SendUs launched out of stealth mode today and revealed  that it is backed by $17 million in funding. The company provides a video submission and management platform so brands can use video content created by fans to their own advantage.

“SendUs was founded to address the needs of brands to tell better, more engaging stories along with their consumers,” said executive chairman George Crowley in an email. “Consumers and brands alike care about co-creation and one-dimensional brand messages are no longer impactful. ‘Likes’ and retweets are hardly real engagement. When considered against the opportunity for more authentic content created by the like of YouTube, brands can no longer ignore the need to loop their audiences into marketing and programming.”

According to a study by the Content Marketing Institute, 80 percent of consumers are interested in being involved in projects with brands they love, however less than 1 out of 5 companies are actually involving consumers. The SendUs platform lets brands sent out a call for content from their audience. People upload content from their phones, computers, and social media. They transfer the media use rights to the brand, which can then review and publish it. SendUs automatically adds the brand’s watermark to the content so it is integrated with other marketing efforts. Enterprise brands, small businesses, creative agencies, non profits, and other organizations can use the SendUS widget and API for added customization.

SendUs was founded in 2012 and has worked with brands like FremantleMedia (creators of American Idol), Singapore Airlines, Peugeot, Nextel International, Sierra Club, and the Susan G. Komen foundation. Today, it made its public debut and revealed a hefty $17 million from private investors. It is based in Los Angeles

And, by the way, kicking some dirt at bitter rival Vidyo.

“A couple of weeks ago we crossed the million minutes-a-week level,” Blue Jeans chief commercial officer Stu Aaron told me yesterday. “We’ve got thousands of paying customers.”

The company has been monitoring usage patterns on its existing payment plans — a minutes-based plan, a per-user plan, and a per-device plan — and is unveiling a new option Aaron thinks is the best one yet. It would appear that Blue Jeans customers agree — a hundred of them have been testing the new plan since November 2012, and they grew their usage of videoconferencing at ten times the rate of other Blue Jeans clients.

The new plan sees participating companies pay one annual fee, plus between $10-50 per month for active users — employees who use Blue Jeans videoconferencing at least once per month.

“It’s a site-license option,” Aaron says. “Everyone gets an account, everyone gets unlimited usage, for an attractive low annual fee. All employees have accounts, but you’re only paying for active users.”

The new pricing model will come in hand when competing with videoconferencing rival Vidyo, whose CEO recently called Blue Jeans out. Vidyo’s quarterly growth in billings was 68 percent, he said, while competitors were flat or down. And, he said, a five-person one-hour call on Blue Jeans costs as much as an all-inclusive, unlimited $30-a-month subscription to Vidyo.

Them’s fighting words, as the saying goes, and Blue Jeans accepted the challenge and knocked off the chip.

“That was not a correct statement,” Aaron told me. “Our customers are typically pay cents-per-minute or tens of dollars per month, and there’s no way anyone has an advantage over those price points.”

In addition, he said, Blue Jeans is growing fast, having reached the 50 million annual minute run rate — even assuming no further growth in 2013 — after just over a year in business. That means, Aaron says, that Blue Jeans is probably a quarter of the entire videoconferencing market.

“There’s 100 billion minutes a year used for audio conferencing, and 200 million minutes a year in video conferencing,” he said. “Since we’ve exceeded the 50 million minutes a year run rate, we’ve grown to 20-25 percent of the market.”

The new plan seems to be a hit.

Not only are existing customers adopting the plan and increasing their use of videoconferencing, 25 percent of Blue Jeans new customers signed up in April were signed up on the all-you-can-meet plan.

That’s impressive, and given Blue Jeans’ ease of use and wide compatibility with a vast array of devices and software (including Cisco, Polycom, Lifesize, Microsoft Lync, Skype, Google Video, WebRTC Browser, and smart mobile devices), it portends well for the company’s future sales as well.

One small caveat before small businesses get too excited: To get the $10/user price point, you need over 10,000 users. Less, and you’ll be somewhere between $10 and $50.

photo credit: iandavid via photopin cc

“We may be witnessing the rise of Twitter’s recently acquired Vine,” Compete.com’s Conor O’Mahony said in an email.

Source: Compete.com

Fast movers for April 2013

Vine, which bills itself as “the best way to see and share life in motion,” was acquired by Twitter for $30 million in October of 2012, when it had only three employees. The site is essentially a combination of a video-based Instagram and Twitter, as users upload short 6-second videos and share them with friends.

Two million unique visitors is not huge, of course, although it is significant. But it’s important to note that many users who access Vine solely via mobile will not be counted, and that this is a momentum signal, not a sign that Vine is already at Twitter- or Facebook-style reach.

Vine, which has had some challenges lately due to copyright violations and hardcore porn appearing as an editor’s pick, is ideally suited to grow fast simply due to the fact that Twitter owns it … and can feature it more prominently in users’ tweet streams whenever it wishes. Twitter has already signaled with Twitter #Music that it intends to go full-media and extend what has largely been a textual medium into music and other media.

Other top sites included MLB.com — as baseball season hits — and Boston.com, for reasons too obvious and painful to mention. Java.com and Adobe.com hit the fast mover’s list simply due to new software updates.

photo credit: mclcbooks via photopin cc

Originally available only on smartphone platforms like Android, iOS, and others, Viber has added a desktop client that seamlessly interoperates with its mobile apps and now enables video calling for the first time.

The result is a combination of just about every kind of communication you could wish for in a single client: mobile text-like messaging, audio, and video. Which means that not only is Viber competing with mobile messaging platforms like the massive WhatsApp, it’s also competing with existing VOIP giant Skype.

And it’s got a few advantages on both sides.

With its new desktop client, Viber can seamlessly transfer calls between mobile and laptop, handy if you need to get out of the office in the middle of a call. It seamlessly syncs contacts between devices, silently and continuously, and it shows your received and sent messages on all your Viber-equipped devices.

“People spend a substantial amount of time on their smartphones,” Viber CEO Talmon Marco said in a statement. “However, a lot of that usage takes place at home or in the office, where they have laptops or desktops close by. With Viber Desktop you always get to use the most convenient device. You can seamlessly switch devices while messaging and even transfer calls between your mobile and desktop.”

