Webware

YouTube has become synonymous with online video but a score of companies still believe there's plenty of opportunities to win big in the burgeoning marketing. This includes media heavyweights focusing on long-form content. Rupert Murdoch's News Corp and NBC Universal have jointly launched a video service scheduled to go live later this year. Joost, which operates on a peer-to-peer technology developed by the creators of Skype, is offering material from a score of top TV networks and media conglomerates, including Viacom.

UStream.tv plans to differentiate itself by turning Internet users into live-video broadcasters. This is not a new idea. The popularity of Justin.tv, the all-day, everyday Web broadcast of founder Justin Kan's life, has shown that sharing live events over the Web has wide appeal. One of the challenges UStream may face is preventing inappropriate content from appearing. "Every investor asks us about porn," said Chris Yeh, who presented for UStream. He said that pornographers don't need his company's service since they are already well represented online. Some members of the crowd said Yey, is sure to see his share of "griefers."

SplashCast offers tools that allow a user to syndicate video, music, photos, text as well as other media across the Web. SplashCast enables anyone to create their own streaming media "channels" that mix all the aforementioned media together, which can be displayed on any Web site or social network page. Another nifty feature allows a user to automatically update their content anywhere the material appears on the Web.

Zattoo is live TV streamed directly to a PC, according to Sugih Jamin, the company's cofounder. The service is a peer-to-peer Internet Protocol Television system that focus on delivering professional content. Right now, the company offers 40 channels and is seeing most of its growth in Europe. Jamin said that users typically watch Zattoo at home, which is sort of exactly where you would suspect they wouldn't watch. "They like watching when they're browsing the Web or checking the e-mail," Jamin said. Zattoo is one of the companies attempting to go head-to-head against Joost.

Fora.tv is a digtial soapbox that gives anyone a chance to speak their mind in online debates via Internet video.

Wrapping up the group presentations at Under the Radar's Entertainment & Media conference is the virtual worlds group. Only two of these companies (Doppleganger and Kaneva) offer what most would consider "virtual worlds" or a replacement for real life interaction with others. The other two consist of user avatars, and a video gaming platform.

Doppleganger is a 3-D world similar to Second Life. It survives through a mix of micropayments, and partnerships with various companies who want branded areas and appearances for celebrities, movies, and music. We checked it out a few weeks ago and came away impressed, albeit a little bewildered.

The service currently has 150,000 users, and CEO Tim Stevens says it's growing by 10% weekly.

Kaneva is part social network and part 3-D virtual world. I looked at the service in early February, shortly before the site went public beta in April. Despite the fact it's incredibly similar to social networks like MySpace, Kaneva's creators view its competition as movies and television programs. Like Doppelganger, Kaneva makes its money on the sale of virtual goods and sponsorship from content creators.

Meez is one of the more interesting virtual worlds services due to its specialization. Instead of trying to re-create real life, Meez focuses on user avatars. They recently partnered with Photobucket, and provides user avatars for several other services. The site has 2 million registered users, and is now getting 425,000 new users a month.

The site makes its money off partnerships and micropayments, where users use their virtual currently on clothing items. One of their competitors Gizmoz recently launched a face mapping tool that will take a digital photo and stick it on a 3-D avatar.

Multiverse is a development platform for anyone who wants to make their own massive multiplayer online game (MMOG). They've built the system to work with a "world browser" which co-founder Corey Bridges compares to a Web browser since users can visit a network of different games built on the platform.

Companies that help videographers track the popularity of their clips and another startup that wants to cash in on virtual world economies led the afternoon session at the Under the Radar conference on Thursday.

Cruxy offers to help musicians, break-dance instructors, authors, videographers and other artists sell their work online. In addition, Cofounder Nathan Frietas said the company can track sales data and customer behavior in Second Life as well as other virtual worlds.

Vidmetrix touts itself as a way for professional videographers and marketing execs to determine how their videos are faring on sites, such as YouTube. Vidmetrix, tells users how many views and comments a video receives at any one of 44 different sites. They also give the number of blogs that link to a clip. The San Diego-based company announced that video-sharing site Veoh, a startup backed by former Disney chairman Michael Eisner, has agreed to offer the service to users.

Crazyegg offers an analytics tool that feature a "heat map," which is a visual representation of how visitors are behaving on a site, the areas of the site that they visit and the links and advertisements they click on.

Visible Measures is another analytics company that attempts to measure video viewership. CEO Brian Shin offered few hard details about the company.

About a decade ago playing visually rich and enthralling games on your computer required an installation, a reboot, and some considerable horsepower. These days, between lean browsers and speedy broadband connections, people are now able to play something for a few minutes without installing anything. The latest movement in online games is playing them with others, and building platforms and content delivery systems that let fledgling developers share their work with others.

Bunchball is a social gaming service. They integrate multiplayer games into Web sites, as well as branding them to match the look and feel. Bunchball was one of the launch partners for Facebook's F8 platform. Their app integrates several multiplayer games people can play with their Facebook friends, or other users of the service. They've also partnered with several other sites to add Flash games including Warner Brothers and Piczo.

By the way, Bunchball has one of the coolest favicons I've seen...ever.

FlowPlay a casual games aggregation site that runs entirely in Adobe Flash. All the basic games are free. There's also a subscription model that opens up the more advanced titles. The service has integrated a social network with user profiles, rankings, and user avatars. Similar to Meez, and Gizmoz, user avatars are completely customizable, and users can purchase clothing and accessories to change their virtual appearance.

Hothead Games was definitely the odd man out in this group. They create PC and console games. Their upcoming project Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness is one of the more interesting stories of Internet success. Penny Arcade, which gets over 4 million visitors a month, is a video game blog/comic strip that's become so popular it's jumped off the Web, and has its own video gaming festival.

