Tribune Media, a unit of media conglomerate Tribune company, has acquired video search engine CastTV, according to a release issued today. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the acquisition includes all of CastTV’s technology, products, intellectual property and staff, including co-founders Edwin Ong and Alex Vikati, who founded the San Francisco-based company together in 2006.
CastTV, which launched at TechCrunch40 in 2007, as a comprehensive video search engine. → Read More
Session one as follows, including our live notes. Powerset Powerset is a natural language search engine that can use everyday phrases and grammer to conduct more accruate web searches by understanding the search query and the pages it indexes. Parsing phrases and grammer theoretically produces better results because the egine has a better understanding of the searches intended goal than with just keywords alone. For instance, a Powerset search for “politicians who died in office” returns information on the subset of politicians who died in office, rather than a group of pages that ranked highly with the phrase. Powerset presentation begins: talk about semantics and search, “we parse the web”. Natural language search. Announcement: Powerset labs, where users can explore tech demos, share ideas, feed the learning engine and “improve your search karma”. Demonstration of natural language queries with a social voting style feature. Touches of other sites Demonstration of Powermouse (see screen shot), information is pulled from Wikipedia into a semantic index. TC40 attendees will be amongst first in private beta. Overall: tough sell in the search vertical, but interesting take. Great start to TC40. Cognitive Code Cognitive Code makes artificially intelligent user interfaces. Their main product is the SILVIA (Symbolically Isolated, Linguistically Variable, Intelligence Algorithms) platform, which can add a human-like artificially intelligent interface to nearly any digital device. The SILVIA platform can learn and converse in natural language to carry out tasks for the user. Potential applications include children’s digital toys and personal assistants. Flagship product: “silvia platform” Symoblically isolated linguistically variable intelligence algorithm. Laymens terms: AI. Demonstration with AI on the screen, the AI system is having a conversation with one of the Cognitive Code. A couple of bugs in the live demo, but pretty cool. Uses include embedding in toys, phones, websites “unlimited uses.” First major target market is “smart toys.” Clever idea, if they can pull it off we’re seeing the future of toys. CastTV CastTV is trying to build one of the web’s best video search engines by creating a rich index of contextual data about videos and an easy to use interface for searching them. The engine pieces together context for a video based on it’s metadata, the content surrounding it, and the content of pages linking to the video. Notably, CastTV also searches paid video searches such as Apple iTunes. Their user interface allows users to sort results by shows (to → Read More
It may seem weird, but I’ve been eagerly awaiting the day when I see ads in my viral video. eMarketer expects online video advertising to nearly double in 2008 to $1.3 billion, but no one’s really nailed a scalable ad platform for video. However, Google’s been quietly testing their own system and there are a bunch of other startups tackling it as well. There are a couple key issues they’re all struggling with as they try and generate the greatest amount of ad revenue. There’s still some uncertainty about where to put the ads (pre/post/interstitial?). Even the type or length of the ad is up for debate. A recent study found longer ads were more effective at branding, while conventional wisdom has cast doubt on users sitting through the longer plugs. After deciding on the format, determining the content of the video in order to generate relevant ads is yet another tough problem. It’s also a dire matter for big brands that don’t want to risk being associated with inflammatory content. Finally, these ad platforms will need publishers, advertisers and a marketplace to trade in. Here’s a look at what people are doing in video advertising: Definitely the team to watch, YouTube is treading carefully, experimenting with text ads running along the bottom of the video that users can click on for a full video ad. They’re going to be testing the system with some of their top content producers and word on the street is that the terms are pretty good. Revver splits ad revenue 50/50 with publishers. They run ads at the end of viral videos, which might mean that people are still paying close attention after watching the main content. However, this also means they lose some precious real estate to help drive traffic to other videos on their network like YouTube does. Revver filters the content themselves, tying in the appropriate ads. Similar to Revver, VideoEgg helps publishers deliver and monetize their video inventory. It’s a very hands on approach suitable for larger brands that have tight control over the quality and context of their content. They serve up over 20 million videos daily across their EggNetwork. Ads show up alongside lead ins to other videos as well. ScanScout’s technology scans each video and determines content, with ads delivered contextually to match each scene. They run text ads along the bottom of the videos based on → Read More
At Supernova’s 2007 Connected Innovators session, 12 young startups (well, 13 if you count the fake one planted to keep the audience on their toes), pitched their products to an audience at the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco with punditry by Kevin Werbach and Michael Arrington and supporting color from Josh Kopelman, Julia Hanna Farris and Paul Kedrosky. Here’s a look at the 13 companies: adap.tv AdaptiveBlue AggregateKnowledge CastTV Critical Metrics Jangl Pando Networks SodaHead Spock Wize ZapMeals ZenZui Zing Adap.tv – They’re like adsense for video, tying contextual text ads based on the content of a video. When videos play, Adap.tv digs up relevant Amazon products and Looksmart ads to populate an ad bar on the bottom of the video at key moments. They use tags and other meta data, as well as speech to text translations to find out what the video is about. AdaptiveBlue – Makers of the Blue Organizer, a Firefox bookmarking and tagging add-on that parses web pages, adding contextual information where appropriate. For instance, if you go to a web page about a band, Blue Organizer’s right-click menu will show you more info about the band drawn from sites like Odeo or Wikipedia. The plugin also has smart links that let you easily push the link to services