Author: Blancer

With the flood, comes the feast. Advertising dollars are pouring into online video. Some of the largest online video ad networks are seeing revenue growth accelerating this quarter, and expect the fourth quarter to be even bigger. “Last year we grew 40%, this year we are growing 90%,” says Keith Richman, CEO of Break Media. He expects Break’s total revenues in the third quarter, which include more than just video advertising, to be well above $10 million for the first time.

Tremor Media, which is one of the largest video ad networks and second only to Hulu in the number of video ads it serves, is also seeing a doubling of ad revenues. “It has reached a frenzy point over last three quarters.” CEO Jason Glickman tells me. “We see television dollars moving to online video,” he declares. The fourth quarter “is lining up to be a monster,” and next year Tremor’s revenues are on track to top $100 million for the year.

TV advertising still dwarfs online video, with about $70 billion spent on there in the U.S. Online video advertising is estimated to reach $1.5 billion this year, up from $1 billion last year, according to eMarketer. “Our share of the $1 billion or $2 billion pie for online video is insignificant compared to the budgets that are coming over,” says Glickman.

Relatively small shifts in advertising budgets from TV to online can create huge swings in growth for online video. eMarketer estimates that online video advertising will grow 48 percent in 2010, accelerating from 39 percent growth last year (which was a weak year compared to the 127 percent hypergrowth in 2008). But judging by what Tremor and Break are seeing that $1.5 billion estimate might prove to be conservative. Glickman expects revenues next year to top $100 million. Caveat: treat their experience as anecdotal snapshots of the industry which happen to match.

It very well may just be the big ad networks and properties like Hulu that are seeing the vast majority of new ad dollars. “If you are not in the top 10 on comScore you will have a tough time, notes” Richman, “money goes to the guys who are big.” TV advertisers want to match their reach on TV, and online video that is deemed to be safe, professional content is starting to get to those levels. It is not American Idol,” says Glickman, “but it is like a large cable network.” Advertisers can’t yet reach 30 million people in an hour with a single media buy online, but they can reach that many people over the course of a week, and they can target to specific demographics and get some feedback on how the ads are performing, which TV advertising still can’t do very well.

Advertisers are becoming increasingly comfortable with putting their video ads online. Hulu, which may be filing for an IPO, is the largest beneficiary of this trend. If an advertiser already puts ads against House or The Office on TV, it is a no-brainer to match that online on Hulu. But they are also beginning to trust the larger video ad networks like Tremor and Break, which put ads against a wider range of professionally-produced video from guy videos to sports clips and movie trailers.

“I have never seen test budgets that start at half a million dollars,” says Glickman. Usually ad agencies start testing with one tenth as much. Also, he is seeing about a dozen larger commitments in the double-digit millions over the course of the year, deals he calls “online video upfronts” because they are negotiated in advance like regular TV upfronts. According to comScore, Hulu showed the most video ads in July with 783 million, but Tremor came in second with 452 million video ad views.

Video is definitely shaping up to be a large and growing business for the bigger players and ad networks, but will those advertising dollars trickle down to the smaller guys as well?

Photo Credit: Flickr/ Cathy Stanley-Erickson.

When Google acquired video compression technology company On2 for $106 million last year, the search giant also got encoding SaaS Flix Cloud as part of the deal. Now it looks like Google is shuttering Flix Cloud in November (and will stop accepting new customers as of tomorrow), and encouraging users to move to newly launching encoding startup Zencoder, which we previously wrote about here.

Zencoder’s founders actually originally developed the cloud encoding technology behind Flix Cloud, that was used by video compression startup On2 technologies. Flix Cloud combined Zencoder’s cloud encoding software with On2?s Flix Engine encoder, putting Flix Engine in the cloud. The founders launched Zencoder earlier this year as new version of Flix Cloud that promised improvements in speed, quality, reliability, and ease of use.

Here’s what Google wrote on the Flix Cloud home page:

We’ve made arrangements with Zencoder, our Flix Cloud partner, to help Flix Cloud customers move to the Zencoder cloud encoding service if they so choose. The Zencoder team has created a very impressive service that offers many improvements over Flix Cloud, including two-pass H.264 encoding, faster queues, audio-only encoding, and support for the new open WebM video format. For more information, see the Zencoder Flix Cloud transition page or log in to your dashboard.

