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With 35 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute, the Google-owned video behemoth would be the second biggest search engine were it standalone site. I’d say these are fa web video has become a powerful medium. But, I think it’s also fair to say that this powerful medium is in serious need of curation. What if you’re just looking for a quick laugh, a short video, and don’t want to wade through billions of videos — what if you want to create your own, personally curated streaming video channel? Hmmm? Thankfully, content curation has come to video: ShortForm shows it’s here to stay.

The San Francisco-based startup allows users to create personalized channels of web video content, easily pulling clips from YouTube and other video sites. You can play videos back-to-back to create a stream of video, not unlike the TV viewing experience. Creating custom channels is simple, and I would say the UI is more user-friendly (or at least more attractive) than that of YouTube.

ShortForm curates its own videos, but the real focus is in encouraging its users to become VJs (video jockeys), curating their own channels. And with the recent addition of an embed-able widget, publishers can embed their own video player and curated channel lineups on their site. This means that the channels you create on ShortForm are available anywhere. It’s these kind of additions that pushed the startup past the one million users mark.

So ShortForm has all these visitors, but how is it going to make money? The startup is planning to place interstitial ads between videos. The Interstitial ads will be in the camp of video promotions that feel more like content and are fun to watch, ShortForm CEO Nader Ghaffari said, and they’ll be targeted based on channel context, so sports channels will get sports related video promotions. The cool part, though, is that even though the interstitial ad model will be rearing its annoying head, the startup plans to share its ad revenue with its VJs. After all, it’s the VJs who create the channels.

“When it comes to mixing the world’s videos into channels, we want our VJs to have all the tools at their disposal to make VJ-ing channels fun and easy”, Ghaffari told me. “We are integrating with Vimeo in the coming weeks, for example, so our VJs can mix YouTube and Vimeo videos, and soon we’ll be adding new features for VJs to further personalize their channels”.

ShortForm also has a leaderboard that lets VJs see how their channels are doing relative to other VJs, and viewers can scan it to find channels of interest to subscribe to. ShortForm also plans to provide VJs with more social feedback on their channels, like who has watched, shared, liked, and subscribed, for example, and VJs will be able to add commentary into their channels.

But, as you are probably readying your comment for the comment section, I should say that ShortForm isn’t the only video curation startup in the game. VodPod lets users share collect and share videos with their friends and Magnify.net allows website publishers to make video channels for their sites. ShortForm differs from its competitors in that it, unlike VodPod, it enables back-to-back streaming, and, unlike Magnify, is focused on the consumer rather than enterprise.

The startup is also teaming up with CollegeHumor (one of my favorites) this week to launch a best video contest on Facebook, which will allow users to watch and vote for their favorite videos on CollegeHumor. Once a vote has been registered, a leaderboard can be accessed that shows the leading vote-getters. Check it out.

A survey taken over the last year by Glassdoor, a jobs and career community that allows users to anonymously share an inside look at jobs and companies, confirms that Eric Schmidt looks better when he’s on his way out. As the Google big whig prepares to step down from a decade of service as chief exec, his employee approval rating is at an all time high.

On the flip side of the popularity coin, Yahoo’s Carol Bartz is seeing her honeymoon period come to a close. In what is likely unsurprising news, among tech CEOs, Bartz saw the biggest decline in her approval rating in the past year, compared to the 12 months prior. Between March 2009 and March 2010, she held a 77 percent approval rating among her employees, whereas compared to the following year, her approval rating dropped to 50 percent. Granted, this is still 16 percent higher than that of her predecessor, Jerry Yang. Yang had a 2008 George Bush-like approval rating of 34 percent when he stepped down as CEO.

Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer saw the second biggest decline among the 12 CEOs evaluated. During March 2009 and March 2010, he held an average 46 percent approval rating, before dropping to 40 percent. Maybe IE9 will be enough to right a foundering ship?

Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Oracle’s Larry Ellison both dropped four points during the same period to 83 percent and 73 percent, respectively, while eBay’s John Donahoe went on a hot streak. Between March 2009 and March 2010, the eBay CEO held a 24 percent approval rating among employees, whereas between March 2010 and March 2011, he held a 46 percent approval rating. Go Johnny go.

Lastly, always worth noting is that Apple Man Steve Jobs remains as popular as ever, though his approval rating did drop from 98 percent to 95 percent. I’m sure when the iPhone 5 comes out, he’ll be right back on top.

As to how Glassdoor CEO approval ratings are calculated, the site takes the pulse of a company’s employees similar to the way in which presidential approval ratings are tallied. Employees are simply asked, “Do you approve of the way your CEO is leading the company?”

TechCrunch CEO Heather Harde? 110 percent approval rating. And Aol CEO Tim Armstrong, he’s not too shabby himself.

Google launched the +1 feature of its social layer yesterday and if you’re like most tech journalists you probably likened the move to attaching a Facebook Like button to Google search results.

Well now someone has gone and done exactly that, no joke. Meet +Like, a Firefox, Safari and Chrome extension that lets you see how many people have liked a specific Google search result on Facebook as well as which of your Facebook Friends have recommended a specific piece of content, whether or not that action took place on Google search.

When you “like” something on +Like it gets posted on Facebook as well so you can share content you’re into with your social graph, sort of like what Google is trying to attempt with its Google Profile revamp and +1.

Said creator Koby Menachemi, “We built this extension after reading about +1 on TC . We couldn’t understand why [it’s] not just putting the two things together (Google searches + Facebook’s Likes).” It took Menachemi and co-founder Shmueli Ahdut 3-4 hours using their own Crossrider framework to make the cross-browser extension.

Now Google +1 has key advantage over Google +Like in that you can also use +1 to like Google ads (and presumably monetize them). But seriously if I was Google, +Like would have me shaking in my boots.

(Editor’s Note: This post originally appeared on TechCrunch Europe)

I’ve been more skeptical than most about Spotify’s promise to launch in the US, but it looks like Europe’s favourite music service is ready to make good on all of its hype.

We’re hearing from multiple sources today that licensing deals are finally in place with major US record labels and the company’s Valley investors are ready to provide the additional cash needed to pay for costly music licenses. Absent any last minute hiccups, the company’s US service is ready to go live as early as next week.

The catch? Those same sources tell us that in order to finance the cost of a US launch, Valley investors have demanded the company shut down its European service, effective noon on Friday (GMT). The brand new ‘Spotify USA‘ — unavailable to users in Europe — will launch on Monday morning.

Read More…

Earlier this afternoon, Mike posted an exclusive story about an internal war raging within Google.

In the post he mentioned that Google revenue chief Nikesh Arora had recently returned from a two week jaunt in the Caribbean with Demand Media CEO Richard Rosenblatt aboard Rosenblatt’s yacht, ‘The Adsense‘.

A few minutes after the post went live, Rosenblatt called the TechCrunch office and left a voicemail. Boy is he pissed. Not at any of the other details of the story — which he doesn’t deny — but about Mike revealing details of his yacht.

We understand that, in these piracy-infested times, the super-rich are rightly protective of their yachts — but come on dude, it’s called ‘The Adsense‘. That’s news!

Voicemail below.

Update: