TechCrunch exclusive – If you’d never heard about KIT digital before, you will after today.

The provider of cloud-based video asset management solutions has acquired not one, not two but three social software and video companies.

The company has acquired New York City-based KickApps, Paris-based Kewego, and San Francisco-based Kyte, for aggregate consideration of approximately $77.2 million.

In conjunction with the acquisitions, KickApps CEO Alex Blum has been appointed to the new position of Global COO of KIT digital, while KickApps CFO David Lapter will assume the role of SVP Finance and Administration within KIT digital.

KIT digital, which delivers video asset management solutions for multi-screen delivery, says the acquisitions are meant to enhance its existing product offering while “growing market share across geographies and client verticals”.

KIT digital’s chairman and CEO, Kaleil Isaza Tuzman, comments:

“We are committed to ensuring that our ‘VX-one’ video management platform has market-leading functionality that helps clients realize value across the video distribution value chain, from securing and capturing the right content to delivering it across multiple channels and via social communities.

We are intent on becoming the one-stop shop for medium and large-sized corporations’ video needs, delivering IP video management services from the eyes behind the camera shooting the video to the person watching it on any device—from ‘lens-to-lens’.”

Alex Blum, CEO of social software startup KickApps, will become KIT digital’s worldwide chief operating officer. Blum was an early pioneer of online video and interactive TV as VP of products at AOL, and was previously president and COO of JumpTV.

Blum will be responsible for the overall business operations of the company, including product management, R&D, client operations, and business administration. He will be based in KIT digital’s headquarters in Prague, Czech Republic, will apparently also spend significant time at the company’s newly acquired R&D centers in New York and San Francisco.

So why KickApps, Kewego and Kyte – apart from the fact their names all start with a ‘k’?

According to KIT digital executives, KickApps adds significant technology and product synergies to the company, its Open Source Media Framework (OSMF) App Studio in particular.

The latter product will serve as a unification point for all publishing-layer technologies across KIT digital’s family of products and enable its clients to leverage KIT’s infrastructure to deliver Flash and HTML5 deployments no matter which module of the VX-one platform they have currently deployed.

KickApps 450+ clients include NBC Universal, American Express, Hearst, Live Nation, Liverpool Football, Phoenix Suns, Scripps Network, Simon & Schuster and Viacom. KickApps is said to derive in excess of $12 million in annualized revenues, with the large majority derived from recurring software license fees from its software solutions.

KickApps has approximately 60 staff members, and raised $32 million in venture funding.

As for Kewego, this French company was founded in 2003 and – much like KIT digital – provides IP-based, multi-screen video asset management solutions for managing, broadcasting and monetizing videos on PCs, mobile phones, iPads, connected TVs, gaming consoles and other Internet-connected devices.

Kewego is also said to enhance KIT’s enterprise offering through onsite, digital signage deployments.

Kewego reported fiscal 2010 revenues of $10.2 million, the large majority also derived from recurring software license fees.

The company adds more than 400 clients across 16 countries, including Atos Origin, L’Equipe, Microsoft, Pages Jaunes and Volkswagen.

Michel Meyer, co-founder and CEO of Kewego, will assume the role of senior vice president, product management, and Olivier Heckman, general director and co-founder of Kewego, will become VP sales for Western and Southern Europe at KIT digital (including coverage of France, Benelux, Spain, Portugal and Italy).

Paris, Grenoble (France) and Madrid will continue to be home to Kewego’s approximately 60 employees, with Paris becoming an integral part of KIT digital’s existing Europe, Middle East & Africa (EMEA) sales and account management operations.

Kewego raised $19.4 million in funding.

As for Kyte, this company has been around since 2006 and offers a cloud-based publishing platform that enables companies to deliver live and on-demand video experiences to websites, mobile devices and connected TVs. Kyte was acquired as KIT digital plans to leverage Kyte’s proprietary platform and application frameworks to serve KIT’s global client base.

KIT digital says Kyte also brings key additions to the KIT digital’s management team as well, including Erik Abair, CTO and co-founder of Kyte, and Gannon Hall, Kyte’s COO.

Abair will join KIT’s product development team as senior director of software development, while Hall will become KIT’s senior vice president of global marketing, where he will oversee the company’s outbound marketing, communications and demand generation efforts. Abair will remain based in San Francisco, while Hall will relocate to KIT’s Prague headquarters.

Kyte reported fiscal 2010 revenues of $3.7 million, derived primarily from SaaS platform fees. Kyte adds nearly 100 clients, including CBS, Clear Channel, FOX News, MTV, Walt Disney Company, Nokia, Publicis, Swatch, Oprah Winfrey, and ESPN Europe.

Kyte raised $23.4 million in funding.

We’re still digesting all the news and plan to talk to some key players shortly to gain more insight. Stay tuned.

One thing I want to note straight away, though: Kyte, Kewego and KickApps raised over $74 million in venture funding combined, so a $77.2 million aggregate acquisition price seems terribly low. We’ll update when we learn more.

Update: more details about the deal terms:

The aggregate consideration paid for the acquisitions of KickApps, Kewego and Kyte was approximately US$77.2 million on a cash-free, debt-free basis. This consideration is inclusive of time-based and performance payments, but excludes certain incentive compensation programs for the personnel of acquired companies, which are estimated not to exceed US$4.0 million over a period of years, in a mix of cash and equity.

Approximately US$62.3 million will be paid in KIT digital common stock (based on the closing market price on Friday, January 28, 2011), with approximately US$14.8 million paid in cash. In aggregate, the transactions are expected to be accretive on both a 2010 revenue and EBITDA multiple basis, while meeting or exceeding KIT digital’s EBITDA margin target of at least 24% for 2011.