As we wrote in out initial review of Y Combinator-backed Zencoder, the startup wants to be the Amazon Web Services for encoding. Zencoder differs from competitors like Encoding.com in that it charges clients per minute of video encoded vs per gigabyte. The startup also claims to handle 95% of the unusual or corrupt files that other services can’t tackle and includes the ability to autorotate iPhone videos shot in landscape mode and enhanced developer tools, including a code generator for API calls.

Zencoder is offering tips and information on transitioning to its service here.

And you can see a list of other services and products Google has shut down here.

As we noted nearly a month ago now, Facebook has acquired social activity and ‘check-in’ service provider Hot Potato for about $10 million in cash.

Facebook, fresh from announcing its entry into the location game (our ongoing coverage), and Hot Potato this morning confirmed the acquisition, which is clearly a move by the social networking juggernaut to bring in more talent rather than expanding its product line.

In a blog post, Hot Potato writes:

“This wasn’t an easy decision, especially since we’ve built up a base of dedicated users. If Hot Potato was going to sell to anyone, Facebook was the natural choice. Facebook is still small, moves fast, provides a great supportive environment for people to be entrepreneurial, and most importantly, Facebook builds great products. We’re looking forward to joining their team.”

The startup also says that they’ll be shutting down all operations in about a month and delete all data, as we anticipated. New user registrations have already been turned off, and Hot Potato says it will soon offer existing users a way to download their information from the site (here). No user data or account information will be kept by Facebook, they add.

Hot Potato, which launched at our Realtime CrunchUp event last November, raised a small $1.42 million Series A round late last year from a number of early-stage investment firms and a slew of angel investors.

The young company initially focused strongly on check-ins based around events, and later pivoted more towards check-ins based on anything you may be doing.

We recently reported Facebook is planning for more and potentially larger acquisitions in the future, and that they’re recruiting dealmakers to make things happen.

If you haven’t checked out Texts From Last Night, you probably should. The hilarious site, which can provide hours of pure entertainment, allows users to submit the wittiest texts they may have received or sent between their friend (which are keep anonymous except for the area code). One of the site’s founders, Lauren Leto, has just raised funding from an all-star group of angel investors for her stealth startup, Bnter (pronounced ‘Banter’). Investors include Founder Collective (Chris Dixon), SV Angel (David Lee), High Line Venture Partners (Shana Fisher).

Details are sparse but Leto tells us that she is taking the way people interact on TFLN and implementing this knowledge in Bnter. The site, which Leto co-founded with Patrick Moberg, will center around how people communicate, will include user profiles, and social components. Leto says the startup will launch sometime next month.

While there’s still much more to be revealed about Bnter, Leto has a track record of being able to take a simple idea to a viral level. TFLN, which never raised money, has spawned merchandise, a book deal and even a tv show.

We’ll be sure to let you know when Bnter launches.

A lot of folks are like “I would love to shoot a lot of Nerf darts at my friends and fellow cubicle dwellers, but my arm is too weak to keep pumping the Nerf gun. What can I do?” Dude. Get a Nerf Stampede ECS-50. This fully automatic gun shoots 18 darts in about a minute and includes 3 full clips and one smaller 5 dart clip. It also has a bipod and a blast shield.

Seriously. This is a monster. I’ve never seen a Nerf gun like this one. It makes you feel like freaking Rambo with a gut.

Click through for video.

Read more…

Inkling, a startup that develops a digital textbook platform, has just raised an undisclosed amount of Series A funding today, led by Sequoia Capital with participation from Kapor Capital, Sherpalo Ventures and Felicis Ventures. Inkling had previously raised seed funding from Mitch Kapor and Ram Shriram. Inkling has added Peter Currie, Former CFO of Netscape, and Bryan Schreier, Partner at Sequoia Capital, to its board.

As the iPad and other tablet devices become a go-to device at schools and colleges for consuming textbook content, Inkling is hoping to help publishers capitalize on that growth. Inkling’s platform, which launched today, delivers interactive textbooks that feature the ability to collaborate, add multimedia and communicate within content. Inkling aims to add another layer to online textbooks by adding 3-D objects, video, quizzes, and even social interaction within the content.

Inkling’s sync technology lets students collaborate in real time by sharing their notes and highlights with one another. And students can see comments from their friends and professors right alongside their own notes.

The startup has already struck a number of content development partnerships with textbook publishers, including Cengage Learning, John Wiley & Sons, McGraw-Hill, and Wolters Kluwer. Inkling will partner with these publishers to add interactivity to textbook content.

