Magnify.net

Earlier this week, NY-based KickApps announced their partnership with Userplane for chat and IM. Today, Userplane and another NY-based startup have announced a similar partnership. Magnify.net has integrated the Userplane Webchat2 and Userplane Webmessenger2 services.

Magnify.net is a white-label social networking provider that the company describes as, "online video discovery and broadcast platform for websites". The tool allows site owners to add custom video channels to enhance the overall user experience and keep users on the site longer, thereby allowing for more chances to monetize the user.

Both the Userplane Webchat and Userplane Webmessenger tools will carry advertising and publishers can also use a buyout option to remove or control the ads within the widgets.

Check out all of our Magnify.net coverage and the nextNYers interview with CEO Steve Rosenbaum below.

On Monday at the NY Video 2.0 meeting, after the demos concluded, three popular NY venture capital partners took the stage to critique the demos they just watched from a venture capitalist perspective. While they were certainly a bit nice in front of the crowd, I thought you might be interested in their feedback.

The demos came from Adotube, Magnify.net, Vusion, ekkoTV and BestTV.

The VC stars were: Chris Fralic from First Round Capital, Daniel Schultz from DFJ Gotham and a third who didn't share his name.

view the video »

Last night at the NY Video 2.0 meeting, Magnify.net presented their new Magnify Publisher tool. We wrote about the Magnify Publisher when it launched last week. I did notice that embedded videos are now using a customized Magnify.net player with Magnify branding. This wasn't in the initial launch version last week.

Magnify Publisher offers a variety of video hosts to search from and you can filter to specific providers. Image search currently works with Flickr and more image providers are coming soon. There's also the ability to upload a video (it's stored on Magnify's servers) or record a video directly using a webcam.

view the video demo »

NY-based Magnify.net is launching a new tool today named Magnify Publisher. It's an add-on for blogging platforms -- the first installations are available for Wordpress and Movable Type.

Magnify Publisher offers a variety of video hosts to search from and you can filter to specific providers. Image search currently works with Flickr and more image providers are coming soon. There's also the ability to upload a video (it's stored on Magnify's servers) or record a video directly using a webcam.

I spoke with Magnify.net CEO Steve Rosenbaum who suggested that Magnify Publisher will allow bloggers to add more multimedia content to their posts. As we walked through the demo, it's clear that if you are looking for images or videos to add to a post, Magnify Publisher makes it very easy -- much easier than searching on a service, copying the embed or saving out the image and uploading or embedding. Rosenbaum also notes that by using the tool, it can help to add more video content to a site on a regular basis.

On a side note, Rosenbaum is very passionate about the NY tech community and believes we will see big growth this year.

Magnify.net has launched a new widget based on the new YouTube API today at the April NY Tech gathering named VidyUp. I've embedded the video demo below. The idea is to bring in sites who aren't interested in the full Magnify suite but rather want an entry ramp to get videos from site visitors onto their site.

You install the widget, users can then upload videos into YouTube and they appear on your site. It's pretty slick and I am guessing we will see more of these type of widgets coming from developers using the YouTube API in the near future. view the video »

NY-based Magnify.net has launched v3.0 of their software today including a new enterprise model and more social tools. Magnify.net is now able to import social content from services including: Twitter, Flickr and Mogulus. Magnify.net lets you create a themed video channel by importing videos from YouTube, AOL, Yahoo, Veoh and other online video services. Magnify.net picked up $1 million in additional funding last month. The company is now referring to their service as an "Online Social TV Network".

Similar to NY-based white label social networking provider KickApps, Magnify.net now offers three pricing plans: free, pro and enterprise. Free allows you to share in the revenue generated from your pageviews, pro allows you to "buy" the inventory and display your own advertising and enterprise is for their larges customers including The Weather Channel.

Check out all of our Magnify.net coverage.

