Best Buy takes minority stake in Mydeo for video sharing
Word on the street is that Best Buy – which already had photo-sharing through Kodak – didn’t want a combined photo/video service and, incredibly enough, couldn’t find a US-based company that could do what they wanted. However, I have a hunch that since Mydeo is built on Microsoft’s Movie Maker software there may have been some useful introductions made at Microsoft level. Best Buy, the largest electronics retailer in the US, sells around a third of all video cameras sold each year. Significantly, a large percentage of those are sold to Mydeo’s target audiences of families and small businesses, who tend to use Movie Maker. Hey, it may not be cool, but it’s a fact.
Whatever the details of the deal, it’s a good one for Mydeo’s co-founders Cary Marsh and Iain Millar, who started out in 2005 from a small South West London office with local municipal grants.