Magnify.net

NY-based Magnify.net has announced a new set of packages aimed at small-to-medium sized businesses. Called the "Pro Packages" and priced starting at $249/month, the packages will include Magnify’s Quickstart, Business Builder Pro and Business Builder Premium offerings.

The new Pro Packages include training from Magnify and their hope is to help small businesses integrate a custom-branded video experience into their websites and ecommerce offerings.

Check out our extensive Magnify coverage.

AdaptiveBlue

NY-based AdaptiveBlue has announced the next version of their Glue toolbar today. I spoke with founder and CEO Alex Iskold who tells me that they have 35,000 active users and over 110,000 downloads of the Glue toolbar to-date.

The new functionality includes "connected conversations" which Alex’s calls an intelligent livestream and "popular lists" which should help the top content for the day to rise to the top.

Adam Ostrow has a good overview of the new features. AdaptiveBlue has also hooked in social sites Twitter and Facebook into this latest Glue release. The basic idea with the update is that all of your friends are on a big bus as you travel around the Web – each time you make a stop, your friends yell out from the back of the bus if this is a worthwhile stop or not.

Check out our extensive AdaptiveBlue coverage.

KickApps

KickApps announced today that they have hired David Lapter as Chief Financial Officer and Tom Gaffney to head up the company’s expanding Customer Success division. Apparently the Customer Success division works on strategy and creative services.I’ve never heard of a Customer Success division but I like the idea! Check out all of our KickApps coverage.

Outbrain

Outbrain launched an update to their widget this week called the "Link Zapper". We run the Outbrain recommendations widget on CN (you can see it at the end of this post). The widget recommends other posts both from CN and from our whitelist of partner sites. The Link Zapper allows us to easily remove a link that might not be a good fit for the source story. It’s a very manual process and while I am hoping for some automated tools in the future, it’s a good start. Check out all of our Outbrain coverage.

ZocDoc

We’ve covered ZocDoc extensively on CN and I believe it could be the breakout star of 2009. ZocDoc provides online management for doctor, dentist and other healthcare practitioners. Forbes magazine named ZocDoc the winner of their small business contest. The announcement came this week and ZocDoc won $100,000 to further develop and expand their service.

Magnify.net

Earlier this week Magnify.net announced the launch of Thwoop.com, an online community for featured entertainment content and user-contributed videos. The concept for Thwoop.com came from children’s toy e-tailer Brand Performance and the site will be powered by Magnify.net. Check out all of our Magnify.net coverage.

Magnify.net offers three tiers of service on their video platform: free, professional and enterprise-level service. Magnify self-reports 46,000 web publishers using their video platform.

Magnify.net previously raised $2.2 million in funding. Back in September, Magnify launched their MVP video player.

It will be interesting to see if Magnify follows a Blinkx strategy with regards to partnerships. In fact, maybe there’s value in both companies working together as Blinkx appears to have a strong video search network. 

Check out our look at the NYC online video market which includes 5min and Magnify.net.

Magnify’s MVP player includes a 50/50 split on ads displayed. One interesting note regarding the ads — site publishers can select to serve pre- or post-roll ads in the videos that originate on their network. The video ads are served by DoubleClick’s DART service.

The new Magnify player seems a bit similar to Kyte’s player in terms of customization and options. Kyte offers chat within the video player along with more media options (e.g. images, live video, etc.) while the injected ad on Magnify’s player allows Web publishers to generate additional revenue from ads that are served below the video channel.

Magnify self-reports over 5 million videos added to the social networks they serve each month. Check out all of our Magnify.net coverage.

Update: I met with Magnify.net CEO Steve Rosenbaum last night at an event in NYC and he mentioned a few things about the new player that I thought were worth sharing. He noted regarding the idea of the new Magnify.net player going for the big player market:

"We don’t believe that all video players are created equal.   If you’ve got a huge video collection,  than a player that serves your videos is what you need.  There are already a number of good products that do that, Brightcove, Maven, Blip.tv."

I also asked him about how he describes what’s new in the player:

"As a video aggregation player  – we’re the first in the market. We think that being able to find, curate, and present video from multiple sources is a powerful new way  to increase page views and therefore revenue."

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.

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 Charlie Federman from Crossbar Capital.

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.

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 currently hosts more than 36,000 video channels and launched their 3.0 version in March 2008.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Check out the nextNYers interview with CEO Steve Rosenbaum:

We went thru a full product demo and I was very impressed, especially with the video search features. It seems like a great way to add content to a site without doing anything. Set up the filters once, and Magnify.net will continue to add content as you have indicated.

The announcement tonight is around their ad-share advertising program. Basically it's simple, you can utilize the Magnify.net ad network and you earn 50% of the revenue generated from your impressions and ad clicks. And if you use the settings I mentioned above, fresh new "ad impressionable" content appears daily. Steve noted that they also offer an ad buyout program whereby you can "buy" the impressions at a rate you negotiate with Magnify.net and then you "own" the full 100% of ad space.

These ad programs are similar to KickApps except that KickApps gives you one of two locations and they own the other ad slot. The ad buyout program is the same for both services.

From the official announcement: “We see the next 24 months as a critical turning point for ad dollars. By launching the AdShare Network now, we’re giving our users a head start in determining what advertising strategy works best for them, their advertisers, and their visitors,” said Steve Rosenbaum, founder and CEO of the Magnify.Net team. “Each day we see power shifting from Madison Avenue to Main Street — and a new economy is growing up around video-centric communities of content. This means that individuals or small businesses with passion can become the central place for content consumers. And that’s exciting.”

The team is currently made up of three developers, a CEO/CTO/CFO, and a biz dev person in San Francisco. They supplement the full-time staff with a few additional developers. They are actively recruiting for a biz dev person for the east coast. They raised a 1.2 million dollar angel round and are looking at a full vc round in the near future. Three developers seems a bit light, they are certainly leaner than their competitior up the street, KickApps who has 40+ staff.

Magnify.net

Using Magnify.net, sites can search for videos based on unique interests and subject matter. Providing filtering and organization that works seamlessly with the major video hosts like YouTube, Google, and Revver, sites engages their visitors to discover, share, rate and rank videos. The result is peer-filtered content that is engaging and organized around a sites subject matter.

Jaman

Film fans can watch feature films via Jaman's player directly from their Mac or PC, or enjoy the viewing experience using a home theater system. Jaman incorporates community features including in-movie conversations, reviews, groups and "friending" providing a way for thousands of movie-goers to socialize on Jaman.

Attendio

Attendio keeps people "in the know" about the local events that match their interests. Attendio and its user community continually add relevant local events, reviews, and recommendations to their website and users calendars.

Bling Software

Bling Software enables companies to build and deliver the most visually stunning and data-rich applications ever available on the mobile handset. For the first time, consumers can enjoy dynamic mobile applications from Bling Software's early customers including Jay-Z, Barry Bonds, Ninja Mobile, The Onion, Amp'd Mobile and GoTV Networks.

Nexo

Nexo.com is the first web community to bring together the ease-of- use, security, personalization, and communications features that groups need to express themselves and manage a variety of online interactions. Nexo believes that every individual is part of at least one, if not several groups. Nexo makes it possible for these individuals to easily bring their groups online, empowering each individual to collaborate and communicate more openly and frequently with their already established communities," said Craig Jorasch, CEO of Nexo Systems, Inc.