I was Digital Hollywood today rubbing elbows with content creators and distributors in San Jose. On the agenda were several entrepreneurial forums where local startups pitched their companies to an audience of competitors, peers and venture capitalists. Given the words “Digital” and “Hollywood” can cover a lot of ground all of the companies generally fit the themes of the conference. I saw some interesting companies, some of whom haven’t been profiled yet on this site. Here’s a rundown: TurnHere TurnHere was founded by Brad Inman who founded HomeGain. Staying within the community arena but moving to the world of travel, TurnHere creates and distributes travel and “local experience” films. They employ 2000 independent filmmakers around the world, with 250 trained in the 90 second “Turn Here” style, which includes a local as narrator to capture the right flavor of a place. The firm experimented with different lengths, but is gravitating towards 90 second to 2 minute features in our short attention span world. The business model is centered on local advertising and advert films in the profiled regions. I watched several films in both genres and they were great. I am really impressed by the site and the films. The food makes you salivate, the sites make you want to hop in your car. RallyPoint Started by Jeff Allen, Managing Partner of Rocket Systems, who is taking a break to be CEO, RallyPoint aims to bring the Internet (and interactivity) to your TV. Inspired by a desire to talk smack to friends while watching sporting events, it will offer an array of products like chat, voting, game show participation, pop up alerts, auction watch through applets overlaid on broadcasts. They will create their own device and hope to be integrated with other devices as well. Another device in the living room scares me, but the company is in its very early stages, so they’ll presumably be testing the concept. They plan to offer their service through subscription, targeting the market of people getting score updates on their SMS phones. Sounds like Wink and some other startups from another era, maybe the time is now. Mediazone Funded by Naspers, a large South African media company, but based in the Silicon Valley, Mediazone is a secure P2P video delivery platform that supports media portals and live premier events. They recently did live coverage of 300 matches on 9 courts for Wimbledon. There’s → Read More