Conversation with SeeToo Founder Yoav Ilan – We’ve Got Invites!

This morning I sat down with Yoav Ilan at the ‘Bucks to discuss his new startup, SeeToo. SeeToo is a peer-to-peer social video service which lets you share a video with a family member or friend in a real-time environment and chat as well. Yoav believes that some videos aren’t meant to be shared on a public stage and sometimes you want to share the video and walk someone through it. We took a look at his new baby crawling on the floor and he spoke about how he shares the video with his parents in Israel and they can see their grandbaby crawl and chat at the same time.

So here’s how the service works. After signing in, you select your video to share. SeeToo processes the video which takes seconds. Then you send the link to the video to your friend or copy it into IM. The other person joins in and the video syncs and you watch the video together. You can annotate the video by clicking on it and chat as well. The other person can take control and do the same things.

We tried videos over 500mb and they were ready in 15-30 seconds. The video plays using streaming from one pc to another pc – SeeToo stores nothing. In addition, the other party saves nothing as well. Yoav says it’s much faster than uploading the video to a sharing service which could take hours (I agree).

Some comparisons will be made to Seesmic but they are different. Seesmic has simplified video sharing and SeeToo has simplified video interaction and collaboration. They have raised about $1 million from several people including Israeli investor Yossi Vardi.

We spoke briefly about the business plan but Yoav asked me not to post the details. He’s also got some interesting expansion plans for the product as well coming in 2008.  

It seems like a fun service and useful as well. I could see future expansion into B2B for product sales and more immediately usage with military members sharing videos with loved ones back home. Closer to real interaction than uploading a video to YouTube. The interface is simple and could probably use some more color and life — perhaps they are holding that part back while in beta?

If you’d like an invite to the beta, use the code ‘centernetworks’ and visit SeeToo.