Just a week after announcing their 2007 figures and a month after opening their graphics platform, NY-based Magnify.net is announcing a new round of financing to the tune of $1 million dollars. Magnify.net is a white-label social networking provider that the company describes as, "online video discovery and broadcast platform for websites". The tool allows site owners to add custom video channels to enhance the overall user experience and keep users on the site longer, thereby allowing for more chances to monetize the user.

The money will be used to continue expansion and hire more staff for their ad network. Participating in the round are current investors: Next Stage Capital, New York Angels, Rose Tech Ventures, Active Angel Investors, and a number of individual investors including Chris Anderson. New to the round-up are: Ogden Capital and Gideon Gartner.

The company reports new membership at 1,000 sites per week.

Just hours after KickApps released their latest stats and just a few blocks north in Manhattan, Magnify.net is also releasing their latest stats. Magnify is celebrating their first anniversary this month as well.

While not a completely accurate comparison, Magnify's PR firm has put together a chart showing that Magnify has broken into the top 10 most popular online video networks worldwide. I say not completely accurate as Magnify's numbers come from their own stats and the other companies stats come from comScore. We know that comScore has had some reporting issues with Flux recently so perhaps Magnify actually ranks higher.

Here are the numbers reported to us (unaudited):

• Page views totaled 15,745,953, which represents a 23.71% increase
• Unique visitors jumped by 30.18% increase
• 2,209 new channels created
• 1,134,376 new content items were submitted to the network
• Total channels on the network are now over 30,000, up from 14,000 in September 2007
• Worldwide growth has skyrocketed by 174% in six months

This should be an interesting year for the white-label social networks including KickApps, Magnify and Ning. Just how many social networks can we handle?

NY-based white-label video social networking provider (phew!) Magnify.net is announcing the launch of their open source graphics development program. The idea is simple -- if you create templates and graphics to use on Magnify.net, you can now share them and let others use them as well.

Called the Graphic Share Library (GSL), any member of the Magnify.net community can create, share, and use elements that have been 'open-sourced' by other members of the community. As part of the launch, Magnify.net has added 75 element Graphics Bonus Pack and an entirely new set of templates and graphics elements that include a series of themed channel graphics for sports, food, politics, adventure sports, gambling, and newspaper sites.

I have to admit, I don't know how well this program will work. It's a great idea in concept but if I spend hours/days/weeks creating a template, why would I want 10 other jabronies to use it as well? It would just water down my brand image. What I do think could work well is if Magnify.net partnered with some top Web designers to provide some templates and then allow those designers to offer other templates for a fee - could be a new stream of revenue for Magnify.net and a new base of marketers (the designers) similar to Wordpress. They could also sign on these designers to make icon and button packs - another way to promote the product and have fans of the designer flock to Magnify.net

Magnify.net also claims to deliver more than 12 million page views per month and serving over 25,000 content publishers and they are the fastest growing video platform.

Have you ever wanted to cry into the camera about Britney or yell about teen Jamie Lynn's baby announcement? Have you considered dropping a mentos into a coke? What about talking about maps? Well if that's you, Magnify.net has the product for you!

We covered the private beta release of Magnify.net's "video blog in a box" setup which basically allows anyone with a webcam to start a video blog in 5 minutes or less. I think of this tool as being similar to Wordpress.com for text blogging. Unlike Wordpress.com, publishers can share in the revenue generated on their video blog. It's very easy to use from my testing.

You use a webcam to create a video channel on the network and can add in other videos to complement your own live action movies. Today they are showing off Jeff Hibbard and his mobile weblog. Frankly the videos were boring as heck. No one wants to watch a guy drive a car or eat at a Denny's. Side note: I am absolutely against people videoblogging while driving, it's just wrong.

Magnify.net has also released the following stats on service usage: passed 1 million unique visits in the month of November and there are currently over 22,000 dedicated channels online on Magnify.net.

Check out our previous Magnify.net coverage including the nextNYers interview with CEO Steve Rosenbaum.