Jim Greer, co-founder and CEO of Kongregate [review] talked about his site, and company who recently celebrated their one-year anniversary. The service is a casual games site mixed with a social network. It's library currently has about 1000 games. Users can chat with one another, view each others profiles, and their gaming achievements--a feature similar to Microsoft's XBOX Live Arcade. Greer says Kongregate's version was inspired by Pogo.com's badge system.

The site is planning to roll out a micropayment system and a subscription model so users can purchase full versions of games, or subscribe to access premium titles.

This morning's presenters on music at today's Under the Radar conference are probably one of the most interesting groups. A few months ago, it would have been just another pitch session, but in light of radio silence day just a few days ago, music on the internet is a big deal--especially what happens to it when RIAA royalty rate increases go into effect next month.

iLike is a social network mixed up with online music. This morning they talked about their Facebook app, along with their integration with Apple's iTunes. iLike's CEO Ali Partovi considers Facebook's F8 apps platform "the greatest paradigm shift in computing since Windows." iLike's Facebook app currently has over 4 million users, which is 4x the amount of users the site had prior to the F8 launch.

MOG is one of the neater music tools out there. You download a small application that integrates with your music jukebox software and connects you with others who share similar tastes. Founder and CEO of MOG David Hyman confirmed the team was working on an app for Facebook that will provide music recommendations based on what your Facebook friends are listening to.

We've covered Mog before, as well as one of its latest offerings, MogTV.

ReverbNation is a syndication and tracking service that lets bands and content creators keep track of where music is going and how often it's being listened to. They tell you which songs are the most popular, along with how long people are listening to them. Artists can then look at that information and figure out what's working. The system works a little bit like Widgetbox's metrics tools with a hint of grassroots focus groups. Some of this functionality is already built into MySpace's music player, which keeps track of how many plays songs have gotten, along with people who have downloaded.

SpliceMusic.com calls itself the "the biggest legal free music label." It's a mix between a stock music service, and a place to create your own tracks. SpliceMusic has a nifty Web based sound synthesizer and creation tool that lets people work together to make new sounds and tracks. It's reminiscent of Apple's Garageband. SpliceMusic keeps track of this content and where it's going around the internet. It also gives users a community with ratings, comments and user profiles.

Stay tuned for more Under the Radar coverage. Coming up later today we'll have presentations on games, power tools, virtual worlds, and internet TV. To see all the Under the Radar posts from today, just bookmark this link.. You can also check out our live Webcam feed.

Update: We're no longer streaming live, but you can catch the recorded video from our earlier session after the jump. To see it, just click the "Read More" link below.

We're broadcasting live from Under the Radar's Media and Entertainment conference this morning. There are two tracks, and we've got our Web cam live broadcasting one of them. For all other posts, just use this link and check back throughout the day for continuing coverage.

... Read more

Guiding consumers to products that they actually buy is supposed to be the Web's specialty. Then how come e-commerce growth is slowing down?

In the morning session at Under the Radar on Thursday, four companies explained why their technology would appeal to e-tailers.

The big crowd pleaser was PowerReviews.com, headquartered in Millbrae, Calif. The company aggregates and manages customer reviews. What makes the 26-employee company different, according to CEO Andy Chen, is that it's concentrating on products not typically reviewed on the Web, such as sporting goods, shoes, and backpacks.

"Online stores that want reviews can just turn us on and we're on their site," Chen said.

Criteo based in France and San Francisco, is yet another recommendation software that a consumer's behavior to offer products. Wize, based in San Mateo, uses a search algorithm to make suggestions.

They compute user and expert reviews by placing a numerical score to their level of satisfaction. The company also uses their system to present most relevant information first.

Santa Monica-based ThisNext.com got slammed following its presentation. They collect reviews from bloggers but what the company provides after that was too thin according to the judges at conference.

Advertising is an important part of the Internet, but how are content creators and advertisers going to come together to start making money off videos? At Under the Radar this morning four new Web 2.0 advertising companies that specialize in video are trying to figure that out.

Adap.tv is an online video advertising platform that looks at the context of a video to place advertisements. Almost like Google's contextual AdSense program, Adapt.tv reads a video's metadata to figure out what the video is about before serving up an ad that (hopefully) is related. Ads pop up in a small transparent bar on the bottom of a video while it's playing.

Rafe took a look at Adap.tv last week at Supernova. There's also a demo of it on their site.

ScanScout is another service that inserts ads into videos. Like Adap.tv, ScanScout will insert a small transparent toolbar on the bottom of a playing video, along with a video link right inside it. Once users click it, it will pause the video they're currently watching and "pop-up" yet another video. The service can also insert ads before and after a video clip.

In addition to inserting ads on context, it will also look at the genre of a video to pull up similar ad videos. In this case, the example video of a man talking about mittens for kittens brought up a Flight of the Concords clip.

XLNTads is creating their own network that pays people to create video ads. It's funded by companies, who create "challenges" for XLNTads content creators to make ads for an ad campaign.XLNTads provides brand logos and related media items, and the users do the rest. The winning videographer gets the partial rights to their ads, along with future revenue earnings. It's essentially an ad agency that's attempting to tap into freelance video creators to do all the work.

YuMe (pronounced "You-Me") is an advertising company that's focusing on serving up localized ads for videos based on location. Similar to some text ads you might have seen while surfing the Web that include your city name, YuMe is attempting to do the same thing with video advertising. One of their examples was an ad for airline tickets in three different cities. The airfare to the same location from three different areas were different prices instead of one generic pitch.

For a live stream of the presentation, check our our friend Chris Pirillo from LockerGnome.com, who judged the event.