of every user’s feed.

Twitter launched Vine last week, and the new video app has attracted a lot of fans among the tech-enthusiast crowd. But since the service easily allows porn clips to be shared and found, some are wondering if Apple will take down the service; Apple has a history of removing apps that give access to adult material. Vine’s video slip-up today certainly won’t help matters.

As you can see in the picture above, a video titled “Dildoplay” with the tags #nsfw, #porn, and #nsfwvine was selected as an editor’s pick. Vine selects editor’s pick videos and places them in users’ activity streams presumably to show off the most creative uses of the service.

The video was up for a few hours, but it has since been removed from users’ feeds. Twitter blamed “human error” for the posting of adult content.

“A human error resulted in a video with adult content becoming one of the videos in Editor’s Picks, and upon realizing this mistake we removed the video immediately,” a Twitter spokesperson told VentureBeat via email. “We apologize to our users for the error.”

While the video did not play unless you tapped it, users were not happy about the prominent placement of porn in their feeds today.

Some choice comments from Vine users:

Taylor Winklemeyer: “I clicked on the video bc I thought the warning was a joke. I’m furious I had to see something like this.”

Brendan Wilhide: “First video I see after installing the app. How is this an editor’s pick?”

Curt Voice Allen: “This is garbage man! This should not be the first thing I see when I open this app. UNSUBSCRIBE ME PLEASE!!!”

Alessandro Melandri: “You must be crazy! Editor’s pick?!? Deleting the app now.”

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.

Vilynx is a service that lets people manage their personal videos across multiple smartphones, tablets, desktops, and cloud storage services. It works off the premise that people are currently storing those videos wherever its convenient but don’t have a way to survey and share them all in one centralized spot.

“We were struggling with how to manage all the personal videos we were collecting,” said Vilynx founder Hendrik van der Meer about why the startup chose to fix this problem. “There was nothing more important to us than our family’s memories and we wanted to be able to preserve them forever.”

There are plenty of cloud-based services (Box, DropBox, Google Drive, etc.) that allow people to upload their videos, but Hendrik explains that Vilynx differs because it doesn’t treat these videos as a collection of files. It also allows for easier sharing of videos than YouTube, because Vilynx isn’t also serving billions of publicly available video clips from millions of users.

The service works by allowing you to upload videos through its iOS application. Each video is then given a five-second preview clip (which you can identify specifically based on a few options) and made available to share via Facebook, YouTube, Email, or within the Vilynx app itself. The advantage of uploading video to Vilynx before other social networks, according to the company, is the added degree of sharing control the service offers.

“Posting short video summaries encourage people to watch your whole video,” van de Meer explained on stage at DEMO. “ Sending a URL or a big ol’ file is not the most compelling way to get people to look at your content.”

As with film trailers, the gist of a longer film is conveyable in a short clip which makes them easier to manage, as well as share.

“The idea of simplifying a two minute video of my daughter running around in the five seconds I want to share out would be great,” said Josh Elman of Greylock Partners during the social Sage Panel.

Vilynx is one of a handful of companies concentrating on managing personal videos, and faces competition from Boxee’s new Cloudee service as well as the new stream sharing functionality in Apple’s iOS 6.

Founded in July 2011, the San Francisco, Calif.-based startup has raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding. The company plans to release an Android version of its mobile app in the near future. Check out a demo video of Vilynx below for a closer look at the service.

Vilynx is one of over 75 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Fall 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

Popular video-sharing service Vimeo has introduced new ways to reward the creators of videos posted on the site, with the ability to put videos behind a paywall and a new “tip jar” so people can contribute to video artists.

Vimeo has made a lot of big steps in 2012, and the site currently claims to attract 75 million monthly unique visitors. Thus far, the company brought in new CEO, redesigned its main site, launched a wide array of apps to bring in more mobile users, and integrated with Dropbox. Now Vimeo wants to give its deep community ways to make money using the service.

First up, it will immediately offer a “tip jar” on all videos so viewers can throw a little cash at the creators they love. Vimeo will pay 85 percent of the gross revenue to video creators.