The total number of shares expected to be issued over time in association with the three acquisitions is approximately 4,611,346 of which 96% are subject to staggered resale restrictions between 12 and 24 months.

Following the completion of these acquisitions, including payment of deal-related fees and charges as well as payments of approximately $4.2 million in net positive working capital adjustments, management estimates KIT digital will have approximately 37.9 million common shares outstanding and approximately US$115 million in cash.

When Steve Jobs tells the technology industry to get in line, it gets in line pretty quick. All the initial hair-pulling and angst surrounding Apple’s decision to not support Flash on the iPad is already mattering less and less. At least for video, most of the major online video platforms such as Brightcove and Ooyala are supporting HTML5 playback in the iPad browser. YouTube might eventually get there as well.

Now Kyte is jumping on the HTML5 bandwagon. Kyte videos will stream in an HTML5 player in the iPad browser using the same embed code that triggers a Flash player on other computers. But Kyte is also going to release a software developer kit (SDK) in the next couple weeks which will let its media partners create apps specifically for the iPad. The SDK will also let them create versions of the same apps for the iPhone and the iPod Touch. This will replace the iPhone framework Kyte released last year.

The SDK will customize apps for the larger screen of the iPad, allowing for a larger video player and more room for chat and show guides. In the mockup above from Om Records, you can see how there is more room for the various elements of the app on the iPad.

Kyte’s main customers are media brands, music bands, and brands such as ABC, Fox News, MTV, Lady Gaga, Alicia Keys, and Calvin Klein who want to publish videos to their Websites and mobile apps all from the same system. Kyte’s new Apple “universal” SDK will allow developers to create apps for both the iPhone and the iPad, and send out the correct version depending in the user’s device. They can also charge once and deliver different versions of the app to multiple Apple devices.

Live video streaming on the web is becoming more and more popular, and for news organizations and brands who don’t want to shell out thousands of dollars a day for a satellite truck there is another option. At SXSW, Kyte is going to release a new product called Kyte LivePro Unwired with Spin magazine.

LivePro is a computer in a backpack connected to six data cards all uploading live video at the same time, balancing the load across three different carriers (Sprint, AT&T, and Verizon). It is made by LiveU and Kyte will be reselling it to its larger customers. (LiveStream uses the same technology in its Livepack).

Kyte CEO Daniel Graf came by my office the other day to show me the technology (see video below). It is incredible that a backpack can now replace a satellite truck. You won’t get HD quality, but you can get broadcast-TV quality, and it is certainly better than uploading video from your mobile phone, which Kyte also allows. He says that typical livestreaming rates with the backpack are 700 kilobits to 1 megabit per second.

Some customers using Kyte’s online video platform include Fox News, MTV, and Calvin Klein. Graf says Kyte is now streaming 100 million videos a month across its network, up from 50 million last summer.

The app, which is $4.99, is very simple. You boot it up, log in (or create a new account), and you’re taken to a screen where you put in a title for your “show” (what you’re about to broadcast). Below that are links to add video, a photo, and/or a link. If you choose to add a video you can easily take a new video, or use one you’ve already shot with your iPhone 3GS. The video capture functionality is fast and works just as well as the iPhone’s own video capturing app.

But the real killer features of the Kyte app are its upload speed and even more so, the quality of its videos. While I’ve already gone in depth about why I think video is the killer feature for the iPhone 3GS, based mainly on how well the videos shot on the device look, and how easily they are uploaded to YouTube. But in testing this app out today, I’d say that Kyte’s offering is at least as compelling from an ease-of-use perspective. The video upload was about as speedy as it was to YouTube, but it didn’t feature the annoying rendering time of the YouTube videos I’ve uploaded. And the video quality is noticeably better on Kyte than on YouTube when uploaded from the iPhone 3GS (see below).

http://www.kyte.tv/f/ch/320318&tbid=k_1&p=s

One downside to recording the videos in the Kyte app is that they don’t save to your video library on the phone. The other downside is the price: As I mentioned, $4.99. But that’s to make it clear that Kyte is intending this app for its commercial publishers, we’re told. But any Kyte users is able to use it and really, $4.99 isn’t a bad price for a video app that works this well.

This offering is the latest in Kyte’s mobile strategy with regards to the iPhone. Last month, it rolled out a series of branded iPhone apps. Of course, as a live-streaming service, Kyte would love to be able to live-stream from the iPhone 3GS, but that’s still not allowed yet. Hopefully that will change one day.

I’ll start with the most exciting one imho: Kyte, the live video streaming enabler, is making its way to Android next September, likely marking the first entry of its kind on the platform. It will enable you to stream whatever you’re shooting with the built-in video of apt devices live on the Internet and from mobile to mobile.

Another cool one is BookDroid, which is essentially a mobile ebook reader for any written work that can be found in Google Books. Coolness: you can use your phone’s camera to capture a book label and it will automatically detect the ISBN and crawl the database for the digital version.

Also in the works is an Android app for Rummble, a location-aware social search and discovery engine for places that hails from the UK but delivers worldwide.

Finally, there’s TransDroid, which is a text-to-speech / speech recognition app for Android. The latter one is the only one that is already live on Android Market, the other apps should all be ready by September this year.

