NY Video Meetup Archive

Last night at the NY Video Meetup, MobLogic presented their new daily online video show.  I noted that I was not going to post the demo as it was basically just showing the actual show which you could watch on MobLogic.tv. Presenter Scott Solary asked if I would post the video so please find it below. I cut out most of the actual video show – go watch it live – better than my Canon capture.

Lindsay is a talented video host and should have stuck to Wallstrip. She also seems to love Crest white strips! While CBS will probably throw a ton of money at this show, I find the "person on the street" interviews to be cute for the first 1-2 days. Rather than stick with one video host, they are placing the videos on every host. Blip is their featured partner, one of the presenters had a Blip wallet. On the technical side, there is a very good implementation of WordPress that seems to be pushing the envelope.

Tonight was the March installment of the NY Video Meetup. The idea is to bring together people interested in online video. I found tonight boring at best. In any event, here are videos of each presentation with my Twitter recaps. Unfortunately due to the layout of Webster Hall, the videos will seem like you are sitting in the first row of a movie theater. 

SeeToo

Check out my discussion with founder Yoav Ilan from late 2007. View the SeeToo site.

Neovids

They are an Internet video production and distribution company – they showed some mock Web 2.0 company "Slikstr" they created an entire persona for — Web site, blog, YouTube page, etc. Would have rather had them speak about their company and capabilities than show videos.

ReviewBasics

ReviewBasics seems like an interesting tool – allows you to jointly markup a document with edits and needed changes. As the presenters noted, it works well for agencies as they review documents and prototypes with clients. There was a question about comparisons to ConceptShare. From what I can tell, ConceptShare is further ahead in innovation. RB did note that chat is in private beta and audio and video integration is coming soon.

PermissionTV

PermissionTV is Boston-based (couldn’t we find another NY company?). It’s a B2B video host that can customize their player for each client. Compares with Brightcove and Maven, presenter noted, "the big difference between us and Brightcove is that we are focused on innovation." Company has been around 3 years and is heavily funded.

MobLogic

I’ve decided not to post the Moblogic video of this demo as all they basically did was show a clip and explain that the site is built with WordPress. I was excited to learn WAY more about how CBS views Internet video and their plans for expansion, monetization, etc, etc. Instead we got 3 minutes of Lindsay.

Tonight was the last NY Video Meetup of 2007. There were major technical issues throughout the evening which forced one presenter to next month and kept us focused on the Wiffiti board for half of the time and doing individual intros for another piece of the evening. Frankly I was bored so my recaps below are short and blunt. Below are the videos for each presentation. I will allow this as normally the Video Meetups are quite good.

ModMyLife

I could swear I’ve seen this demo for ModMyLife before. The basic idea. They have actors who they don’t pay act out stunts in NYC that the audience decides on. It’s cute, not sure if it’s the next killer idea but it’s a good time waster. They won’t let the actors do anything illegal or "dumb" so not sure how far they will go. But they do have “digg-like” voting.

Redlasso

Redlasso lets you take clips from other sources and put them together and then save or upload the final clip. They also monitor stats on where the files are stored. Questions around copyright and monetization came up – he had no concrete answers on either.

OriginDigital

The sponsor of the event – they showed off their Odaptor product. You upload videos, it converts them, makes an xml, makes various formats and can send them to various providers. Didn’t really see anything unique or new – though it seemed very smooth in interface.

Sportsbone.tv

The only content creator of the evening, Sportsbone.tv creates video shows about football with a "funny" twist using lots of props it seems. A couple bits were funny. A woman in the audience suggested they do the shows live as the football game is in progress, I thought that was a nifty idea. Ten friends from college create this – each one focuses on another aspect of the business.

Tonight I attended what I believe is the 2nd largest NY (tech) Meetup group – the NY Video Meetup. The group continues to get larger month over month and I am guessing 200ish came out tonight. Tonight’s presenters were: HeyCosmo, Joost, 5min and blip.tv. I am assuming that the Ustream recorded show will be available later this evening.

Before I provide some comments on the demos, tonight I had the chance to meet one of the hottest video show hosts today, Gary Vaynerchuk. Gary runs a daily video show called WineLibrary.TV. I wrote about Gary on my Vimeo vs. Viddler post and Gary has been on mainstream tv (Tonight Show and Ellen) recently and his video shows continue to explode in visitors.

So many times when techies talk about video bloggers it’s always the same crowd. There are plenty of great video bloggers outside the tech market. If you plan to get into the video blogging space, check out WLTV. Gary has 50k+ viewers daily and what’s more important is that each day he has 300+ comments on his video. And what’s great is that even though Gary owns a large wine store, he never “forces” viewers to buy from him (yet I am sure they do!). Anyway it was great to meet him this evening.

And now on with the recap.

HeyCosmo

First up was HeyCosmo. The demo was pretty tough to sit through yet it worked, which means the product sells itself. The guy who presented (I didn’t catch his name) is the brother of the CEO who was unable to make it so I can’t be too negative about the presentation :). He was hilarious. HeyCosmo offers a variety of applications on a community video platform. One of the demo’d apps was a live texas holdem app. I have to say, it’s hot. Each player uses a webcam and so it’s as close to sitting at the same table as possible. They are working on Sudoko which is in development currently. I am working on getting some invites for CN readers.

Joost

David Clark, North American VP presented Joost and if you haven’t tried Joost recently, I would suggest you give them another try. The app has lots of improvements from say early summer versions. David noted that they are a small company with big ambitions and they want to create a product that people love to use. Currently they host 15,000 shows and just launched a Facebook widget. I asked about their thoughts on Hulu and David responded, “We like Hulu – and we are looking to move to live and Web down the road as well”.

