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Kyte.tv Picks Up $15 Million VC and 50 Cent
Robert Scoble has the exclusive on a new round of funding for Kyte.tv. This B round is $15 million added to their A round of $2.25 million. Robert notes the following players in the round: Telefonica (led round), Nokia, DoCoMo, Swisscom, Holtzbrinck and DFJ.
The Kyte.tv people say that Kyte is the "easiest at production and distribution." Kyte.tv has also signed 50 Cent to a "celebrity channel" – and apparently is adding more celebrity channels soon. I guess if you can’t get General Wesley Clark like Ustream did yesterday, 50 Cent is a good 2nd place substitute.
The little bit I’ve used Kyte it worked well but there really is no community there compared to Viddler and some of the other video plays. But with Scoble on board, look for them to continue to grow in the space.
Here’s the video of the announcement:
Hi Allen – Thanks for your coverage of our recent funding. Regarding the issue of community, an important thing to understand about Kyte is that we are not in and of ourselves a destination. We have no desire to drive traffic to kyte.tv. In fact kyte.tv’s main purpose is to serve as a demonstration of our platform. As discussed in Robert’s interview with Daniel, Kyte is an enabling platform that is experienced by users from within the websites and social networks they already use. For instance 50 Cent fans interact with 50 and each other using the Kyte player from within his Facebook profile, his Ning community, his MySpace page, and numerous fan profiles and sites (over 400 at last count) where the player has been embedded.
Our announcement is really about the distribution potential of partnering with world leaders in communications and mobility. Hope that makes sense, and thanks again for the coverage!
Best,
Gannon
Doesn’t surprise me that the 50 Cent team is on top of this new media channel. Of those Universes on Netvibes which use our most popular widget, anyurl, 50 Cent is consistently the most visited. Music seems to be the most popular category of those using anyurl. (By contrast, #2 in the list appears to be the Universe of a shire’s government in the UK.) So I’m not sure who’s on top of 50 Cent’s marketing, but they appear to be paying attention.