The paywall situation is a little more complex. In the first quarter of 2013, Vimeo will offer a “pay-to-view” platform to Vimeo Pro subscribers that want to make money showing films and episodes. It will be a flexible platform that allows creators to set control over the price, rental duration, and other settings. The company will take a cut of each transaction, but it is still figuring out what that cut should be.

“We’ve wanted to offer this for a long time,” Vimeo CEO Kerry Trainor told me. “We don’t know how big this will be, but we’re excited to see what it becomes.”

Offering a paywall for videos is a big step for IAC-owned company. It represents a way for Vimeo to attract more Pro subscribers and earn more revenue on taking a cut of a video or film rental. The company’s largest revenue generator is subscriptions, second is advertising, and third is transactions. Ideally, this could bump up how much money it gets from transactions and boost subscriptions. “We’re bullish on the growth of our subscription service,” Trainor said.

As for advertising, Trainor told me the company is looking into new ideas for ads as well. One way the company made some cash recently was by partnering with Old Spice and Wieden + Kennedy to bring a crazy interactive ad starring Terry Crews to life. It will continue to explore its options like this. Trainor said the company would have other announcements this year, so we’ll see if new ad products come into play.

Check out the video below for more on video monetization.

Photo credit: Vimeo

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

Popular video-sharing site Vimeo has launched a new Enhancer tool that makes it possible to seamlessly add more than 50,000 music tracks from the Vimeo Music Store directly to online videos, the company announced today.

Vimeo has always focused on bringing the highest-quality experience to online videos and its emphasis on quality separates itself from YouTube. Now, with the Enhancer tool and a new partnership, Vimeo builds on that reputation by making it easier to add a soundtrack to an already uploaded video, change audio levels, and change the start and end times of a track.

The company also has added a new music partner with SmartSound that will let users add about 4,000 customizable tracks to their videos. The offering is unique in that you can do a lot to change the mood of SmartSound track, including speed it up, slow it down, or change the musical arrangement. SmartSound tracks cost $1.99 per track for a personal use license and $19.99 per track for a commercial license.

Check out the video below for a quick look at Enhancer:

Oh, boyfriend. Pop superstar Justin Bieber has joined video-sharing sensation Viddy.

The “Boyfriend” singer took a mini break from promoting his coming-soon album “Believe” on Twitter to solicit a little Viddy love from his almost 22 million Twitter followers — and give back a little something with footage of himself shirtless at a photo shoot.

Viddy is the Los Angeles-based startup that makes an iPhone application for shooting 15-second clips that can be enhanced through “production packs,” otherwise known as video effects. The service, which has more than 27 million users, is often likened to Instagram for its ease of use and simple sharing tools. The company just announced a massive $30 million funding round.

“Photoshoot was….well u will see. #viddy #abouttogoIN,” Bieber tweeted Tuesday afternoon. “Follow me on @viddy – @justinbieber,” he added.

Just a few minutes later, the teen heart-throb posted his first Viddy — an update of himself shirtless (we’ve confirmed that “justinbieber” is his official account). Clearly, the Biebs knows what the ladies like. The account added more than 3,000 followers in the first few minutes following Bieber’s tweets, and the viddy is racking up comments and likes as we speak.

The Biebs joins a growing cadre of celebrity Viddy users — some of whom have actually decided to invest — sharing stylized quickie vids with their fans. Viddy celeb members include Bill Cosby, Rihanna, Snoop Dog, Terrell Owens, and newbie Katie Couric. Even Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently got in on the Viddy action.

Viddy has more than 27 million registered users, and is adding 500,000 new users per day. It feels like it wasn’t that long ago when the startup first announced hitting 10 million users — oh wait, it wasn’t. In fact, just a little over two weeks ago the service touted the 10 million milestone. Today, that seems like small potatoes.

With Bieber on board, who knows what crazy member-milestone the company will surpass next.

Photo credit: Justin Bieber/Instagram

Smoking-hot mobile video-sharing startup Viddy has closed a $30 million financing round and is fast-approaching 30 million registered users.