The Joost advertising platform combines all of the current Inernet technologies serving approximately 1.5 minutes of video ads per hour along with other interactive ads. From a peer-to-peer standpoint, currently 70% of the bandwidth comes from p2p and 30% from their server farm.

5min

By now I am guessing most of the CN readers have seen the Israeli actor who discusses how to get VC funding – if not, I have embedded it at the end of this post. 5min is currently located in Israel but is planning to open a NY office in a month. They currently have one million unique visitors for October with 700-1000 uploaded videos per month. Their motto is “helping each other to share knowledge”. The idea is simple – you are an expert at something. You create a video about that knowledge that’s less than 5 minutes in length and upload it to 5min.

Their business model is to get “sponsored knowledge” where say Absolut would sponsor videos on how to create a great martini or LA Fitness might sponsor videos on how to lose the freshman 15. It’s an innovative revenue model.

Blip.TV

Co-founder Justin Day presented Blip.tv. Blip has really picked up steam since their partnership with Rocketboom earlier this summer. Basically Blip is for show creators who create episodic content. Not much else to say here – though Alec from For Your Imagination noted that with Blip you can “replace” a video which is something you can’t do on most of the other services.

Check out my photos on Flickr

Quick note – tonight’s NY Video Meetup is going to stream coverage of the demos live on Ustream. Check out the channel here. The presentations begin at 7pm Eastern and include: Joost, Blip.TV and 5min.com. Should be an exciting night and I bet the name Hulu will be sounded several times.

The next NY Video Meetup is on October 30th and is well worth attending. Check out our previous event coverage and below is the list of presenters. Space is limited so register quickly if you plan to attend.

1. Joost – David Clark, GM North America
2. Blip.tv – Mike Hudack, Co-founder & CEO
3. 5min.com – Ran Harnevo, Co-founder & CEO
4. HeyCosmo.com – James Im, Founder & CEO

The event is held at the For Your Imagination studios which is the same location the CenterNetworks Mixer was held at. What an all-star lineup! I am really looking forward to hearing from Joost and 5min. Looks like the 30th will be a busy day with the Future of Business Media conference all day and then this meetup all night!

This evening I attended my first NY Video 2.0 Meetup. Quite a large crowd (about 150ish) with most people raising their hand that this was their first video meetup. About half of the audience work for large companies (AOL, T-Mobile, etc.) and half from smaller companies and startups. A handful are from recruiting firms and a few agency people – yet not as many as I would have thought. If you are in NYC and looking for a job in the new Web space, this meetup might be for you.

Here are my notes… 

• Gary (no last name) noted that his video blog is the best, even better than Ze Frank – winelibrary.com - though I had a chance to chat with him afterwards, seems pretty cool
• Brightcove had 2 people – they seem to be pretty hot in the NYC meetup scene. — not sure why they didn't answer the questions that related to how AOL Video is working with Brightcove
• The idea of the meetup is to bring people together who are in the video scene somehow.
• Viddler recorded the event and I can post audio if someone prefers audio.

There were 4 companies presenting and here are my notes and general comments related to each one. 

Rob Sandie – Viddler (viddler.com)

• We are the best way to host video online
• Our forte is longer and larger video
• Ability to seek anywhere in the video at anytime unlike YouTube
• Rob speaks about timed comments and how this differentiates and is innovative
• He shows the dashboard
• Uses 3 volunteers to show the live recording feature
• Shows their new video commenting feature – this is very cool!
• Check out our other Viddler coverage

Shay David – Kaltura (kaltura.com)

• Starts with a video which had a high production value but didn't say much frankly
• Today they are showing some brand new features
• Tagline – It's the place to create together
• 1% produce 9% might comment, 89% sit back and watch, at Kaltura they want everyone to be part of the show
• Kaltura works by allowing friends to submit videos about a topic, then the producer puts the final video together
• Flash editor – works like a simple timeline
• It seems very user-friendly
• It allows you to pull images from Flickr using CC licensing
• Their hope is to provide a platform to allow people to collaborate on creating content
• They are looking at advertising and commercial licensing for sites

Gino Yoham - AOL Video (video.aol.com)

• Starts with a discussion about something – couldn't seem to get on track with what he was saying
• He speaks about "truveo" and their search product – sounds like AOL acquired them
• Their portal is just an index of video – videos play inside AOL (not sure I like that)
• Next he shows their widget and all of the big video companies are using truveo search
• Overall it looks like AOL's video strategy is to be a search engine for video – I can't say that I was "wow'd" by this presentation. I would love to understand if this is the overall strategy on video or just the search piece? 

James Tilsner from Tilzy.tv (tilzy.tv)

• They just launched – 2 people in the company
• Their vision is to be an entertainment guide to the Web
• They identify what they think is the new entertainment media
• Exploration and discovery – they built a surfing guide experience
• Basically it is a way to tag the brand
• It's an editorial – not exactly sure what James meant by this
• We want to cover this new entertainment medium like Entertainment Weekly would
• Believes it is important to drive traffic to the producer's brand
• My commentary would be that this product needs a lot of work before it can be mainstream. The audience had some good ideas for these guys, I hope they were listening!
• I think the concern here is that it's a completely manual process but could become a directory of video… but what gets in? how quickly can they get content in there. Would the VT massacre have been listed in news as quickly as it was on CNN?
• The two guys have great positive attitudes and that should help them as they grow