In an age when anyone with a video-capable cell phone can have their own TV channel on the Web, it is still the celebrities and rock stars who are getting all the views (just as on Twitter they get the most followers). Kyte CEO Daniel Graf knows this fact all too well. Of the 215,000 video channels on Kyte, nearly all are created by consumers, but only about 1,000 account for more than 90 percent of the mobile videos streamed via the service. And those 1,000 channels are invariably the work of professionals or the cell-phone videos of famous people such as musicians Lady Gaga (iTunes link) and Soulja Boy (iTunes link)

In April, Kyte streamed 50 million videos across the Web, mobile devices, and social networks. Just to put those 50 million video streams into perspective, that is half the number of videos streamed in March, 2009 by AOL, the tenth ranked video site in the U.S. (Hulu, which is No, 3, streamed 380 million videos).

Today, Kyte is launching iPhone apps for partners including MTV, the NBA, Spin Magazine, the rock band No Doubt, and the Los Angeles radio station KCRW, which is using the app to highlight videos of bands playing live in its studios. Some of these apps are tailored to specific events such as the MTV Movie Awards and the NBA Playoffs (iTunes link). Kyte creates iPhone apps as a turnkey service, with the ability to add different modular features to each app. These features include video shows based on mobile Kyte uploads; blog, news, and Twitter feeds; live chat; a presence indicator showing how many other people are currently in the app; music or video downloads via the iTunes store; location-aware event listings for tour dates and other listings, mobile Web access, and custom modules such as basketball scores

Kyte is taking off, but not because of user-generated videos. Rather it is trying to cash in on the premium slice of video content out there, much like Hulu is for Web video. The difference is that Kyte creates consistent branded video experiences across Websites, social networks, and mobile devices. Graf doesn’t see Kyte competing so much against Qik and UStream on the mobile live streaming video front as it does against Brightcove in the enterprise video publishing. Pitches Graf: “We are cheaper than Brightcove and you get mobile as well and Twitter and Facebook.”

Kyte wants to become the one-stop shop for major talent and media brands, wrapping their Websites and iPhone apps around mobile video. My problem with the apps is that they are only as good as the content they showcase. The iPhone apps are very consumption-oriented. For instance, Twitter is treated as nothing more than a straight, one-way feed instead of turning letting fans Tweet back from within the app.

In the video below, which I took last week when Graf visited my office, he talks about the new iPhone apps, how the Kyte platform ties together mobile, Web, social Networks, and Twitter, and how he sees Brightcove as his biggest competition:

Live video startup Ustream is making a big push into mobile. Today it is launching a mobile business division, as well as a new set of mobile video broadcasting apps (which can be found here, after login). Right now, the apps work on a wide variety of Nokia phones, including the N95, and on the iPhone, but only jailbroken ones. Alas, the company is still waiting for approval from Apple to release the app through iTunes. Meanwhile, its view-only iPhone app for watching live video streams is approaching one million downloads.

The broadcasting app, however, is what we are excited about. It includes integrated chat, audience polling, and GPS mapping. The polling lets broadcasters ask their audience what they want to see or what actions they should take in a live broadcast situation. Another key feature: mobile video broadcasters can send out a message via Twitter or Facebook to their audience to tell them when they are about to start streaming live. (See video below). Under the hood, Ustream has developed its own low-latency streaming technology which reduces the amount of transcoding that needs to be done on the server as well as the amount of buffering that needs to be done on the phone.

Ustream wants to bring its large audience for live streaming videos on the Web (it claims 15 million monthly uniques across both its site and embedded players) over to mobile phones. In the mobile video streaming race, it is fighting for position with Qik and Kyte (their official iPhone apps don’t allow for broadcasting yet either, although Qik has one for jailbroken iPhones). But this is a battle for the hearts and minds of tomorrows mobile video streamers. Taking a page from Kyte, Ustream is getting celebrities and rappers like Lil Wayne to broadcast using Ustream.

Below is a promo video showing UStream’s new mobile app on an iPhone:

http://www.ustream.tv/flash/video/1214798

Given the incredible popularity of the iPhone, many entertainers (and the studios backing them) are eager to establish a presence on Apple’s App Store, but don’t necessarily want to invest in the resources needed to independently develop their own iPhone applications. Today Kyte has launched its iPhone Apps Framework – a turn-key solution that allows Kyte partners to create applications that can include video, live chat, and monetization options with a minimal amount of development costs. Alongside the launch of the new platform, Kyte is announcing five artists from IGA records who have already released their iPhone applications, including the following free apps [all iTunes links]: The All American Rejects, Keri Hilson, Lady Gaga, The Pussycat Dolls, and Soulja Boy Tell ‘Em.

Besides Twitter feeds, RSS, and chat, Kyte also offers a listing of each artist’s most recent videos taken using Kyte.tv‘s mobile phone video apps. And, perhaps most importantly for the artists, each app features a list of links to songs in the music section of Apple’s iTunes store.

Kyte isn’t the first company to launch a platform for branded iPhone applications. Other options include Infomedia’s Mobile Syndication Solutions, through which MC Hammer built his app.

The Kyte Dashboard is a bit like Google Analytics for cell-phone video. It is filled with charts showing the number of views for each show, ad impressions, bandwidth usage, most watched shows, and the sites where the embeddable videos are watched the most.

A content view lets users see the individual video lineup for each upcoming show and change it aroubd by dragging and dropping . And the moderation tab lets users accept or reject new videos into their channel from their audience.

Below are screenshots:

So far, Kyte has been focusing on getting mobile content (videos shot on a cell phone) onto the Web. For each publisher of mobile video, many of them rock stars and rappers, Kyte creates a branded video player they can put on their Websites.