If you’ve taken a two-month hiatus from the Internet, then you’ve most certainly missed Viddy’s overnight comeuppance. The one-year-old company makes an iPhone-only application for shooting 15-second clips that can be enhanced through video effects called “production packs.” In just over two weeks, Viddy has rocketed from 10 million registered users to more than 27 million and is adding 500,000 new folks to the fold each day.

The company secured its newest millions from NEA, Goldman Sachs, Khosla Ventures, and Battery Ventures, Viddy CEO and co-founder Brett O’Brien told VentureBeat. It plans to use the cash pile to hire more engineering talent, push out products more aggressively, expand internationally, and spend on scaling growth.

Today’s announcement confirms whispers that were circulating about a looming round. The startup wouldn’t go on the record with a valuation, but earlier reports pegged its post-money valuation at between $300 million and $370 million.

“We have a big vision, big ambitions,” O’Brien said of the company’s big round, which only trails its first $6 million round by three months. “And to accomplish … those things more quickly, and manage growth, it made sense to take on additional partners.”

Additional partners is right. Viddy, basking in the limelight, has attracted a “who’s who” list of celebrity and technology investors, partners, and members. Biz Stone, Shakira, Will Smith, and Jay-Z are all backing the company in some form. And on the user front, A-listers such as Rihanna, Snoop Dogg, Katie Couric, and Mark Zuckerberg are all Viddy-ographers.

“Personal video sharing is clearly an enormous opportunity and we think Viddy is positioned to be the breakaway leader,” NEA general partner Pete Sonsini said in a statement to VentureBeat. “Viddy has tremendous momentum and a growing, engaged community generating original content, a major differentiator, and we’re excited to partner with the Viddy team.”

O’Brien spoke of the proliferation of smartphones, continual enhancements to mobile phone cameras, and the rise of 4G networks as converging factors helping Viddy succeed. He said the startup’s almost unbelievable user growth is due to four factors: a great product, celebrity users, integration with Facebook, and constant placement atop Apple’s App Store charts. Of course, he added, it doesn’t hurt that people already know Instagram, which makes the Viddy experience feel familiar to new users.

“Our goal is to entertain and connect people around the world through mobile,” he said. “There’s an extraordinary opportunity for us to … enable consumers to take videos worth sharing.”

With video-shooting and sharing still restricted to iPhone users, the company believes its rapid growth is sustainable as it moves to other platforms. Viddy, O’Brien said, has a working prototype of an Android release, though he isn’t ready to discuss launch timing.

As noted above, Viddy’s service and success closely parallels that of Instagram, which was snatched up by Facebook’s Zuckerberg for about a $1 billion in cash and stock shortly after hitting 30 million users and launching on Android. Will Viddy follow in Instagram’s footsteps here too? Nope, not happening, O’Brien said.

“We’re focused on building an extraordinary company independent of anyone else’s interest,” O’Brien said.

“So you wouldn’t sell to Facebook if Zuck offered you a $1 billion?,” I countered.

“That’s not what we’re interested in right now,” O’Brien said. “We’d just like to stay focused and continue to execute.”

We’ll see about that.

While everyone is trying to predict which video sharing app will be the true “Instagram for video,” the massive surge in popularity for video apps could also become a problem for the online video mainstay YouTube.

As consumers move towards mobile video apps like Viddy and Socialcam for viewing and sharing content, their time spent on YouTube seems to be decreasing, according to the latest report from the mobile analytics firm Flurry.

The company found that between December 2011 and March 2012, mobile video app usage jumped 52 percent from 152 minutes a month to 231 minutes (see chart below). Meanwhile, video usage from Google’s sites (mostly consisting of YouTube), actually fell 10 percent.

“While it cannot be concluded that mobile video apps are cannibalizing YouTube, the shift in time spent between these two platforms appears to be a signal of disruption,” writes Flurry marketing VP Peter Farago. “Think of it this way: With every mobile video you share of friends, family, vacations, parties and weddings, you are likely loading another bullet in the chamber for Web 3.0.”

Now that smartphones can shoot video in crystal clear 1080p HD, and 4G networks make it relatively painless to share and view large video files, it makes sense for online video watching habits to change. It’s still too early to tell how much of an impact apps like Viddy and SocialCam are having, but it definitely seems like we’re at a significant breaking point.

