Impossible Software has been building its product for a little while now. Founded 2008, its concentrated on real-time video, especially placing images and video into other videos. What do I mean here? I mean putting products into video that were never there in the first place: product placement. Yes, this has been done before, but I’m going to lay a bet you’ve not seen stuff like this.
The simplest way of explaining what they do is for you to try out the demos here and our interview at DLD this year.
What’s new here is that the company is now fully releasing itself and the complete product suite and and API to the market with some big name customers. Everything is built 100% HTML 5, so it works on your iPad, Browser – something no other company has done before. A consumer version will drop soon.
First up, have you ever seen a TechCrunch video sponsored by Coke? No? Well we just went back and re-did it, selecting from a number of possible brands. Click on the image and try it out:
The company already has a US office and co-founder Claus Zimmermann will leave partner Torsten Appel to start an office in New York City to complement offices in Hamburg and Boston. The company is 9 super geeks strong.
The core technology is about dynamic video, real-time video and video editing, across all devices. Invested in by Cinco Capital – the investment vehicle owned by Lars Hinrichs (founder of Xing) – and Corporate Finance Partners, the company has raised only $2 million to date.
There are four main business areas and audiences: Video Advertising Technology; Commercial / OEM users / API users; Semi-Professionals and finally Consumers.
A demo of the first is the ad technology. Check out this ad campaign for shoe retailer deichmann.com. The platform generates video spots dynamically featuring the products a user selects on retailer’s website. It’s slick, though I wouldn’t say groundbreaking. Then again, Impossible says there are 2.16 million possible product complications, so maybe fairly slick.
Impossible has a B2B play as a SaaS service. So for instance, seambi.com has used it like this:
For consumers and semi-professionals, soon there will be HTML5 web based video editing applications. I’m told it will be comparable to WeVideo, but no Flash, just HTML5 based so it will be usable on tablets or desktop browsers.
The applications range from point-and-click personalized video greeting card creation to simple video editing to more professional post-production tools.
We’ve demo’d it and it’s pretty cool. You just mark a certain corner of the video and images or video are just inserted automagically. This is very hard to do in a mere Web App.
It will be interesting to see what Impossible comes up with when it launches its consumer facing app.
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