Now, with more media consumption happening right on many mobile handsets, Kyte is going the other way around and letting bands and brands turn their Kyte player into a mobile Website complete with banner advertising, chat, fan comments, ratings, and sharing features. You can see some examples here (best viewed on a mobile phone), including mobile sites for Lady Gaga and the All-American Rejects.

Kyte’s mobile sites can be seen on most phones, including the iPhone, Blackberry, and Nokia S60 series. Although, it doesn’t yet work on Android phones.

In other news, Kyte has added Google AdSense for Video as an advertising option for its customer’s to put into their video son the Web. This option is not yet available for Kyte’s mobile sites.

Hot on the heels of its competitor Qik, mobile video service Flixwagon has released an application for the iPhone 3G that allows users to stream live video from their cell phones. Qik released a similar application for the iPhone 3G yesterday. Unfortunately, like the Qik app, this will only work on jailbroken (hacked) iPhones, which severely limits the potential user base.

Here are the instructions if you’d like to install it:

-On Cydia, make sure you refresh all ‘Sources’ under the ‘Changes’ tab, and then Install Flixwagon from “Sections/Multimedia”.
-On installer 4: make sure you refresh ‘Sources’, and then install Flixwagon via “Categories/Multimedia”. The app is also available via Community resources like iSpazio.

Apple’s ban on applications using the iPhone’s camera is just one of the seemingly arbitrary restrictions the company is placing on developers. What makes the restriction especially annoying is the fact that the camera is actually designed to capture video. Some users speculate that the lack of a sanctioned video app may be because of Apple’s concerns with the iPhone’s already lackluster battery life, while others believe that the phone’s developers don’t have it very high on their priority list.
Update: A developer I’ve spoken to says that the camera buffer is simply a part of the phone developers are not given access to yet, but that this likely has more to do with creating a sandboxed environment than Apple explicitly forbidding video apps.

Either way, the fact that Apple is rejecting applications that have significant demand and no malicious qualities has frustrated users and developers alike. Apple’s lack of communication and hazy Terms of Service may cause the App Store to stagnate, as developers become wary of creating something truly innovative only to have it rejected.

Notably absent from the race to get streaming video to the iPhone is Kyte, a direct competitor to Qik and Flixwagon. Kyte may be trying to avoid any disagreements with Apple, as it already it has an Apple approved application available in the App Store (which can only handle images, not video).

So far the fund has done best investing in mobile chip companies, some of which have been acquired by ATI (BitBoys for $44 million), Broadcom (Global Locate for $143 million), and Dolby (Coding Technologies for $250 million). But it is also an investor in mobile video service Kyte. Generally, it is a alter-stage growth fund that looks for companies with a product ready to ramp up.

The new cash comes at a time when the mobile Web is generating excitement again in Silicon Valley. Most of that excitement right now surrounds the iPhone. Throwing around a little cash to encourage startups to develop cutting-edge apps for Nokia phones is not a bad strategy. The fund will also invest more heavily in China and India, where mobile growth far outstrips the U.S.

Well-known blogger Robert Scoble, who once said that he would “only use HD camcorders”, has become one of the new services’ most vocal supporters. Last month he predicted that Kyte would eventually overtake the competition, based on its interface and devices that support playback.

What he neglected to analyze was the audio and video quality of each service, which are obviously key components of media streaming. So we’ve decided to put them to the test. We’ve recruited Sarah Austin of Pop17.com, who has helped us record the same interview four times (once with each service). The questions may get a little repetitive, but at least the videos are easy on the eyes.

We’ve done everything we can to make the tests as consistent as possible. Each video was shot using the respective app’s highest quality setting on the same Nokia N95 smartphone. And we’ve used the same location, lighting, and Wi-Fi access point for each test.

Qik

Qik began testing in November 2007 with support for a limited number of Nokia smartphones. In March the site annouced a partnership with popular lifecasting site Justin.TV. The number of phones supported remains limited, but the site has recently announced support for the Windows Mobile platform (though only on a select number of phones so far), and the release of a version for jailbroken (hacked) iPhones. Qik has raised about $4 million in funding.

http://qik.com/player2.swf?streamname=693b03b100c24e508398d4443b95bf0c&vid=131447&playback=false&polling=false&user=cubrilovic&displayname=cubrilovic&safelink=cubrilovic&userlock=true&islive=&username=anonymous

Video:
Audio:
Player:

Kyte

Kyte opened its media distribution channels in April 2007, but it wasn’t until almost a year later that it launched its streaming video service. Kyte has managed to recruit a number of big-name celebrities like 50 Cent, who prominently features the player on his homepage. Of the services tested, Kyte has by far the most funding, having raised a total of over $23 million.

http://www.kyte.tv/flash.swf?v=2&uri=channels/87241/171923&embedId=49090078http://media01.kyte.tv/images/updatenotice.swf

Video:
Audio:
Player:

Flixwagon

Israel-based Flixwagon launched in a limited private alpha in January, and opened its doors to the public earlier this month. Like Qik, the company has also released a version for the iPhone, but it too is for hacked phones only. Flixwagon only has around $1 million in funding, and is reportedly seeking a second round.

http://flixwagon.com/flvPlayer.swf

Video:
Audio:
Player:

Livecast
Livecast (formerly known as ComView) supports Windows Mobile 5/6 and Symbian S60 phones. We began this experiment with the intention of comparing four services, but unfortunately, we couldn’t get Livecast to work. We successfully got the video to upload to the site, but Livecast’s video player is little more than an embedded .mov or .wmv file that never played. We managed to download a video file that worked locally, but that sort of defeats the point, doesn’t it?