Skype has been the de-facto leader in desktop audio and video communication for years, but its days at the top may be numbered if relatively young upstart Viber continues to grow at its current pace.

The VOIP communications company with its roots in mobile announced today that it has hit the 200 million user mark — startlingly fast growth for the young company which had 140 million users just in December. That’s perhaps not surprising, as the company is growing at mobile speed — it was the ninth most-downloaded app on Google Play as of March, 2013.

In contrast, Skype hasn’t released user numbers in some time, but the company did say it had about 280 million users six months ago, and it has made no secret of its goal: one billion users. It’s worth noting, however, that Skype probably has some user acquisition surprises up its sleeve: It had the third most-downloaded app in Google Play in March, and it recently announced that its users were spending two billion minutes a day on Skype.

On the mobile side, messaging apps such as WhatsApp are killing it, too. WhatsApp was the second most-downloaded app on Google Play, just behind Facebook … and two spots up on Facebook Messenger.

Clearly, messaging is a very, very competitive market.

According to Viber, however, it is “more flexible” than existing VOIP apps (read: Skype) and more convenient than mobile-only platforms. And the company just added eight languages to reach 27 total, to help it expand globally.

photo credit: coreyokada via photopin cc

This is a guest post by entrepreneur Adam Peterson, CEO of video-sharing platform VipeCloud.

Do startups need a video strategy? I’ve been in and around the “video for business” industry for the last six years and I get asked this question by startups quite often. The answer is always yes.

Video is the most engaging form of online content. But it’s also a highly expensive and time-consuming proposition for startups. So the strategy you take will depend a lot on what stage your company is in.

Here’s a breakdown of what kind of video you’ll want to invest in at each stage:

Pre-funding and pre-launch

There are really only two types of videos a startup at this early of a stage should consider. Most companies this early are going to change their messaging and possibly even direction several times. Taking valuable time or bootstrapping dollars to create a video can be a tough decision to make; however, these two use-cases should qualify:

1. Create a simple screenshot or animation of the problem you are solving and your proposed solution. This will help you tell your own story, and it will help you with customer discovery to validate the problem and your proposed solution with prospective customers or buyers. I would not invest any funds in the first versions of this video. Simply use a screen recorder like Quicktime or Camtasia and run through a PowerPoint presentation, basic animation, or recorded whiteboard drawing.
2. Create a professional looking video if you’re planning to do a crowdfunding campaign. A good-looking video will show your audience that you’re serious about your project. Tim Ferriss discusses the idea of “Minimum Effective Dose” in his blog about how Soma Water raised $100,000 on Kickstarter in 10 days. A professional-looking video is a required “Minimum Effective Dose.” If you’re on a tight budget, don’t worry; there’s an overwhelming number of resources available about how to make good videos. For reference, here’s an article offering tips for how to record a video on a skeleton crew and a series about how to make professional-looking content.

If you’re not one to pick up video editing software quickly and have a few bucks to invest, it might be worth hiring a videographer. A handful of low-budget options exist, including videographer networks like BBN3, Pixelfish, or SmartShoot. If your budget is slightly larger, you might try the animation approach with Ephipheo or AutoDemo. Of course, you might also have a friend of a friend who’s willing to help.

Pre-launch but MVP-demo-ready

Once you have a functional minimum viable product, recording a typical use-case of your product is a great way to validate your problem/solution and even generate pre-launch signups. Dropbox has one of the more recognized success stories doing this. Their waiting list purportedly went from 5,000 to 75,000 overnight after launching their simple screen recording video demo. That said, they took great care to cater to their audience by adding in several easter eggs.

Near this stage, your company might also begin social media and other efforts to generate attention. Videos are expensive and you shouldn’t always promote your own product on social media, yet video is one of the most effective forms of content to generate engagement. So what do you do? Share other people’s videos.

Sharing an interesting, educational, or new video meme with your network will still make you the source of the great content to your audience and thus help you generate attention. For example, you can generate thought leadership by sharing industry- or business-relevant videos like this strategy discussion from the Harvard Business Review, or an interesting TedTalk, or even the new Psy Gentlemen video if you dare. With 72 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute, something should be interesting to your audience.

Launched

If all goes well, you’ll eventually get your product out the door. At this stage it’s almost a requirement to use video. Why? Because your buyers want it. Ninety-five percent of business-to-business (B2B) tech buyers are watching videos. Furthermore, your competitors are more than likely using video, as 87 percent of B2B enterprise marketers and 70 percent of business to consumer marketers use video.

What kind of videos should you make? The first priority should be product overviews. Product demos are more valuable than case studies or white papers for influencing purchase decisions. These overviews can include a high-level product showcase, highlights of key sections, feature releases, and use-case scenarios.

Product videos for customer support and onboarding efforts can also hit two birds with one stone. A quick screen capture can be much faster than typing up support guides, at the same time, the more FAQs you get on video, the more you can automate your support engine. If you check out the Box channel on YouTube (below) it’s clear their video focus is on supporting their existing customers. Zappos has also publicly discussed how videos have increased conversion rates and reduced return rates.

Whether you’re funded or not will really only affect the quality of videos you can produce. Quality is important; however, there are workarounds. For example, if you can’t afford a professional video to represent your brand on your homepage, then put one on your blog. Write an article and embed a “micro-webinar” product overview that’s positioned as something you made quickly like a screencast or a live interview.

What do you do with your videos once you have them?

Everything you possibly can. Videos can be the most expensive sales and marketing assets your company creates, so you should get the most out of them. Here’s what you should consider:

1. Post them to YouTube. Though be careful not to rely too much on the “SEO value.” When a link to your website shows up in a Google search, it brings the searcher to your website or a landing page that’s also on your domain. When a link to your YouTube video shows up in a Google search, it brings the searcher to YouTube. You can turn the in-video ads off; however, ads and distracting promoted videos can still show up within your channel (for instance, click on any of the videos on Box’s channel and you’ll see a featured video ad on the right).
2. Consider private hosting. There are thousands of video hosting options. We offer this at VipeCloud, so does Brightcove, Vimeo, and several others. Note, if you’re going to use Vimeo, you’ll have to upgrade to VimeoPRO as their community guidelines don’t allow videos for commercial use on their free or plus levels.
3. Get everyone to share them, including your sales team, support team, and any evangelists inside and outside your company. The more people distributing your videos, the more value you’ll get. Buyers are looking to build relationships earlier in the process as they look for trusted advisers. Furthermore, your sales teams, support teams, and evangelists build different relationships with buyers than marketing does, and can guide video suggestions as such.