Flurry, not surprisingly, found that photo and video apps were among the fastest growing between October and March, jumping 89 percent in time spent per active user. Music apps were second-place with a 72 percent increase, and productivity apps saw a 66 percent jump. Time spent in photo and video apps has grown steadily over the past nine months, going from just 87 minutes a month last July to 231 minutes in March 2012.

Google could certainly turn around and come up with a compelling way to reposition YouTube to better compete against the likes of Viddy. But the company has its fingers in many pots at this point, and it’s going to be tough for the search giant to compete with nimble startups. Viddy, for example, is growing like crazy thanks to plenty of buzz and celebrity support, and it’s reportedly valued around $300 million.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Color me crazy, but serial entrepreneur and quixotic Silicon Valley character Bill Nguyen could be on to something big. A partnership announced today between his flagging startup Color and prominent wireless carrier Verizon is, at the very least, no small feat.

Color is the seemingly cursed, $41 million-backed Palo Alto company that makes an iPhone and Android app for broadcasting 30-second live clips to friends on Facebook. The app is yoked to Facebook’s Open Graph, but Color is reaping none of the member and engagement benefits counterparts Viddy and Socialcam are getting from the relationship. In fact, with roughly one million users, Color looks like a dud.

But counting out Nguyen would be a million dollar mistake. Nguyen was previously the founder of Lala, the before-its-time cloud music-streaming service that sold to Apple for around $80 million, and Onebox, which was acquired for $850 million in 1999 by Phone.com.

Today’s multi-year Verizon deal is the start of a comeback story arc for Color, as Nguyen sees it. Verizon, which touts the largest 4G LTE network in the U.S. and has 93 million retail customers, is breaking out the crayons, betting big on the application by making it a native part of all the mobile devices it sells.

Starting Monday, Verizon customers will get access to a special version of the application that allows higher quality video recording and live streaming over the carrier’s 4G network, and adds audio into the mix for the first time.

The partnership means that the Color app can rely on a Verizon device’s hardware and the carrier’s network for encoding a higher quality video at double the frame rate. For the user, that translates to live videos that are closer to being as rich in color as they are in real life. For Nguyen, it means he’s one step closer to building the live video app of the future.

The quality is now high enough that a Color video is good enough to rival a status update or a tweet in terms of content, Nguyen said. “You used to have to sacrifice quality to have a shared moment … but you don’t have to make compromises any more. You don’t have to sacrifice video quality for a live experience.”

Nguyen is a quirky idea man with just the right mix of genius and eccentricity needed to believe that he can see the future. In his corner of the world, the future is live, high-quality, unedited video experienced in the moment, and enjoyed in a variety of formats after the fact.

“Once you have HD, you don’t go back,” Nguyen said, likening the new Color app and its future iterations to high-definition television sets. Eventually, Color will win over people with an experience so great that they’ll say, “I can’t believe I’ve lived without this,” Nguyen added.

Vision and pedigree aside, you would be right to be skeptical, to second guess Nguyen, Color, and the notion of live video as the future in mobile. Color version one, the iPhone-only, photo proximity version of the app, flopped so forcefully you could nearly feel the impact of the crash. Round two has fared a little better. Members share, on average, four to eight videos per month, Nguyen said — that’s not the home run his investors are still anxiously awaiting.

“Investors … would want to see more success from us at this point. That’s understandable. They put a lot of capital in; they want to see momentum,” Nguyen admitted. “But I don’t think I’ll ever try to do something just to get adoption — versus trying to do something that I think is cool and hard.”

And what about all that cash, you ask? Fair question. Color raised $41 million in funding prior to its launch, a sizable sum of money that put a giant target on the startup’s back. Now, even after releasing one poorly received app, spending months working to perfect one unproven app, hiring aggressively (Color has a 50-person staff that will soon double in size), and living large in an expansive Palo Alto office, Color has plenty of time to find its identify and an audience. The startup has five to six years of runway left, Nguyen told me.