Inkling launch today also coincides with the public debut of its iPad app, which is available in the App Store.

At the intriguing intersection of green tech and microbial genomics lies a new discovery that could make biofuel production more efficient and affordable. That discovery is a strain of yeast with above-average alcohol tolerance.

Biofuels are made by fermenting crops, and when yeast is used to convert sugars into biomass, the fermentation can create familiar alcohol-based fuels like ethanol and isobutanol.

Here’s the catch: if the fuel is too concentrated, the yeast begins to die. It would be more efficient to be able to produce highly concentrated batches, however. So University of Illinois Professor Yong-Su Jin set out to find a gene in yeast that can help it tolerate more alcohol.

Jin studied the microbe most commonly used in ethanol production, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, and found not one, but four genes that boost yeast’s tolerance to ethanol and isobutanol.

Now the challenge will be to breed yeast with these genes over-expressed. One of the genes in particular, INO1, increased tolerance by 340% and could help produce up to 70% more ethanol per batch.

It might not be as simple as it sounds though, since other genetic elements could interact with the identified genes in a way that hasn’t yet been tested. Still, it’s a discovery that could significantly improve biofuel production in the future, especially as scientists begin to breed yeast with this knowledge.

Photo credit: Flickr via Steve Jurvetson

Oh boy. LG’s Marketing VP made a mighty big claim in a recent Wall Street Journal article. I’ll state it again if you somehow missed the headline: “our tablet will be better than the iPad.” That’s like Kia saying their upcoming sports car will be better than the Porsche 911. Or some Hollywood startup saying they’re making the next Star Wars only better. A blanket statement like that just doesn’t sit well. Although, LG seems to have the right idea and might bust out the best Android tablet to date — well, that’s not that hard really.

Research2guidance, a Berlin-based research organization specialized in all things mobile, recently forecasted the worldwide smartphone application market to reach $15 billion by 2013.

In an update, the firm says the global smartphone app market has in fact already reached $2.2 billion in the first six months of this year.

Also according to research2guidance’s findings, mobile application download numbers reached a total of 3.8 billion in the first semester of this year, compared to 3.1 billion in 2009 (full year, to be clear).

The firm attributes the strong growth numbers to the success of Apple’s App Store, Android Market and other mobile app stores like Ovi Store and Blackberry’s App World.

In the future, they expect growth to also come from niche stores for verticals such as business or health.

The research organization’s projections are fairly conservative compared to others. An independent study released last March by app store company GetJar indicated that the market for mobile apps could grow to a whopping $17.5 billion – thus overtaking CD sales – by 2012.

In an earlier report, research2guidance posited that the big surge in applications will also be driven by a fast-growing number of smartphone users worldwide, which the research company estimates will increase from about 100 million in 2009 to nearly 1 billion by 2013.

Last year, the Twitter-focused stock and trading network StockTwits acquired Chart.ly, a stock-chart service that was designed specifically for StockTwits. It’s sort of like a Twitpic for stock charts (you can Tweet about a stock with a link to a chart on Chart.ly). But for the most part, StockTwits co- founder Howard Lindzon retained existing Chart.ly’s look and feel for users. Today, Chart.ly is getting a UI makeover and additional features as part of the StockTwits Network.

Chart.ly’s new front page is not just more visually appearing, but navigation is more user-friendly. The startup also features charts from top chartists and creators (an alogrithm highlights the charts based on aggregate number of veiws per user).

You can filter streams now by Charts that are Bullish, Bearish, Equities, Forex and more. One compelling new feature to the site is the ability to record a screencast on the site which Lindzon says could be huge for traders. Many traders have been using Chart.ly and StockTwits has a place to build their brand and a business around their trading ideas on the social trading platform. Screencasts allow traders to visually connect with possible investors.

Chart.ly has seen a fair amount of growth over the past year as traders and financial professionals start adopting social media as a forum for sharing data and information. The site now sees 600,000 page views a month.

And StockTwits has also been steadily adding features to its fast growing community. Yesterday, the site announced the ability for companies to include a “verified stream” and profile on the site that can include investor relations news and other company content on the site.

With the launch of an AIR Desktop app, a online video channel, financial news and a more interactive stock charting service in just a year, I’m sure we can expect additional growth from StockTwits in the future.