[Guest Post: TechFluff.TV, the video blog started by Hermione Way over a year ago has done a lot to make the European startup scene a lot more fun and – hell, let’s just say it out loud shall we? – a lot less male. So with the recent revamp of her site, and a locked-and-loaded video camera, TechCrunch Europe has given her a mission: to hunt down a European startup every week and get them to give her an elevator pitch. In an elevator. Will she come up with the goods? Will she fail? Stay tuned. Here’s her first instalment. Meantime, we’ll be rotating this slot with other contributors around Europe as well, so if you’ve got a video blog about startups, get in touch.]
Describing themselves as ‘The future of video communication ‘ Winkball.com is a video messaging site which aims to ‘bring personalisation back to email and bridge the gaps of Skype and Youtube. They say:
Their freemium model allows for anyone to create an account and start a wink (a video conversation), but they are also white-labeling their services for advertisers and brands who want to use Winkball for commercial services. Brands can see what the word is on the street about a particular subject and create, amongst other things, a video wall with citizen’s winks. See what they did for London’s NottingHill Carnival here.
White labeling was a clever move in the current climate as I don’t see why general users would adopt Winkball instead of services they are already familiar with for video blogging/chat like YouTube, Skype, MSN Chat etc. Winkball was founded in London in 2005 by Dr. James Ohene-Djan and Duncan Barclay.
Questions need to be asked over why similar video platform Seesmic.com largely dumped its video model, but it will be interesting to see if WinkBall will have more of a citizen journalism play.