Peter Chun

NY-based Magnify.net has launched v3.0 of their software today including a new enterprise model and more social tools. Magnify.net is now able to import social content from services including: Twitter, Flickr and Mogulus. Magnify.net lets you create a themed video channel by importing videos from YouTube, AOL, Yahoo, Veoh and other online video services. Magnify.net picked up $1 million in additional funding last month. The company is now referring to their service as an "Online Social TV Network".

Similar to NY-based white label social networking provider KickApps, Magnify.net now offers three pricing plans: free, pro and enterprise. Free allows you to share in the revenue generated from your pageviews, pro allows you to "buy" the inventory and display your own advertising and enterprise is for their larges customers including The Weather Channel.

Check out all of our Magnify.net coverage.

NY-based CafeMom has announced a new round of funding in the amount of $12 million. The round was co-led by the company's original investors Highland Capital Partners and Draper Fisher Jurvetson. Including this new round, the company has raised $20.3 million to-date.

CafeMom is working with some of the largest CPG companies and retailers in the U.S. including: Walmart, Playskool, Disney, HP, Kraft, General Mills, Nestle, Unilever, JCPenney, Johnson & Johnson and Best Buy. I spoke with head of design Matt Zarzecki who explained that custom campaigns average between $200,000 and $500,000. 

The site is currently running over 120 million pageviews per month with 6 million visitors. CafeMom is an interesting startup for me to watch given my history in the CPG online business and having been involved in a similar site from inside a CPG company. Moms are one of the "richest" segments online and CafeMom has done an excellent job capitalizing on this demographic. I put them on acquisition watch last week.

Check out my interview with two of the executives from CafeMom.

NY-based KickApps is announcing this morning a new partnership with Advertising.com to monetize video content built on the KickApps social networking platform. Social networks using KickApps can select advertisements as either pre- or post-roll messages. I assume this means videos that use the KickApps video player.

Revenue share percentages were not disclosed. I like this deal because it helps small publishers to earn more and provide better ads than with smaller advertising networks. In fact, most of the smaller ad networks can't even support video ads.

Since their $11 million funding round in August, KickApps has continued to make press-worthy announcements.

Tonight was the last NY Video Meetup of 2007. There were major technical issues throughout the evening which forced one presenter to next month and kept us focused on the Wiffiti board for half of the time and doing individual intros for another piece of the evening. Frankly I was bored so my recaps below are short and blunt. Below are the videos for each presentation. I will allow this as normally the Video Meetups are quite good.

ModMyLife

I could swear I've seen this demo for ModMyLife before. The basic idea. They have actors who they don't pay act out stunts in NYC that the audience decides on. It's cute, not sure if it's the next killer idea but it's a good time waster. They won't let the actors do anything illegal or "dumb" so not sure how far they will go. But they do have "digg-like" voting.

 

Redlasso

Redlasso lets you take clips from other sources and put them together and then save or upload the final clip. They also monitor stats on where the files are stored. Questions around copyright and monetization came up - he had no concrete answers on either.

 

OriginDigital

The sponsor of the event - they showed off their Odaptor product. You upload videos, it converts them, makes an xml, makes various formats and can send them to various providers. Didn't really see anything unique or new - though it seemed very smooth in interface.

 

Sportsbone.tv

The only content creator of the evening, Sportsbone.tv creates video shows about football with a "funny" twist using lots of props it seems. A couple bits were funny. A woman in the audience suggested they do the shows live as the football game is in progress, I thought that was a nifty idea. Ten friends from college create this - each one focuses on another aspect of the business.

This morning I sat down with Yoav Ilan at the 'Bucks to discuss his new startup, SeeToo. SeeToo is a peer-to-peer social video service which lets you share a video with a family member or friend in a real-time environment and chat as well. Yoav believes that some videos aren't meant to be shared on a public stage and sometimes you want to share the video and walk someone through it. We took a look at his new baby crawling on the floor and he spoke about how he shares the video with his parents in Israel and they can see their grandbaby crawl and chat at the same time.