Video is a means to an end. It will soon represent most all of Internet bandwidth and a majority of mobile data. However, your company still needs to solve a real problem for a large market. The exercise of making your first video at an early stage will help you think through the details of the problem you are really solving. Once you’ve chosen your path, video becomes a requirement. Put together a strategy that works for your company, and remember to track if it’s working.

Adam is CEO of VipeCloud and an Entrepreneur-In-Residence at StartX, Stanford’s student startup accelerator. Prior to VipeCloud Adam launched eFaceTime in 2010, integrating video into Cendyn’s eProposal, the hospitality industry’s leading sales proposal software tool used by more than 10,000 hotels and venues worldwide. In 2008 he launched VipePower, an offering that became the leading recruiting and staffing video solution. From 2008 to 2012 he served as the Technology Chair on the board of the Silicon Valley Chapter of the California Staffing Professionals. 

Top image via Shutterstock

The New York Times will now offer unlimited free access to video content on its site and mobile apps thanks to sponsorship deals with Acura and Microsoft, the company announced today.

Back in March 2011, the Times put up a paywall for its digital content. It later raised the wall so people could view just 10 free articles or videos a month because the paywall tactic worked so well. But now video views will no longer count against the 10-article-per-month limit.

“As we continue to tell stories through video and increase our offerings, we want to ensure NYTimes.com users can watch and explore our video content with ease,” Denise Warren, NYT executive VP of digital products and services, said in a statement. “We are grateful to Acura and Microsoft for providing the support we need to continue to expand our best-in-class video content and deliver it to our vast NYTimes.com audience.”

Paywall strategies have evolved over the years. Different from the Times‘ model, blogger Andrew Sullivan has been a major proponent of offering an ad-free experience that is funded by readers. His blog The Dish charges readers $2 a month (or $20 a year) to access it. The Dish’s paywall lets nonsubscribers read just five free stories every 60 days.

The Times‘ video page offers much original content and in-depth takes on news events. Categories covered include world news, U.S., business, science, opinion, arts, style, sports, and more.

Take a look at a recent video by the Times below.

If advertisers want to take advantage of Facebook’s upcoming video ad platform, they’re going to have to pay up — big time.

The video ads, which will likely launch this summer, will run for $1 million each per day, as AdAge reports. According to sources, Facebook plans to sell four ad spots per day, each of which will target specific demographics. Assuming Facebook actually sells those ads, the video ad platform could pull in an extra $4 million a day — or, if you’re feeling particularly ambitious, over $1 billion a year.

Source: Jolie O'Dell/VentureBeat

Facebook: More ads, all the time.

Again, that’s assuming Facebook sells those spots.

From the outset, Facebook’s biggest challenge with video ads is proving to advertisers that they will actually pay off. This has traditionally been one of Facebook’s biggest problems, as its high-profile spat with General Motors last year showed.

In that situation, GM didn’t have much proof that advertising on Facebook was worth it, and it wanted to expand its Facebook advertising presence beyond the Facebook sidebar. GM has since returned to the Facebook flock, and the video ads could be the key to reinvigorating its Facebook presence — assuming it doesn’t balk at that price tag. (GM is rumored to have spent $10 million on Facebook advertising in 2011.)

The other problem, of course, is Facebook’s user base, which is particularly sensitive to change and probably won’t be crazy about the prospect of the  News Feeds being bogged down by large, potentially obtrusive advertisements.

Facebook, however, has probably done its homework on this: The ads will be limited to 15 seconds, and Facebook also plans to limit the number of them users see per day. So if users do complain, they won’t have terribly much to complain about. In theory, anyway.

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.

That’s faster than “Gangnam Style,” which took 60 days to hit 350 million views. And with 22 million views in just 16 hours, it beat out Justin Bieber for the most YouTube views in a single day. Plus, its ridiculously catchy jingle almost ensures that this new video will continue to be successful.

But this case has one big difference: A lot more people, proportionally, dislike this video.

“Gangnam Style,” which currently has over 1.5 billion views, with 7,391,498 likes and 731,346 dislikes, for an almost 10:1 like to dislike ratio. “Gentleman,” however, which is a video about not being a gentleman, has 791,926 likes and 138,742 downvotes, for a much lower likeability factor: under 6:1.

That’s probably due to the fact that “Gentleman” is — frankly — kind of nasty.

The video is full of gags that PSY pulls on barely dressed beautiful women: pulling out chairs and causing them to fall, unleashing bikini tops, tripping, “stink-palming,” and more. Plus, of course, there’s PSY kicking a soccer ball away from playing kids.

All of which makes the main lyric very, very appropriate: “I’m a mother f***** gentleman.”

I suppose it’s all in good fun, and PSY does get some comeuppance late in the video when a female companion pulls his chair away as well. But something tells me even if this video goes as hugely big as “Gangnam Style,” it won’t ever be as big a cultural phenomenon.

It’s just too nasty.

Image credit: YouTube

Roku announced today that it has sold five million of its video and music streaming set top boxes, claiming that 25 percent of its users are using Roku as the primary way of viewing television.

In addition to having sold millions of Roku players, the company says it also has provided over eight billion streams of videos and music to date.

The company first started out with streaming service Netflix as its customers’ only option for streaming video, but quickly added more options such as HBO Go and Hulu Plus. In January, Roku rounded out its channels with PBS, Time Warner Cable, and Fox Now. On the music streaming side, it also added Vevo around the same time, and also includes Pandora among its music channels. There are now over 750 channels available on Roku.

In an earlier interview with VentureBeat, Roku chief executive Anthony Wood said that over a billion hours have been streamed as well.