Let’s not forget the competition. Viddy and Socialcam, two apps for uploading recorded video clips, are performing remarkably well after hooking into Facebook’s Open Graph. Nguyen had colorful words to describe their recent successes and why his app is better.

“A lot of those guys gave up 20 percent of their companies for celebrity endorsements,” he said. “I’m never going to pay someone to use a product … we’ll beat [their] numbers, but we’re going to do it with technology they can’t touch.”

Those are fighting words. Here are some more: “I get to the big numbers,” Nguyen said with unabashed confidence, “but they usually happen over night.”

Investors, naysayers, and yours truly will all be watching for that night.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has made his mark on the fast-growing video sharing startup Viddy, after signing up for the service and sharing a video of his dog. The move has tech watchers eyeing many comparisons to Viddy and just-purchased Instagram.

After launching its own Facebook Timeline app, social video sharing startup Viddy began to grow at a startling fast rate, eventually adding 5.5 million users in 11 days. Viddy’s successful tie-in to Timeline has prompted other services to launch Timeline apps, including Magisto and Ustream. But Viddy’s success is unparalleled in user growth and with Zuckerberg’s sign up attracting attention, expect many more people to sign up.

Zuckerberg’s first and only post on Viddy is a 15-second clip of his dog Beast playing. It’s not a terribly surprising or exciting video, but when the CEO of one of the hottest companies on the planet posts a clip, people take notice. And hey, who doesn’t like cute animal videos?

Viddy is rumored to be raising a new $30 million round at a potential $300 million valuation. The comparisons to Instagram are natural, as that company focuses on photo sharing (rather than video sharing) and was just bought by Facebook for $1 billion. Since the announcement of the Facebook buy, Instagram has surpassed 40 million users.

Facebook's Sam Lessin using Viddy

Hang on to your seats, kids. An application for shooting and sharing pretty little videos is rocketing through Facebook and picking up new users at whirlwind speed.

Social video app Viddy added 300,000 new users yesterday, bringing its total to more than 4.5 million, the Los Angeles-based company told VentureBeat.

“Following the launch of Viddy’s Facebook Timeline app two months ago, we have seen significant growth in web-based usership, and just yesterday [we] surpassed 300,000 sign-ups in less than a 24-hour period, a new record on our one-year anniversary,” co-founder and CEO Brett O’Brien told VentureBeat.

Viddy, one of several video apps vying to reach Instagram-type celebrity with mobile phone owners, offers iPhone users a simple way to shoot, edit, and share video clips. The application has shot up Apple’s App Store charts and currently holds the number nine spot on the top free apps list. It’s also the number two free photo/video app, second only to Instagram.

“Just over a year ago we saw a huge opportunity to help people create, edit, and share videos using the capabilities of smartphones,” O’Brien said. “Then the success of Instagram really got a lot of people thinking about how they could not just make photos more beautiful, but video too. This is how a lot of people found Viddy, we were already there when Instagram really took off.”

But as sexy and sparkly as the Viddy iPhone app is, it owes much of its newfound success to Facebook. The startup enmeshed itself within Facebook’s Open Graph platform two months ago, fully integrating its app with Timeline and Ticker to allow for more seamless sharing, and it’s come out a big winner.

More than 1.7 million people have navigated over from the social network to join Viddy since February, and the startup is now signing up an average of 150,000 new users per day. It has also tabulated well over 15 million interactions with Viddy content on Facebook for the same period.

You’ve heard variations of this “Timeline bump” story before. Viddy joins a smattering of startups and app makers who have seen remarkable — dare I say, mind-blowing — returns following their integration with Facebook’s Open Graph.

In February, one-year-old Viddy closed a $6 million round of funding for a total of $8.2 million to date. From the looks of things, it was money well spent.

Screw those stupid cat videos; Slashdot TV has arrived, and it might actually make you smarter.

While most video aggregators these days lean heavily in favor of the cute, the bizarre, and the clickbait-y, Slashdot TV lives up to the site’s “news for nerds” tagline. On the front page of the new property, we see fascinating car tech, Linux running on a TV, and our good buddy Bre Petis demonstrating his newest Maker Bot 3D printer. Can you imagine a Beowulf cluster of those?