So here's how the service works. After signing in, you select your video to share. SeeToo processes the video which takes seconds. Then you send the link to the video to your friend or copy it into IM. The other person joins in and the video syncs and you watch the video together. You can annotate the video by clicking on it and chat as well. The other person can take control and do the same things.

We tried videos over 500mb and they were ready in 15-30 seconds. The video plays using streaming from one pc to another pc - SeeToo stores nothing. In addition, the other party saves nothing as well. Yoav says it's much faster than uploading the video to a sharing service which could take hours (I agree).

Some comparisons will be made to Seesmic but they are different. Seesmic has simplified video sharing and SeeToo has simplified video interaction and collaboration. They have raised about $1 million from several people including Israeli investor Yossi Vardi.

We spoke briefly about the business plan but Yoav asked me not to post the details. He's also got some interesting expansion plans for the product as well coming in 2008.  

It seems like a fun service and useful as well. I could see future expansion into B2B for product sales and more immediately usage with military members sharing videos with loved ones back home. Closer to real interaction than uploading a video to YouTube. The interface is simple and could probably use some more color and life -- perhaps they are holding that part back while in beta?

If you'd like an invite to the beta, use the code 'centernetworks' and visit SeeToo.

Last week I had the chance to sit down with Darren Herman who recently joined NY-based The Media Kitchen as the group director of digital media. The Media Kitchen is part of the kirshenbaum bond + partners family. You might already recognize Darren as he has authored several popular articles here on CenterNetworks. Darren oversees the digital media group internally and all external strategy as well. His team manages approximately $1.9 billion in media spend annually. They work with clients such as Mike's Hard Lemonade and Panasonic. And I am sure you are asking why I am covering this on CN. It's simple. Darren's company is looking for quality startups to spend those $1.9 billion in ad dollars on. Darren thinks of his job as "corporate entrepreneurship" where he gets to invest ad dollars into startups. Most media companies take Comscore reports, pick the top x number of sites and spend their client's advertising dollars on those sites. Because Darren understands the startup world (he's been through several), he can help clients join the conversation and help expose them to sites and services earlier than other (larger) media companies. If you have a startup that is advertising-based for revenue creation, what ad networks do you use? Have you considered using an ad partner like The Media Kitchen? Or are you using Google AdSense or a typical ad network including Burst, Tribal Fusion, Casale, etc? Lastly, Darren asks that you contact him via his blog if you looking for advertisers for your startup.

Tonight was the first MatchupCamp in NYC put on by the NextNY crew with Eran Hammer-Lahav and Charlie O'Donnell leading the crew. The event was held at the For Your Imagination studios and Silicon Alley Insider provided the funds.

Turnout was great with about a 70/30 mix of startup/marketing and developers. Didn't see many designers but there were a lot of startups representing. I tried to capture all of the request flyers below. My suggestion for next time is to have people put their pictures with their flyers for easy identification. Someone else also suggested that startups get 5 minutes on a mic to go over who they are and what they are looking for. I would say shorten it to 2 minutes, no demo.

Thanks to everyone who stopped by and said hi - I grabbed many cards and will have more reviews coming as the products and services move into actually functioning prototypes.

Additional recaps:

• Michael Galpert

Here are some photos from the event (view all photos):

    

    

Here are the videos I captured:

Welcome video:

Wan Hsi Yuan - 8coupons.com (www.8coupons.com):

Jason Amster - BeenVerified (www.beenverified.com):

Kareem Kouddous - beYOU.tv (www.beyou.tv):

Looking forward to the next Matchup Camp!

NY-based Snooth has announced a $1 million angel round of financing today. This is in addition to their previous $300k funding round raised in December 2006.

Snooth is a data aggregator - they pull in content from thousands of sources. Snooth claims to be a "social shopping site" and their recommendation engine also provides customized selections based on stated preferences and user feedback. The more information a user gives on wines they enjoy, the more personalized and detailed the recommendations become. Snooth also maintains a wine database with over 1.9 million reviews for over 300,000 wines.

The new funds will be used to scale the development team, integrate the current backlog of merchants that have already partnered with Snooth, and add new retailers worldwide.

Check out our write-up of Snooth from the NY Social Networking Meetup from earlier this month.