According to Roku, Nielsen states that “the average American spends 34 hours per week watching live TV.” It went on to say that 25 percent of its customers use Roku 35 hours a week. Of course, anyone who buys a Roku box is going to have a predisposition to streaming content, but it does show a shift in attitudes around cable.

Roku launched its first player in 2008.

Roku image via Roku

Hipset cofounder Mazy Kazerooni with Justin Bieber and Lil Twist.

Celebrities may have goods looks, money, the spotlight, and a fan base, but they don’t always know how to make money off their popularity. Today, Y Combinator company Hipset introduced a multichannel YouTube network that helps musicians grow and make money off their online audience.

CEO Matt Schlicht said that while many artists may have a strong presence on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, they are “shockingly small” on YouTube. Hipset develops these artists by optimizing their metadata, defining their video strategy, scheduling their uploads, setting up collaborations with top YouTubers, and using technology to develop and retain their YouTube audience.

Hipset works with record labels and artist management companies, who use their technology to distribute content and increase their clients’ reach on Facebook. Hipset celebrities include Tyga, Souljaboy, Lil Twist, Daughtry, 3 Doors Down, Rob Zombie, and Ryan Leslie. Schlict said these celebrities have a combined 1 billion views on YouTube and distribution channels to over 35 million fans.

The Y Combinator-backed company first launched as Tracks.by in 2012. Back then, the site was a place where artists could showcase their new work, and Tracks.by helped campaigns “go viral.” It also connected brands with celebrities to facilitate for celebrity endorsements.

As Hipset, the goal is to “hack through the world of online monetization” to optimize the Internet for musicians. In addition to the YouTube network, Hipset offers Hipset Boost, a suite of promotion tools to help artists grow their online audience. In addition to announcing the YouTube network, Hipset also announced adding new features into Boost that enable artists to require fans to follow them on social networks, in order to access exclusive videos.

Hipset has received backing from Menlo Ventures, Y Combinator, Venture51, Matt Mullenweg, Alexis Ohanian, Justin Kan, Brad Hunstable, Josh Elman, Alex Le, Garry Tan, Nils Johnson, David Wu, Harj Taggar, Michael Weiksner, Erik Moore, and Apu Gupta.

Image credit: Hipset Facebook page

UrtheCast is launching the world’s first high-definition video platform of Earth, streamed live from the International Space Station. Today, “Earth’s video camera” announced a $25 million financing agreement that will bring its vision closer to a reality.

The space tech startup is working with partners from the international aerospace community to build, launch, install, and operate two cameras on the Russian segment of the ISS. The data will be downlinked to ground stations and broadcasted in near real-time, to “change the way we view the world” and provide a view “only astronauts have experienced.”

“When you begin using the platform, it will feel much like you’re interacting with a mashup of Google Earth and YouTube. You will be able to scroll, pan, zoom, and search your way around the Earth video stream, which will reveal everything from natural wonders of the world to buzzing urban centers,” the company said on its site.

Vanounver-based UrtheCast previously raised over $4.5 million in August 2012 to accelerate development of cameras and the ground station network, as well as build strategic partnerships. Once the cameras go live later this year, UrtheCast will provide an interactive platform for consumers, app developers, educators, media outlets, government bodies, humanitarian relief organizations, and environmental monitoring services.

The $25 million is the result of a reverse take-over with Longford Energy Inc. Once the deal is completed, UrtheCast will be a wholly owned subsidiary of Longford. UrtheCast’s CEO and President Scott Larson said in a statement that the transaction will provide the capital needed to execute on the business plan, and also add expertise to the team.

The platform will be open source, allowing developers to create apps based on the video data. Like stars in the galaxy, the possibilities are endless. Now if only the company name didn’t immediately call to mind “urethra.”

The creators of streaming music service Rdio have finally launched their take on digital video through a new service called Vdio.

But fans of Rdio’s model (unlimited access to all the music you can stream for $10 per month) will be disappointed: Vdio is similar to Rdio only in name. It’s really just another online video store.

The site, which officially launched today, sells customers movies and TV shows a la carte. Right now the service is in beta testing and only available to paying Rdio subscribers, who get a free $25 credit to buy videos. The service’s library appears to be pretty broad with content from all the major film studios and TV Networks, including Disney, Fox, Warner Bros., Universal, NBC, CBS, ABC, Fox, and many popular cable channels. (Sorry, Game of Thrones fans, no HBO to speak of, although GigaOM is reporting that Vdio hopes to add that content in the future.)

Customers will buy access to each video through Vdio’s platform, which is available via web browsers and an iPad app. Presumably more devices will follow as the service grows and opens up to the public. It doesn’t look like there’s an offline viewing mode either, which means you’ll need to have a reliable Internet connection. You can only make purchases through the Vdio website, not the app — which makes sense considering that Apple takes a 30 percent cut on all in-app purchases.

Basically, Vdio is directly competing with Apple’s iTunes store, Walmart’s Vudu, Flixster, and Amazon’s video store (not counting the Prime service). That may be a bit of a disappointment for people who were hoping the Rdio folks would go for a subscription-based route.

While there are already a slew of dominant players in the digital video store world, there’s always room for more choices. Vdio is trying to win consumers over with the same sort of content recommendation features that it uses for Rdio, which includes your previous content consumption activity as well as the activity of your friends and family members.

Vdio will tentatively open to the public later this summer, with plans to launch in other countries like Canada as well.

Vantrix believes that video is bound to be the most popular way to consume content on your mobile phone. It announced a $4.5 million loan of funding from NXT Capital today, aimed at helping it prepare your carriers for the increased network traffic.

Vantrix helps carriers, Internet service providers, and large enterprises control the video traffic that comes through their networks. The software attempts to make the video as efficient as possible, so it doesn’t clog up the system, and deliver better quality video to the end user.

It also works with multimedia messaging to make sure that any videos, images, or other multimedia content is sent and received in a way that is optimal for both phones. For example, one of the phones might not support the file size of the video, so Vantrix would make sure the video meets the requirements of that phone to be delivered.

The company was founded in 2004 and is headquartered in Montreal. Previous investors include Summerhill Venture Partners, Tudor Growth Equity, BDC Capital and JK&B Capital.

