If you’ve seen the name Nyoombl before, it’s for one of two reasons. First, it’s a really weird way to spell a word that sounds like “Nimble”. Or second, they launched at DEMO last spring as one of the 65 startups. At the time, they were working on a dead-simple solution for videoconferencing on your television. But that space is both tricky and now crowded with the likes of Cisco. So about five months ago, founder Oladayo Olagunju decided it was time for a don’t-call-it-a-pivot-pivot. He decided to take what he had learned about the video conferencing space and transfer it over to a new, unexplored area. And his team has been working hard on this new Nyoombl ever since.
But it’s not ready yet. And Olagunju is reluctant to share much about their plans until it’s ready. But here’s what we do know: it’s going to be a completely new service that’s a sort of hybrid of Skype and YouTube. In other words, it will allow any two people to take a video conversation and share it with the world, for all to see on the web. But think: debates and interviews, rather than straight up chats. “We are a broadcasting technology company, not a communications tool,” Olagunju says.
Bigger picture, Olagunju says that the aim is to breakdown the walls that you see around the majority of important conversations being had today on places like cable television. “We hope to bring the entire notion of a studio setup worth millions of dollars and compress it into a laptop,” he says.
And he has some good people advising him on how to do that, including entrepreneur Adam Rifkin, Sun Microsystems co-founder Scott McNealy, and venture capitalist Lara Druyan. Nyoombl has also received funding from one ex-Facebook executive, though Olagunju declines to say who just yet as the round isn’t fully closed.
Nyoombl plans to start inviting a very limited amount of people to try out their service shortly, you can sign up here. Olagunju says that they’re going to take the roll-out slow so they don’t overwhelm the servers with all the video streaming required to make this work. For now, you can sign up here.
Nyoombl is currently a team of three people working out of Palo Alto.