Conclusions
We’re going to ignore Livecast for this comparison, because we couldn’t get its player to work at all.

In terms of video quality, Qik and Kyte are clearly a step above FlixWagon, with Kyte barely edging out Qik for the top position. FlixWagon seems to be using more compression on its videos, giving some shots a pixelated look that is especially obvious when there’s movement on camera. Kyte also seems to do this too to a lesser extent, but it’s nowhere near as bad.

Audio is another close call, but we think that Kyte takes the top spot here, too. Qik’s audio comes through clearly, though the volume is a little faint, while Kyte seems to have the ideal mix of loudness and clarity. FlixWagon comes in last – its audio has a very tinny quality that leads to an irritating staticy sound.

Preference in the embeddable players will largely come down to a matter of taste. Qik’s player has the best styling, but it lacks the embedded chat features that are found on Kyte (Qik has a chat button in the player, but it doesn’t seem to do anything). Again, FlixWagon falls short in this area – it’s overly simplistic player is neither stylish nor feature-rich.

What none of these services can offer is native, Apple-approved support for the iPhone, which is easily the most user-friendly smartphone on the market. The first app that can do this (if it’s even possible), will likely become the standard in mobile broadcasting.

We’ve been gathering videos and overviews of many of the applications and have held them until now. We received demo vidoes for dozens of applications, ranging from basic games to complex GPS-enabled social networking applications. Below are some of our favorites.

Among the apps that we didn’t include below (primarily because of their simplicity) are Recorder (a voice recorder), Movies (movie showtimes), and iMaze (a basic maze game).

Social Networking On The iPhone:

The iPhone, with cult-like users and location aware technology, is the perfect social networking device. Earlier this year we speculated that someone would emerge with a killer social networking app for the iPhone. It turns out that there are lots of contenders.

Loopt

Loopt – We’ve been tracking Loopt’s efforts around their iPhone application for months now. In April we posted early screen shots of the app without saying who had built it. Think of Loopt as a simple social network to find local businesses, message friends and send status updates with where you are (using the iPhones location technology). And a key difference with Loopt and many of the other networks below: you can meet new people who are nearby, if they choose to share that information. If everyone used this, you could see who’s single in a bar before you approach them (and flirt with them by phone first), and know the first name and job of everyone at that cocktail hour at the tech conference. We’re big fans of Loopt, and will have more news on them later today. For now, download the free application here.

Limbo

Limbo – Limbo is another geo-aware social network that behaves like a mashup of Twitter, Loopt, and Whrrl. One of the app’s most compelling features is its grid-like diagram that visually groups your friends according to what they’re doing (for example, all of your friends that are Out Drinking will be lumped together, even if they aren’t necessarily drinking in the same place). The app accomplishes this feat by forcing users to select from a predefined hierarchal list of activities (while this might sound restrictive, the list is pretty comprehensive). This categorization allows users to see what they’re friends are up to without having to sift through each of their messages.

On the geo-positioning front, Limbo allows users to interact users who are within a close radius (about a quarter mile), in a manner that is similar to Loopt. You can download the app here for free.

MySpace

MySpace – The MySpace iPhone app is everything you’d expect from a multi-billion dollar company: the app integrates seamlessly with the massive social network, allowing users to add friends, exchange messages, upload photos, and do just about anything else they could do from their computers at home. They aren’t yet integrating with the location features, but expect that in the near future. If you are a MySpace user, you’ll be using this constantly. You can download the app here for free.

Shozu

ShoZu – The ShoZu iPhone app allows users to interact with a number of social websites, including YouTube, Facebook, Flickr, and a number of others. Users can upload photos to these services, comment on other users’ profiles, and send status updates, depending on the site involved. You can download the app here for free.

Utilities and Reference:

The introduction of the iPhone app store has effectively made the iPhone the ultimate utility belt. We’re seeing no shortage of apps that aim to make life easier for users, and while many of them are a little too simplistic (how many tip calculators do we really need?), others will be godsends for some people, serving up the latest sports news, on-demand drink recipes, and restaurant recommendations.

Save Benjis

Save Benjis – Save Benjis is a shopping tool that will look up a product’s price according to its model number. Using model numbers instead of product names helps take the guesswork out of pricing comparisons (for example, it would be much easier to compare two computers with their model numbers versus a name like “MacBook Pro”). The app integrates the Safari web browser, so users can browse and purchase goods on a website from their phone if they find a better price. You can download the app here for free.

Pocket Express

Pocket Express – Pocket Express is a news and information service that is available for a number of smart phones. The app allows users to browse through news articles written by the Associated Press on topics that include politics, science, and world news. Users can also browse through sports scores, weather reports, and movie information. You can download the app here for free.

Urbanspoon

Urbanspoon – Urbanspoon brings a fun (and gimmicky) solution to choosing a restaurant for dinner. After using the phone’s GPS to detect restaurants in the area, Urbanspoon presents you with a slot machine-like listing of cuisine types and price. To activate the slot machine, you give the phone a hard shake (the accelerometers inside the phone will measure the movement). The dials will spin around a few times, and you’ll be presented with a suggested restaurant (you can shake again if you’re not satisfied). You can download the app here for free.

Cocktails

Cocktails – Cocktails is a well designed reference for “potent potables” that will put traditional bar-tending guides to shame. Users can browse through a large index of drinks, search by ingredient or drink name, and label drinks as favorites for future reference. The app also includes information about the type of serving glass to use, as well as the date that each recipe was created (there are often multiple recipes available for each drink). You can download the app here for $9.99.