Phone video image via Shutterstock

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

Your iPad or Android tablet is really good at a lot of things, but for some things, paper just can’t be replaced, as one French company hilariously illustrates in this ad, which has gone viral:

The ad is by the Leo Burnett agency for a French company, Le Trèfle, which produces — of course — toilet paper. It has already gathered 62,000 likes, including about 10,000 just in the past 50 minutes.

photo credit: bookgrl via photopin cc

Today Vevo, the “web’s No. 1 platform for music,” took a giant step away from YouTube, where its viewers consume most of its content. It took a giant step away from the web, too, and a big step back toward broadcast TV, announcing that Vevo TV will be an always-on broadcast-style music and video channel available exclusively on its own website and apps, plus Roku.

The new channel will feature music videos, of course, as well as live concerts and artist interviews, and Vevo promises exclusives and new, original music alongside old classics. No algorithms here determining what “the audience” wants: This will all be hand-programmed by real humans, Vevo says.

Source: Vevo

Vevo TV on an Android phone

Curiouser and curiouser, as Alice in Wonderland said. Old-fashioned, even.

But Vevo has a method in the madness and magic in the formula. When everyone’s watching everything and nothing is particularly “on,” there’s a definite lack of shared experience, shared reality, and shared community that those of us over the age of 30 once knew. It’s the special something that happens when the Super Bowl is on and you know everyone’s watching and engaged in the same event.

“Just like TV!” as VEVO says.

Except, of course, it’s better, because it’s on your phone, your tablet, or your computer. And anything you want to watch but can’t quite fit in just now can be saved, PVR-style, to a “watch it later” playlist. But the TV-like part is that it’s a curated experience that you are, presumably, watching at the same time as thousands or millions of other people.

And that it’s a lean-back experience, as Vevo is at pains to make clear. Where the contemporary web and app focused media scene is lean-forward, “channel” surfing, switching from clip to clip to clip, Vevo TV is intended to be more relaxing, more enjoyable, and more able to consumed in the living room as well as the bus or train. In other words, from millions of frenetic monkeys clicking frantically on billions of 30-second or two-minute videos, to chilling out and relaxing to music and video.

The new Vevo TV is available today for the U.S. and Canada, with additional countries coming, as always, “soon.”

Today, Koozoo officially launched its broadcasting network that crowdsources smartphone videos from public places. Users can post and view footage from places like coffee shops, clothing stores, parks, and world landmarks. Whether you are looking to assess how crowded a concert is or want to check out what’s happening in Times Square, the company’s goal is to make “live views of the world’s public spaces easily accessible to all.”

“Koozoo will usher in a new era that reads like science fiction today,” said Trevor Darrell, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, in a statement. “For example, within a few years I expect Koozoo to let you take a virtual walk down the street in Tokyo or Paris in 3D, live, as you sit comfortably at home in California.”

Back in December, Koozoo announced its $2.5 million seed round led by New Enterprise Associates and Tugboat Ventures to prepare the platform for mainstream adoption. The app is available on iOS and Android. Koozoo is free for basic members and will be available today in San Francisco and Austin.

Photo Credit: Besty Weber/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

If you’re like me, your iPhone movies look like crap.

Shaky, wobbly, bouncy … it’s annoying to users and frustrating for all us buddying Scorceses, Coppolas, and Spielbergs. Even if our only audience is friends and family on Facebook.

Enter Luma.

With its recent 2.8 upgrade, the movie app replacement for Apple’s camera app uses “cinematic video stabilization” to create movies that are so smooth and clean, it’s a thing of beauty. In fact, the image above is a still from a movie shot on an iPhone with Luma … on a bike.

If I seem to be gushing, that’s because I am. I take some video occasionally when doing interviews for VentureBeat, and have received some criticism for the sadly palsied nature of the results.

I’ve tried the app myself, and the results are simply stunning. I had no idea handheld video from a phone could look so good. Here’s footage from the company showing the difference between the native iPhone camera app and Luma:

“By using advanced motion retargeting algorithms Luma not only removes handshake, but also ensures that you get the smoothest possible shot,” the company posted on its blog. “The motion retargeting algorithm automatically figures out the ideal camera motion (whether it’s a stationary, panning, dolly, or steadicam shot that you’re after) and retargets the video to match that motion.”

Luma also allows you to apply filters for various effects to your videos in a very Instagramish way, if you’re into that sort of thing. Pastel, vignette, analog, noir, toon, and the ever-favorite sepia are among the options, and the effect is applied immediately, not in post-processing. As per usual, you can inflict the results of your creativity on Facebook and Twitter, or to connections on Luma’s own budding video network.

One caveat: I did not see a share to YouTube option, which is a must-have for me. Fortunately, there is an option to save captured videos to your standard iOS camera app, from which you can simply upload to YouTube.

Overall, however, this is one of the few apps I’ll be keeping on my phone after testing. The company calls it magic. I simply have to agree.

Image credit: Luma

Among the cut-outs of monsters and knights at Wooga’s office in Berlin, under the banners and giant fake leaves, about 280 people from 40 different countries are working to craft the next big social games hit.

About 50 million people already play Wooga’s games, including flagship titles Diamond Dash and Monster World, each month. This week, the company announced four new games for web and mobile – and that it is currently profitable, with half of its revenue now coming from mobile.

It’s an impressive achievement for a company so young. Jens Begemann – Wooga’s very tall, very calm CEO – co-founded the company with Philipp Moeser and Patrick Paulisch in Berlin in 2009. Before that, he spent several years working as chief product officer for Jamba (the ringtone-maker founded by Germany’s Samwer brothers).

Wooga is still based here – it’s important, Begemann says, to have everyone working together under one roof – and is gradually taking over further floors in its building, an old 19th century bakery factory.

Here, we speak to Begemann about starting Wooga, keeping a healthy company culture, dealing with Facebook – and his thoughts on the hype surrounding startups in Berlin.

Video shot and produced by Glenn Goodison. This story originally appeared on VentureVillage, one of VentureBeat’s editorial partners, in Germany.