Of course, like any good aggregator, Slashdot TV will feature tabs for popular and recent clips, but it also has the lovingly curated Editor’s Picks section. The site divides vids into handy categories, such as Linux, science, and security, and it includes content from SourceForce and Think Geek, which share a parent company with Slashdot.

In a post about the new hotness, the editors write, “You may have noticed that we’ve posted quite a few original videos on Slashdot in the past few months. Rather than being the work of a few rogue editors with newly-acquired Christmas cameras, this was part of the groundwork for a new site we’re launching today. SlashdotTV.”

Videos are embeddable (except on WordPress, unfortunately) and shareable via the usual social sites. A commenting system should be coming soon, as well. And yes, the site does include some preroll advertising. They gotta pay the bills too, y’all.

Slashdot was founded in 1997 by Rob “CmdrTaco” Malda, currently of the Washington Post. The site is owned by GeekNet, and its current editors are Jeff “Soulskill” Boehm, Clinton “unknown lamer” Ebadi, Timothy Lord, and Rob “Samzenpus” Rozeboom.

Image based on photo by Alterov, Shutterstock

If you’ve been to a wedding in the last 15 years, you probably saw disposable cameras on each table so guests could take pictures that the happy couple would later develop. In this iPhone-and-Instagram-filled world, that practice is becoming outdated, and people are just snapping pictures to put on Facebook or Twitter. Kaptur is hoping to wrangle all those digital pictures together so you can hold onto them forever, just like the days of printed photos.

Kaptur’s president Tejpaul Bhatia got the idea for the company after his own wedding. He and his wife were frustrated that pictures and videos of their celebration were scattered across Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube. Along with Kaptur’s now chief technical officer Vikash Mishra, Bhatia decided to build an algorithm to search Facebook to find pictures that his friends had shared and wound up finding 4,000 pictures of his wedding, most of which he hadn’t seen before.

Bhatia and Mishra decided to turn the idea into a business and launched Kaptur in 2011. The service works as a Facebook app and collects photos, videos, and statuses that correspond to a special event, such as a wedding, baby shower, or vacation. Once you connect your Facebook account, you can view all of your friends’ photos. Kaptur uses Facebook album names, photo captions, and people tags to collect pictures that relate to one specific event. When you click on individual pictures, Kaptur uses its algorithm to search for similar photos and create your Kaptur album, which can be edited and shared. I was able to go into my boyfriend’s “tagged pictures” album, click on one specific image and find the all the photos from a party we both attended.

Similar products are out there, focused on creating group albums and collecting pictures. DropEvent, for example, lets you create an event-specific group album where you friends and family can upload pictures they take. Hipstamatic Disposable is a more quirky concept with a similar idea to Kaptur. The iPhone app creates a digital disposable camera roll that can be shared among friends once the roll is complete.

Kaptur will use its funding to market the company in the wedding industry and develop mobile applications.

Kaptur was founded in 2011 and is based in Manhattan. Angel investors Archie Cox, Deb Meijer, John Quigley, and Prakash Mishra, and investment firm Green Hat Partners participated in this funding round. The company has eight employees.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Popular video sharing site Vimeo has launched slick new mobile apps for Android and Windows Phone 7 devices. The company is also showing off its upcoming revamped iPhone app and brand-new iPad app at the Consumer Electronics Show this week in Las Vegas.

Vimeo’s launch of the apps at CES 2012 shows the company is getting much more serious about mobile. Joe Schmitt, Vimeo’s head of mobile, told us that the percentage of mobile-based site traffic has doubled in the last year. He said Vimeo’s total traffic coming from mobile was at 7 percent in Jan. 2010 and that now sits at 15 percent.

The company previously just had an iPhone app and a mobile site for other smartphones, and while that’s a good start, it’s not enough. Native apps almost always provide the best possible experience on a smartphone or tablet versus HTML5-based mobile sites. Thankfully that’s not a problem any longer with the new Android app (which is optimized for smartphones and tablets) and a new Windows Phone 7 app. Both of those apps are available to download now from the Android Market and Windows Phone Marketplace, respectively.