ForeFlight

ForeFlight – ForeFlight is an iPhone app that is aimed towards pilots (both recreational and professional) rather than your average consumer. The app allows users to find nearby airports, maps, diagrams of airports, and lookup of plane information by tail number. The app also includes the A/FD, the Airport and Facilities Directory, which includes location data like field and approach information and location data on hotels. You can download the app here for a whopping $69.99 (the highest price in the store).

Audio and Video

App providers will make use of the 3G iPhone’s speedy network with streaming audio and video apps that will allow users to consume a near-limitless amount of content without having to sync up with their computers. Unfortunately, the iPhone is still unable to record video, so all media uploading will be limited to photos for now.

Kyte Mobile Producer

Kyte Mobile Producer – Kyte’s Mobile Producer is a mobile image uploading app. Users can upload the images they take from their iPhones directy to Kyte Channels that they’ve embedded in their blogs or onto their Facebook profile through Kyte’s facebook app. Users can also compile their images into slideshows, complete with captions and polls, which can also be played through the their Kyte Channels online. You can download the app here for free.

mdialog

mdialog – mdialog’s iPhone app allows users to browse through content that have been uploaded to the video site. The app is reminiscent of YouTube, allowing users to share and bookmark their favorite channels, leave comments, and browse through a “What’s New Section”. Users can also attach polls to their videos. You can download the app here for free.

Pandora Radio

Pandora Radio, our flat out favorite application so far, is an audio app that streams music to the iPhone over Wi-Fi, 3G, or Edge. Pandora is a popular music service that creates a “Music Genome” to analyze music a user likes and then recommend new artists. Users can enter the name of an artist or song they like, and Pandora will generate a streaming playlist, even if they haven’t created a profile. You can try out the app here for free.

Update: Here is a late addition:

Jott

Jott – Self-dubbed “the notepad you’ve always dreamed of,” the Jott iPhone app records your voice and turns it into text. You can add items to specific lists and cross them off once you don’t need to worry about them any longer. Additionally, all of your notes are backed up online. You can try out the app here for free.

Robert has been one of the earliest adopters of cell phone video, which offers the ability to stream live to the Internet, with the primary tradeoff being relatively poor video quality. He’s extensively tested all of the major emerging services in this area, including Kyte, Qik and Flixwagon, among others.

This is a post I didn’t want to write. Why? For the last six months I’ve been using Qik’s live video service off of my cell phone. I’m the top user there, with most views, most videos, and all that. I’ve used that service to take videos inside the first production Tesla, Annie Leibovitz as she showed us around her latest photos of famous people, Google press conferences, Ansel Adams’ son at the top of Glacier Point in Yosemite, Bono at the World Economic Forum, and more than 700 other videos as well.

Qik has done something remarkable: it put a TV studio in my pocket. I can get live video onto the Internet faster than I can make a phone call (Qik takes two clicks to start streaming, a phone call takes 12 clicks on my phone’s keypad). Even better, while doing a video you can watch live and you can send text chat messages to my phone while I am filming. While we were racing around Santa Monica in Elon Musk’s new Tesla (he’s the chairman of the board and was giving us a killer demo) we had hundreds of people watching my cell phone along with Jason Calacanis’ phone, which was shooting the same view from his Corvette alongside. As Elon was driving we had hundreds of people asking questions about the new Tesla. This was interactivity the world had never seen.

At the same time a company in Israel, FlixWagon, has been competing with Qik. I liked FlixWagon too. The quality on their video was slightly better than Qik’s although I went with Qik because they had a better live experience, at least on my phone. Other cell phone videographers, though, like Sarah Meyers loved Flixwagon. When I visited Israel recently I interviewed the Flixwagon guys and they are whip smart and really nice too.

Which gets me to why this is the post I never wanted to write. I have been treated absolutely wonderfully by the Qik team. They call me often, make sure I’m having a great experience, and have fixed many of the problems I have been having as I push their service into places it simply wasn’t really designed for. My interview with Annie Liebovitz, for instance, was done in a museum that had absolutely no wifi or cell phone service. So, I used up every bit of memory on my phone and gingerly carried my cell phone back outside where it started sending information again. I’ve had AT&T’s 3G service die right in the middle of many of my interviews (most troublingly right in the middle of an interview with Sun Microsystems’ CEO Jonathan Schwartz) and Qik got on those problems quickly.

Anyway, back to the fight between Kyte, Qik, and Flixwagon over your cell phone video experience. Last year I was Kyte’s top user too. Why did I switch to Qik? Because I saw that cell phone video would let me extend my brand into places no other video network was letting me get to. I was the only one doing cell phone videos from the World Economic Forum, for instance, something that got me a lot of attention and followers. I told Kyte’s CEO, Daniel Graf, tons of times over the past seven months to get video streaming into his product. At first he resisted, thinking it wasn’t that big a deal, but on Friday I finally tested it out on my cell phone and was impressed enough to give Kyte a second look.

That led me to this post. Here’s why I think Kyte will dominate over Qik and Flixwagon:

1. The distribution system that Kyte has built is much better than either Qik or Flixwagon. Translation: the embeddable player that Kyte.tv has is much better than Qik or Flixwagon, more on that in a second.
2. The chat room that Kyte has built is much better than Qik or Flixwagon and can be participated in from other cell phones, something that Qik and Flixwagon can’t do.
3. The ability to mix videos from your webcam, live videos streaming from your web cam, recorded videos from camcorders, or from places like YouTube, along with both recorded and streamed videos from your cell phone goes way beyond what Qik and Flixwagon have done today.
4. Kyte.tv can play videos on an iPhone today. Neither Qik or Flixwagon can do that.
5. Kyte.tv can play videos on a Nokia today. Both from your recordings and other people’s. Neither Qik or Flixwagon can do that.
6. Kyte.tv is partially funded and supported by Nokia. That might not sound like a big deal, but it is. Nokia is using Kyte’s service internally too, and I’m sure Nokia is giving Kyte better engineering support than it’s giving Qik or Flixwagon.
7. Kyte.tv is way ahead of Qik and Kyte in getting real mainstream celebrities like 50 cent on its service, which means its growth is way stronger.