Related posts:

• Casual game developer Wooga experiments with new genres and platforms in 2013
• The “Feelgood Manager”: is ensuring workplace happiness a full-time job?
• Berlin social games maker Wooga reveals new games, first Kindle release – and profitability

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Taboola provides a video content recommendation platform. Its marketplace has marketers and brands on one side, who bid to distribute their content on top publisher sites, and algorithms on the other side, to match content with the most relevant users and predict what they want to watch. Brands and marketers use the technology to maximize their reach and optimize audience engagement.

The company compares its service to Twitter Promoted Tweets or Facebook Promoted Stories. It serves 1.5 billion recommendations daily on sites including Time.com, NY Times, Fox Broadcasting, USA Today, Bloomberg, The Weather Channel, and BusinessWeek. Taboola helps publishers “re-circulate” their own traffic by generating on-site content recommendations. (VentureBeat uses Taboola, whose recommendations appear at the bottom of every story on our site.)

Video advertising is expected to be a major trend of 2013. The technology surrounding video production and distribution has made online video ads a powerful option for businesses and consumers alike. Furthermore, studies show the more targeted the ad, the more effective it is. Taboola is capitalizing on all these trends.

After experiencing significant growth in 2012, largely spurred by the $10 million round Taboola closed in June, this funding brings the total capital raised to $25 million. Israeli firm Pitango VC led the $15 million investment, with participation from existing investors Evergreen Venture Partners, WGI Group, and Market. Taboola is based in New York City.

Read the press release. 

Photo credit: Annie Mole/Flickr

Vuclip serves videos ‘on-the-fly’ to people on any device in any country. Its goal is to make videos accessible to everyone, and to strengthen the connection between brands and an audience they wouldn’t otherwise be able to reach. The company claims to deliver 25 million videos a day.

In November, Vuclip closed its fourth round of funding from New Enterprise Associates, Singtel Innov8, and Jafco Ventures, bringing its total to $35 million. Now, it is putting some of this money into Jigsee, which makes it easier to receive video on low-cost phones. Jigsee’s technology and team will serve to further engage users in emerging markets. The terms of the deal are undisclosed.

Read more about Vuclip on VentureBeat.

Original video content is increasingly the coin of the realm among big Internet companies locked in a war for eyeballs. Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer said as much to analysts during the company’s earnings call at the end of January.

“We see video as a big opportunity for future monetization, and we’re really just getting started here,” she said.

Netflix has generated tons of press with its new $100 million original series “House of Cards,” and competitors like Hulu and Amazon are edging into that same territory. And Yahoo has likewise been investing heavily in its own slate of original programming, on its own terms.

The company’s original Web series “Burning Love” – a spoof of “The Bachelor” – is returning to Yahoo Screen this week for a new season. It’s a testament to the power of strong original content, since the response of fans and critics to the first season led to a pickup of two additional seasons.

The new season launches on Valentine’s Day, and the company has done something new this time around. For the first time, Yahoo sold all the premium ad inventory for an original program to a single ad agency – PHD, which handles such brands as Foot Locker, Safeway, and Lord & Taylor.

That means PHD is not only the exclusive sponsor of seasons 2 and 3 of “Burning Love,” but this agency-wide, multi-brand partnership includes deep integration of brands into the show and media elements being customized for “Burning Love.”

“In season 1, we did not sell ‘Burning Love’ to a sponsor,” said Erin McPherson, Yahoo vice president and head of the company’s video and original programming. “What’s great about PHD coming on as opposed to a single brand is it gives us flexibility to work the right brand into the right places. It was really important to the ‘Burning Love’ team to not be forcing products in.

“Our brand integrations are really fun. And we’re still in the early days of figuring out the best, optimal ways to do this.”

The “Burning Love” series, created by Erica Oyama, is produced with Paramount’s Insurge Pictures and Ben Stiller’s Red Hour Productions, together with Yahoo. Season 2 features new cast members like Michael Cera, Colin Hanks, and Nick Kroll, and it follows “Julie” – the woman who failed to win bachelor Mark Orlando’s heart last time around.

As another testament to the show’s success, it’s making the jump from the Internet to TV not long after launching a new season of the web version. Season 1 of “Burning Love” is debuting on E! Feb. 25, with seven half-hour episodes set to air.

McPherson said “Burning Love” is part of the comedy slate of programs Yahoo launched in 2012 and part of an overall channel initiative Yahoo started in 2011.

“What’s been fantastic is the way we’ve been able to really leverage the power of our network to program these shows contextually,” she said. “’Burning Love’ would not only live on Yahoo Screen but would be promoted across all our verticals. It’s such a great parody of ‘The Bachelor,’ so we covered it in Yahoo TV right alongside ‘The Bachelor.’ Because it had great cameos with actors like Kristen Bell, we covered it on our celebrity site. What that did is find audiences where they were already engaged and help make the show really successful.”

She said Yahoo’s internal data showed that users weren’t dropping off after episode 1 – they were sticking with it. In addition, it drew a relatively young and new crowd, and users tended to “binge view” the series.

New episodes of the web series will go live every Thursday and Friday starting Feb. 14.

You can see a trailer for the second season at www.yahoo.com/burninglove.

It’s almost midnight, and you’re stuck on a math problem that is due first thing in the morning.

In stressful situations like these, online tutoring startup Instaedu can help. The Silicon Valley company specializes in finding stumped students a tutor or homework assistants at any time of day or night.

When the company launched, its core innovation was the pay-by-the-minute model, and the on-demand access to tutors. But with its new features, the startup is moving into the realm of personalized learning.

The Instaedu team is honing its abilities to better match its students with tutors based on their academic needs and interests, so they’ll be tempted to set up regular sessions.

Currently, there are 1,500 tutors signed up from top colleges like Harvard and MIT, but the founders aren’t disclosing the number of registered students. Tutors are paid a fixed rate of $20 an hour (Instaedu keeps the rest), and working hours are flexible.

The tutors connect with students using video chat, text chat and document editing — it’s all online, so there are no travel costs. Alternatives include Edoboard, which provides tutors with online tools, and TutorCentral.net.