Vimeo also designed its Android tablet app so it will be available through Amazon’s Android Appstore, which means it will work for the seemingly popular Kindle Fire. The Fire may already be the number 2 tablet after the iPad in the U.S. and likely cut into iPad sales this past holiday season, so it’s a smart move for Vimeo to target that device as well.

On the iOS front, an updated iPhone app and brand-new iPad app are on the way. The iPad app is especially important because that device is tailor-made for media consumption. Schmitt expects they will be ready for release by the end of January.

Vimeo has been owned by IAC, which also owns companies like Match.com and The Daily Beast, since August 2006. The company doesn’t reveal subscriber numbers, but it has more than 8 million registered users. It attracts 58 million unique users per month, and that doesn’t include embedded views across the web.

A gallery of the new and updated apps can be viewed below:

Vimeo’s revenue comes from a combination of advertising and paid subscriptions, so the company is always looking for new ways to make its subscriptions a high value. The Perks program is purely a play to keep the company’s Pro and Plus subscribers satisfied and to attract new ones; the company will earn no money from it. A Vimeo Plus subscription costs $59.95 a year and gives users 5GB of a video storage, while a Pro subscription costs $199 a year and gives users 50GB of storage.

To make Perks work, Vimeo has partnered with B&H Photo, Kessler Crane, Red Giant Software, Letus Direct and GarageCUBE to give users discounts on cameras, software and video accessories. There’s also specific packages and bundles available that can bring the cost down further.

“The value is really appealing to our users because the cost of a subscription can be paid for with a Perks discount,” Blake Whitman, Vimeo’s VP of Creative Development told VentureBeat. “This encourages anyone who is serious about making video and lets them see the value in a Vimeo subscription.”

Whitman says the Perks program is just “phase one” and will continue to add vendors as it grows. But he also noted that the list will remain tightly knit with retailers the company trusts and feels comfortable recommending to its discerning users.

“By offering a curated list, we can help people decide what equipment could be the best fit,” Whitman said. “We don’t want to offer everything under the sun, just the best equipment for our users.”

Vimeo has been owned by IAC, which also owns companies like Match.com and The Daily Beast, since August 2006. The company doesn’t reveal subscriber numbers, but Vimeo does currently have 8.7 million registered users. On top of that, it attracts 58 million unique users per month, and that doesn’t include embedded views across the web.

YouTube appears to be adding a lot of new free tools in the hopes that it will improve the general quality of clips on the service. Just a week after adding the ability to do basic video editing inside YouTube itself, the service is pushing for more through partnerships with Vlix, for adding effects and text, and Magisto for automating the video editing process altogether.

A YouTube-Magisto partnership makes good sense, as Magisto’s free service automates the video editing process for newbies. Users submit video clips and Magisto does the work of cutting a short video in an interesting fashion. Magisto scans the clips for noteworthy action and packages it with tricks like transitions and split-screens. Then users give the video a title and pick a soundtrack, and the video is ready to go. The option to use Magisto appears on YouTube’s “Create” page as well as during the video uploading process.

YouTube also upped the ante for what users can do with the service by letting verified users upload videos longer than 15 minutes and letting users convert 2D videos to 3D. To become a “verified user” you have to give your phone number to YouTube. To use the 3D beta feature, you have to do so at the end of the uploading process by selecting “Edit Info”, then “3D Video” on the clip you’ve uploaded.

What do you think about YouTube’s new features? Have you tried Magisto’s editing yet?

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Cloud video editing service Magisto on Tuesday announced it has received $5.5 million in second-round funding, with the intention of automating the painstaking editing process for the masses.

“Video editing is not just challenging — for 99 percent of people, it’s a barrier,” Magisto CEO Oren Boiman told VentureBeat. “We’re the first company to make automated video editing into an easy-to-use service.”

The funding round was led by superstar Hong Kong investor Li Ka-shing‘s Horizon Ventures, along with participation from Magma Venture Partners. Magma originally funded Magisto’s first round with undisclosed terms.

“We think of Li Ka-shing’s investment as more than just venture capital,” Boiman said. “It opens doors and positions us in such a way that we could be integrated into other services.”