Why do I say that Kyte’s distribution system is stronger? Well, the Kyte.tv player has some significant advantages over the Qik one.

1. When embedded it can be set to play the latest video, or a specific video. Qik can only play the specific video you embedded in (I hear they are changing this, but even if they do the second part makes this not as useful). Flixwagon’s gadget lets you show your blog’s readers other videos you’ve done, but not the chat.
2. The chat room is always the same. This makes interactivity much quicker on the Kyte.tv video player. Many of my Qik videos don’t have any comments, or only have one or two. This makes those videos seem lame. Compare to Kyte, though, where everyone talks about you all day long, and it is a better place. Plus Kyte’s chat is much nicer and can contain video and audio comments (Qik can only have text comments) and Kyte’s can come from Facebook or other Nokia phones. Major win for Kyte here. I love participating in Kyte’s chat room from my cell phone because I can leave audio comments. I’ve gotten in some interesting conversations done with nothing but audio from other people. Audio is a lot easier to do from your cell phone than text or even video, particularly if you have a crappy cell phone camera or you don’t want to look like a dork out in public holding the cell phone up to take video of you.

3. I like the Kyte player on Facebook better than anything that Qik or Flixwagon has done yet. Kyte’s can be branded to yourself and you can make your own customized Facebook app for your own Facebook profile. So, TechCrunch can have its own Kyte app, which is much better for branding purposes.

Add all these together and I don’t see how Qik or Flixwagon can beat Kyte anymore in the cell phone video game. What do you think?

But most importantly, Graf is zeroing in on making Kyte a platform for musicians, media companies, and mobile carriers. He sees Kyte being used more by established personalities and media companies to produce the initial content, and then being shared and distributed by the audience via the Kyte player. To that end, he just launched Kyte.com as a site for branded partners (including bloggers) to tap into the Kyte platform. All four major music labels are using Kyte to create branded players that can be widgetized and distributed all over the Web. (See ours below, which shows an interview with Graf that I filmed using his cell phone).

http://www.kyte.tv/flash.swf?appKey=MarbachViewerEmbedded&uri=channels/2915/107122&embedId=10077863&layoutMode=brandedhttp://media01.kyte.tv/images/updatenotice.swf

“It doesn’t say “Kyte” anywhere,” says Graf (except that it does, on the bottom left). “This is like a micro Website. It can be virally distributed. Fans feel really connected to it.” They can also contribute. The Kyte player has a “produce” button that lets fans upload their own videos right into the channel. Graf created the one above for TechCrunch (it is the second one ever made after 50 Cent’s). For the next few hours you can add your own video commentary using a Webcam (we will be monitoring this, so please keep it clean).

50 Cent has been testing Kyte for about three months, and already has more than four million views on his Kyte channel across 10,000 Websites. The Kyte player is front and center on his Website ThisIs50. He regularly puts up video snippets of himself and his crew shot on a cell phone. Last night, he premiered his video “The Mechanic” through the Kyte player, which fans can embed on their own pages. It is his way of keeping control of his brand online even if people grab the video and put on other sites. Kyte plans on turning on advertising inside its players in April and sharing those revenues with producers of Kyte channels.

Kyte is also giving its partners the ability to turn their Kyte player into a Facebook app in about fiveminutes. Here is 50 Cent’s and here is TechCrunch’s. It offers an API as well for partner Websites to create deeper integration with the Kyte player and service. It even has Twitter integration. Finally, Kyte is working on one-click mobile apps to mak eit even easier to upload video from your cellphone. One such app is already in private beta for Nokia Series 60 phones.

Ustream.tv remains one of my favorite services. It doesn’t have the cool tech Kyte has, or perhaps the wider presence of Justin.tv, but it’s reliable, and it usually delivers. I regularly tune in to Chris Pirillo live, it’s an informative program where you learn stuff as well. Today (my time) I spent some time listening to The Drill Down, where I ended up getting exclusive news of the Digg girl and a possible record contract; it was a good example of where Podcasting meets live TV, a positive from the new wave of live content.

And then there was Jim Choma. I just happened to be on Ustream after the Drill Down podcast and saw him live, and that’s where the fun began. Jim runs sites including Zipperfish.com, he also hosts a live show on Ustream under the name of “The Walrus.” Jim likes a drink, not that there’s anything wrong with that, but we don’t normally stream the experience, complete with homophobia, swearing and nakedness. Once I Twittered the link his drinking session went from 30 viewers to over 100, and it went down hill from there, complete with a call in from me (the show is focused on live call ins) asking him how much he had to drink. Some short video I caught above and below. It was train wreck TV at its worst or perhaps best, but we were all compelled to watch it. If Jim had any career before it must surely join the deadpool now, or maybe not, after all drunk TV had some value tonight, at least from me and 100 others. Either way if the full Ustream clip gets released I’m betting this might well be the last great viral video of 2007.