“The goal is for our students to get to know tutors better before even having that first lesson,” said Alison Johnston, Instaedu’s 25-year-old cofounder (pictured above). So the new features also make it a bit easier to schedule a regular time to meet with the best possible tutor. They include:

• Real-time messaging so a student can chat with a tutor before scheduling a lesson (this makes it easy to connect with a tutor who is currently online);
• “Smart messages” for students who need to be matched with a tutor that can help with an advanced or niche subject;
• Tutor reviews which are displayed publicly so students can browse tutor profiles.

Instaedu has raised just over $1 million in seed funding from the SocialxCapital Partnership.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Can your diary organize your professional contacts or remind you to pick up a carton of milk? Not yet. But in the future it may, with the help of Evernote, a digital notebook that wants to be your diary, personal assistant and collaboration tool rolled into one.

The Evernote tagline “Remember everything” holds a certain charm. But chief executive Phil Libin wants to go one step further in actually boosting your cognitive abilities. ”We want to make you smarter,” Libin said, referring to the popular note-taking service as an “external brain.”

Evernote has a worldwide reach, with 45 million people adopting this easy-to-use notetaking tool. The company has raised over $250 million in five funding rounds, led by investors like Sequoia Capital, Morgenthaler, and Valiant Capital Partners. And while previous reports have suggested Evernote plans a 2013 or 2014 public offering, Libin told us that an IPO is even further off that that: In 2015 or 2016, he says.

For most Evernote devotees, the app is a way to keep track of life’s minutia, meeting minutes, favorite web pages, and other things. But one particular customer struck a chord with Libin. Colorado Springs resident Patrick Jones suffers from a traumatic brain injury that has led to profound short-term memory loss. According to a blog post from a couple years ago, Jones uses Evernote to “piece together the basic memory flows we take for granted.”

VentureBeat invited Libin to our office to discuss his vision for his company’s future, which includes a new COO, and the host of new features designed to appeal to busy professionals. And don’t miss the short video interview on company culture at the bottom.

VentureBeat: Here’s a deceptively tough question to kick things off. How would you describe Evernote to your grandma?

Phil Libin: It’s hard to have a pithy one-line answer. Believe me, I’ve heard countless pitches. I say something like, “We want to make you smarter.” It’s a set of products and goals to give you an external brain. It’s a way to help you remember everything.

VentureBeat: Interesting. Have you looked into brain-training tools like Lumosity?

Libin: Yes, we were talking with them about making some games. I was a subscriber for a while, but I’d have to look into the science to see if it’s conclusive. But it’s the type of thing I could see us doing.

VentureBeat: Evernote has grown so rapidly; do you plan to keep up the pace of innovation?

Libin: Startups that get to our size can get paralyzed and afraid to innovate. But you have to keep innovating quickly until you find something that sticks.

VentureBeat: Can you shed any light on the company’s IPO plans?

Libin: I’ve always been pretty unambiguous. It’s definitely not going to be this year. We want to build a 100-year company and don’t want to be acquired. Going public is the morally correct thing to do, but it’s a step you can get wrong (editor’s note: research has found that most job creation occurs after a company goes public). We have been planning it for a while now and it will happen in 2015 or 2016.

VentureBeat: How about acquisitions? You’ve made about five or six so far. …

Libin: We bought five small teams and will keep our eye out. The size of the companies we acquire will get larger as we spend more on mergers and acquisitions. Our criteria is to look for products that we would want to use.

VentureBeat: I love that my Evernote notebook is just for me — it feels so personal. Will that change as you add more collaboration tools?

Libin: We used to say that Evernote is antisocial. But sometimes, when you are trying to achieve something, you’ll do it in a small group. With Evernote Business, we want to make it easier for five or 10 people to collaborate. But it can also still be private and all about you.

VentureBeat: Evernote is great for storing notes — but will there be any actionable or automated reminders?

Libin: Yes, we’re adding intelligence to the things you capture in Evernote. When you meet someone, for instance, you can push a button in the Evernote Hello app and it will automatically send an email saying, “Great to meet you and here’s my contact info.”

VentureBeat: I can see the upside to data analysis. But is their any kind of guarantee that my private thoughts won’t be packaged and sold to advertisers?

Libin: We just changed our legal terms of service to make it as clear as possible. Your data is yours; it’s not ours and we will never make money off of it!

For more, check out our video on Libin’s shift to a more user-centric design.

The insides of computer systems are often portrayed in science fiction movies as vast arcologies of virtual structures, with whizzing electrical impulses flashing through them. As it turns out, our brains might not look very different from our dreams of artificial computing entities.

For the first time, Japanese scientists captured video of a thought being formed, and it looks pretty much like miniature lightning tracing its way through a meshed structure of neurons:

Of course, this is not a human brain that mad scientists exported from a skull and sliced up in the pursuit of scientific information. Rather, this is a the brain of a baby zebrafish — and it wasn’t even harmed in the experiment. Researchers chose this creature because in their embryonic and larval states, zebrafish have the wonderful property of being almost completely transparent.

The adult of the species is not, alas, transparent

The scientists dosed the baby fish with fluorescencing agents that glow when neurons are activated, then induced a paramecium — a tiny protozoa about 200 micrometers in length — to swim by, causing the zebrafish to perk up and think about a snack.

That caused neural impulses to be fired off in the zebrafish’s “optic tectum,” a region of the midbrain. Which the Japanese researchers then captured video of, and, naturally, uploaded to YouTube, solving once and for all the perplexing question: what do fish think of?

Mostly, it appears, lunch. Which is not too different from humans, perhaps.

Image credits: D o m o n k o S via photopin cc, Akira Muto, Masamichi Ohkura, Gembu Abe, Junichi Nakai, and Koichi Kawakami, hat tip: Gizmodo

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Time Warner Cable isn’t happy about Netflix’s new “Open Connect” initiative, a separate network ISPs can use to pull data from the streaming video service.

Why? Well, it has something to do with Netflix implying that TWC’s network isn’t good enough to provide 1080p video streams and 3D content. Allow me to explain.