Magisto’s free (for now) service automates the video editing process for newbies, making it possible for people to submit video clips to the service and let it do the work of cutting the video in an interesting fashion. Magisto scans the clips for noteworthy action and packages it with tricks like transitions and split-screens. Then users simply give the video a title and pick a soundtrack, and the video is ready to share on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or e-mail.

“You don’t want to share a video, you want to share an event,” Boiman said. “We turn your video into something that isn’t boring.”

Videos on Magisto are edited down to under two minutes. Eventually, Boiman said, Magisto will offer a premium paid version that allows for longer clips. The premium version will also remove Magisto’s branding, allow for video downloading and give the user the ability to tweak the video if they choose.

The service has had 20,00 users in its closed beta that started in April. Boiman said the response has been extremely positive and he sees users creating an always-accessible clip library of personal events. Even if users don’t widely share a clip, they can come back to the Magisto library to access their clips.

Cloud video editing appears to be a hot topic this year. Cloud video editor WeVideo also launched recently with a full video-editing suite in the cloud. WeVideo was one of the most promising and talked about companies from the DEMO Fall 2011 conference.

When it comes to Magisto, we’ll have to see how it evolves. After watching quite a few Magisto videos, I believe the service can do good things for share-worthy clips. The only problem? Not all videos are actually that interesting. For example, a skateboarding video with a not-so-great boarder isn’t fun to watch even with editing tricks.

So while Magisto won’t necessarily make your boring video magical, it can help you make a memorable video ready to share in a short amount of time. One of the better Magisto-made clips I’ve viewed can be seen below:

At a time when online viewers are fickle with their attention and video providers are burdened with finding ways to monetize that attention, this is the latest in a slew of video advertising experiments.

When an ad begins playing, a countdown timer will appear for five seconds, after which time the viewer may press a button on the top-right to skip the ad. If they choose to skip an ad, they’ll be jumped to their content — no questions asked. Alternatively, the advertiser can present the viewer with a choice of ads and let them choose the one to watch, a technique that has been used by competitor Hulu for some time.

The idea of a skippable ad may sound counter-intuitive at a time when the lack of a TiVo-like fastforward button on the Internet is seen as a holy grail for advertisers, but YouTube will only be asking advertisers to pay for ad views in which the viewer doesn’t skip the ad. Which means they’ll only be paying for potentially interested ad viewers who are more likely interested in their product.

Last year, YouTube found in an experiment that as many as 70% of viewers abandon videos when confronted with a long pre-roll ad. So, the idea of a skippable ad, even if it doesn’t lead to an ad sale for YouTube or impression for the advertiser, will at the very least work toward ensuring another viewer isn’t abandoning the video sharing site.

Worth noting is that YouTube is only offering the TrueView choice to advertisers, who can still choose to use the traditional ad format. While there are only a handful of videos that are currently making use of TrueView, the number is likely to grow as more advertisers begin experimenting with the format.

The Lexington, Mass. company offers “video sharing for the average business user, not someone in IT,” said Christopher Savage, co-founder and chief executive of the three-and-a-half-year-old company.

But Wistia’s business model is more than just uploading a video and sending someone a link to it, Savage said. Its software-as-a-service product gives customers the option of selectively sharing videos with certain people while not making it available on the public Internet. If someone wants to selectively share a video, a customer can invite people to view it on Wistia’s website after entering a username and password.

Wistia also offers highly detailed analytical tools so customers can determine how many people watched the video, how many minutes of the video they watched and other information, he said.

Other companies in the video-for-business industry include Fliqz, Brightcove, and Ooyala, Savage said, but he emphasized Wistia selective sharing and analytical tools.

Among Wistia’s more than 200 customers are the commercial real estate firm Cushman & Wakefield, textbook publisher Pearso,n and the acrobatic troupe Cirque du Soleil. They use it to distribute product demonstrations, customer testimonials, training videos and replay of webinars for people who couldn’t see the live webcast.

Today’s funding is the second round for Wistia and follows a $650,000 investment in 2008. Savage declined to identify the investors. The company will use the new cash to hire more people and expanding marketing and advertising.