like Digg or LibraryThing. More coverage of the recent feature additions here. Aggregate Knowledge – One of the more established companies at the event, they work with online commerce sites to provide personalized recommendations by looking at user’s collective behavior. They just closed a large round of financing and are rumored to be profitable after a little over a year in operation. CastTV – A video search engine that pieces together context for a video based on it’s metadata, the content surrounding it, and the content of pages linking to the video. The service performed well in our earlier review. They recently raised a $3.1 million round of financing from DFJ. Critical Metrics – A music recommendation service that aggregates music reviews from around the web. Each song includes an audio and optional Youtube sample and purchasing options from services like Yahoo Music, iTunes, or Rhapsody. Jangl – They specialize in anonymous phone communication. A Jangl is a real phone number lets people call you with knowing your real number. The first time someone calls you they have to leave a message and request permission → Read More
Truveo, which was acquired by AOL in early 2006, is considered to be one of the best video search engines on the Internet. It looks beyond metadata attached to the video file itself and explores the content on the website around the video – resulting in more data to index and better search results. The traffic figures support this. Comscore reports that the site has 40 million monthly unique visitors and is growing at about a 50%/month rate. Truveo says this is a combination of their approach to search as well as the fact that copyright holders are becoming more diligent about pulling down unauthorized uploads on YouTube and other sites. The result is that YouTube is no longer the single place to find good video clips. People are turning to search to find Daily Show clips on the Comedy Central website, for example, instead of just looking for them on Youtube. The company is also partnering outside of AOL to get broader distribution for the engine. Brightcove, Clevver, CSTV, Flock, Pageflakes, PureVideo, Qwest, Search.com, Sportingo, Netvibes, Widgetbox and YourMinis all now use Truveo for video search, joining existing partners AOL Video, AOL Search, Excite, Infospace. There’s a new kid on the block, though, called CastTV, which recently announced a $3.1 million Series A round of financing from Draper Fisher Jurvetson. They haven’t launched yet, but the results from demos show it to be as good or better than Truveo. Given that AOL already owns Truveo, look for a quick acquisition of CastTV, probably by Google, if the technology is as good as the demos suggest. → Read More
San Francisco-based CastTV, a video search service that is yet to launch, announced a $3.1 million round of financing from Draper Fisher Jurvetson this morning. We first wrote about the company, which is led by husband and wife team Edwin Ong and Alex Vikati, last October. See our post and screenshots here. AOL arguably has the best video search technology through their acquisition of Truveo in early 2006. Google also has a growing video search engine that includes both Google Video and YouTube videos. Since many videos posted on the internet contain little or no associated meta data to describe what’s in the video, services like AOL’s Truveo and CastTV look at surrounding text to help determine what the video is about, and make it more searchable. Truveo does a great job with this. CastTV is much better based on the demos I’ve seen. Alex and Edwin won’t disclose all of the technology behind the service, but part of the trick is that they are able to track videos through multiple links on a site, collecting metadata along the way. And they also parse the code on the video files as well, gathering additional information about the content. If tags are available for the videos (such as YouTube tags), these are indexed as well. The final step is actually even more interesting – CastTV will take the data they are able to collect about a video and search the web in general for additional data. If there’s a close enough match, CastTV adds that information to the content metadata. And unlike other video search tools, CastTV indexes movies and shows from iTunes and other for-pay services. The company says they will enter private beta next month; full launch will come this summer. → Read More
Husband and wife team Edwin Ong and Alex Vikati first met at Stanford, and then founded a company together called Filefish in 1999. They raised $4.6 million in venture funding in 2000, and the company was acquired by Oracle in 2003. Now they are preparing to launch their second company, CastTV. It is an ambitious effort focused entirely on video search. And that’s not a bad place to be. As we’ve recently written, rich media search is a very hard problem to solve. A notable success in video search is Truveo, which launched in 2005 and was acquired by AOL in early 2006 for an estimated $50 million or more. Truveo had a unique way of searching video content. First, finding video can be hard, and Truveo does a good job of locating video on indexed web pages. Second, Truveo looks at text surrounding video links, as well as metadata included in the video file itself, and makes intelligent assumptions about the video. CastTV is taking many of the successes of Truveo and building on them. Search itself is significantly better than any other video search we’ve seen, and the user interface, which includes really smart filters (more on that below), makes it easier to find what you’re looking for, fast. Edwin and Alex won’t disclose all of the technology behind the service, but part of the trick is that they are able to track videos through multiple links on a site, collecting metadata along the way. And they also parse the code on the video files as well, gathering additional information about the content. If tags are available for the videos (such as YouTube tags), these are indexed as well. The final step is actually even more interesting – CastTV will take the data they are able to collect about a video and search the web in general for additional data. If there’s a close enough match, CastTV adds that information to the content metadata. And unlike other video search tools, CastTV indexes movies and shows from iTunes and other for-pay services. All of this doesn’t mean much unless the search performs well. In tests I was able to find full versions of movies and tv shows that simply didn’t show up in Yahoo, Google or Truveo search. A free episode of 24 at a Myspace Burger King page. Full versions of Pirates of the Caribbean 2 with price → Read More
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