Currently, the Netflix pulls a majority of its data through commercial content delivery networks, which are optimized for a variety of data from multiple sources. The new Open Connect network, which Netflix debuted in June, would optimize the flow of Netflix-only video data through a new network that ISPs can build into their own services. And considering that Netflix accounts for nearly a third of all video streaming in the country, the video service said it makes financial sense to provide its own Open Connect network, just as YouTube has done in the past. Also, Open Connect means lots of customers will stay happy because their Netflix service will be more reliable.

And to get ISPs on board with this change, Netflix said it will only provide 3D content and 1080p high-definition videos (dubbed Super HD) to customers who subscribe to an ISP that uses Netflix’s Open Connect standard. So basically, that means major ISPs not using Open Connect (TWC, Comcast, or FiOS) look like the bad guys, or at the very least, become the reason why you can’t get the highest resolution and 3D movies.

“While they call it ‘Open Connect,’ Netflix is actually closing off access to some of its content while seeking unprecedented preferential treatment from ISPs,” TWC said in a statement to Multichannel News. “We believe it is wrong for Netflix to withhold any content formats from our subscribers and the subscribers of many other ISPs. Time Warner Cable’s network is more than capable of delivering this content to Netflix subscribers today.”

TWC’s standards might be good enough to carry the higher-quality video streams, which require transferring more data than regular video streams, but it isn’t good enough for Netflix. The streaming video company also denies TWC’s claims that it wants special treatment.

“OpenConnect provides Netflix data at no cost to the location the ISP desires and doesn’t seek preferential treatment,” Netflix said in a statement to VentureBeat. “We hope TimeWarner will join the many major ISPs around the world who are participating in Open Connect to reduce costs, better minimize congestion and improve data delivery to enhance the consumer experience.”

Plenty of ISPs have already jumped on the Open Connect bandwagon, including Cablevision, Virgin Media, British Telecom, and Google Fiber. My guess is that TWC and the others will soon jump on board as well, but obviously some of them aren’t happy about it.

Hostage image via val lawless/Shutterstock

In a statement issued this morning, Keek.com announced that it not only closed an $18 million deal, but also registered 6 million new users in the past month. That is what I call viral.

Toronto-based Keek is a free social network centered around 36 second videos. People can upload video states updates known as “keeks” through a webcam or smartphone and share them across Keek, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, e-mail, and SMS. They can also post comments, follow friends, receive notifications, send private messages, check out an activity feed, view a leaderboard, and access analytics.

First, we lived in a world of written status updates, followed by photo-sharing, and Keek’s explosive growth could indicate that video-updates are the wave of the very near future.

“The word keek means a short look, a glimpse, a peek and Keek indeed opens a window into other cultures, customs and lifestyles, making the world more accessible in a way only video can,” said  CEO Isaac Raichyk in a statement. “Twitter convinced the world to embrace a micro-blogging format and Instagram demonstrated that a photo sharing social network could thrive. With 200,000 new users joining daily and millions of user-generated videos posted monthly, Keek is doing the same for social video.”

The company was founded in 2011 and first released its apps in March. In September, VentureBeat reported that Keek raised $7 million in its second round of funding to support its promising growth. At the time, Keek users were posting about 66,000 videos per day, and in August, Keek racked up 21 million visits and 250 million page views.

Now just five months later, Keek is tacking on another $18 million, bringing its total capital raised to $30 million. This financing will support its continued growth by expanding the infrastructure to meet the “surging international demand,” as well as accelerate new feature releases.

A significant driver of Keek’s exploding popularity is widespread adoption in Europe, the Middle East, and South America, with 200,000 new users joining daily. The most recent numbers real that Keek now receives 1 billion monthly page views, 75 million monthly visits, 15 million monthly unique visitors, and 4 million monthly user-generated videos.

That is many many millions.

The $18 million in new funding was led by AGF Investments, Pinetree Capital Ltd, and Plazacorp Ventures, with participation from Cranson Capital.

Will Keek methodically and sustainably spread the dogma of video-status updates around the world? Or will it follow the same path as other social startups that saw tremendous user adoption at first, before getting kicked to the curb by consumers who have already moved on to the next big thing?

Read the press release.

Simon Walker is an entrepreneur from Melbourne, Australia. From Down Under, he struggled to find fellow innovators, venture capital dollars, and the kind of support he needed to get a startup off the ground. As the story of Mark Zuckerberg and other young Silicon Valley success stories wafted his way, he began to wonder if these tales were real. Is it really as simple as showing up to an investor’s office with nothing but a hoodie and an idea, and walking away with millions?

Walker decided to set out on a journey to uncover the truth about the American entrepreneurial ecosystem. He partnered with Startup Stay, a global community for traveling entrepreneurs, and Shoestring Media, a publishing company based in Sydney, to embark on the Leeap Project, a 10-city, 20-day tour. He would stay with local entrepreneurs, interview local influencers, and create comprehensive videos that reflect “the DNA” of each startup community.

“This project is about the realities of startup life, with the hope of creating an unbiased opportunity for entrepreneurs around the world to build an educated and informed understanding about what the grass roots of the entrepreneurial world actually looks like,” Walker said. “With no hidden agenda or preplanned storyline, the Leeap project is truly a raw, open and honest depiction of the realities of each local startup community and culture.”

His first stop was Los Angeles. He spoke with entrepreneurs, event organizers, accelerator founders, and asked them questions about the L.A. startup scene, how it has changed, its advantages and disadvantages, and their vision for the future.

Check out the this video about the startup community exploding in the Hollywood Hills:

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

AgilOne does cloud-based predictive analytics, and at VentureBeat’s recent CloudBeat conference, AgilOne CEO Omer Artun took a few minutes to chat with us about big data topics as well as the startup’s recent funding round.

AgilOne tries to use the cloud to predict parts of the future with some degree of accuracy. The company used CloudBeat to announce its $10 million round of funding and the launch of its product, which provides cloud-based predictive marketing intelligence to help marketers figure out what their customers are going to do before they do it.

Big data itself was a huge topic at the conference. One of the more interesting revelations as one speaker’s assertion that companies were collecting vast amounts of unstructured data on consumers — data that they then were ill-equipped to actually use. Many of the startups at CloudBeat were attempting to meet that need, to make data from social media and other inputs actually useful.