Treemo is a site where you can upload all types of media (photos, videos, audio clips, and text) from your mobile phone or desktop computer and share them with either the general public or just your friends. Until now, the only way to get your Treemo-hosted content distributed elsewhere on the Internet was to use RSS feeds, but the company has just released a set of embeddable widgets and a Facebook application that should help to spread this content much more effectively.

Of the three types of widgets, the first provides a channel of the last 24 media items you have uploaded to Treemo (we’ve embedded an example below), the second highlights just one media item, and the third allows anybody with a cell phone to subscribe to your content and consequently receive notices via SMS when you upload new stuff. The Facebook application will display your most recent Treemo uploads in your mini-feed and embed a channel player into your profile as well.

In addition to this widgetization strategy, Treemo is developing an API that will allow developers to integrate Treemo functionality into their websites. A Chinese website called 3GDODO has already soft launched with the API as a pre-release partner, and the API should be available to the public in the first quarter of 2008. Another partner focusing on citizen journalism will also leverage the API to solicit the distribution of niche content.

Other smaller upgrades include new language support for Chinese, Portuguese, Spanish, and German, as well as a new homepage that does more to highlight the contributions of your friends on Treemo.

Treemo’s mobile social media competitors include JuiceCaster, Zannel (recently reviewed here), and Kyte. Whereas JuiceCaster requires users to download a client to their phones, Treemo is based completely in mobile web browsers using XHTML and WAP. JuiceCaster announced just this week that it raised $6M more in Series C, bringing its total to $15.3M. This past October, Treemo raised $2.55M in its first round, which was led by JK&B Capital of Chicago.

According to Kyte’s unofficial evangelist Robert Scoble, the announcement was streamed live on Kyte itself, which while demonstrating the product works perhaps compensates for the fact that no where on their site (at the time of writing) is there a written statement about the funding.

Kyte launched in April this year with a product that falls somewhere between Ustream and Twitter. Unlike many of its live streaming competitors Kyte offers a much richer two way experience, including support for text chat from within each video embed and the ability for users to drag drag photos, video and text into Kyte channels while interacting with others.

The investment will expose Kyte to a much broader audience with the raft of telco investors having hundreds of millions of users between them; Kyte could soon be coming to a mobile phone near you.

The service is very much in “alpha” and they’ve only given away a few test accounts. They’ll start to give more over the next few days – just sign up on the Seesmic home page to get one. Look for a full launch

I’ve been testing the service over the weekend and, even though it is yet another video startup, I think Seesmic is both fun and addictive.

Screen shots and full review are below.


A Video Twitter

The service can be described as a video based Twitter, although it is also much more than that. The grand vision behind Seesmic is for it to become a very open online video/television service where people are constantly interacting around both user generated and professional content.

A lot of the functionality behind that vision won’t be built for a while, though. For now, they are sticking to the basics. But a key foundation of the service, right from the start, is that the service is very open with user data, both inbound and outbound.

Here’s the current functionality:

Video Twitter: Each user has his or her own page and can create videos directly from a webcam and publish them to the site as well as other social networks (see below for more on that last point). Or, a user can simply add a URL to a video on any of the major video sharing sites and add that to their stream.

To the right of the main video viewing area shows a list people you follow and/or who follow you (similar to how Twitter handles friends). Once both sides follow the other, they become “friends.” To left of the main video area is a list of videos with three views – all user videos, videos from friends, and your videos. See the screen shots to get a better understanding of this.

The videos listed on the left are not just videos uploaded to Seesmic; the service is also indexing Twitter to find all links to videos that people have posted, and are including them in the list. The idea, Le Meur says, is to find not just popular videos, but videos people are actually sharing with friends and discussing with others. Using Twitter videos is a good way to seed that content.

Social Network Integration: Users who choose to do so can enter their YouTube or Twitter credentials (and soon Facebook and other sites). When you upload or create a video on Seesmic, a link to it is automatically posted on Twitter, uploaded to YouTube, etc. As they add more services, their hope is that users focus all their video attention on the site and distribute those videos through other social networks.

“The aim is to help gather, collect, comment and share the best online shows today spread on numerous platforms and sources of data,” Le Meur said today. “It builds on successes such as YouTube, Facebook, del.icio.us, Twitter or Skype rather than trying to create another video site.”

Coming Soon:

Soon users will be able to add Seesmic as a friend on Skype and other instant messaging platforms that support video. Click on the friend name and record a video from that service, and it will be uploaded to your Seesmic account.

Even better – when you and a friend have a video chat on Skype, you can add Seesmic as a friend and the conversation will be recorded and posted on Seesmic as well.

There’s also some basic stuff that they haven’t added yet but will be in place very soon – RSS feeds for users (with iPhone-compatible MP4 enclosures), video phone uploads, comments (text and video) and ratings on videos, etc. Le Meur also says they will be launching a Joost widget that allows users to interact with stuff they watch on Joost, too.

In what Le Meur calls the second stage of the startup, the team will create an “open, crowd sourced and community driven online TV.” The user generated videos gathered on Seesmic will be gathered to produce topical daily shows around communities. The best authors, Le Meur says, will get a revenue share from shows.

The company will also have an open studio in San Francisco (more cities coming) where people can drop in and create video content.

Overall Thoughts:

One way I know I like a service is if I find myself messing around with it long after I have gathered enough information for a review. I’ve been clicking on Seesmic videos all night when I could have been done with it hours ago. It feels like it has the simplicity of Twitter (v. say, Kyte, which seems like it tries to do possibly toomany things at once). It’s way too early to call Seesmic a winner, of course, but I think both video creators and video consumers will like hanging out on the site.