San Diego-based VMIX has been revising its strategy, which was originally focused on providing a technology platform that enables TV stations and other media companies to stream online video. Earlier this year, VMIX began rolling out technology that allowed consumers to use the company’s video streaming technology on social media sites like Facebook.

Now the six-year-old startup is launching Givit, a new consumer-oriented business that makes it easy for users to share video privately. In contrast to posting a video on Facebook, where just about anyone can see it, Givit users can selectively send a private video link to designated friends and family.

After introducing a beta version of Givit last month, VMIX says today that users can download the Givit app for use on the iPhone and iPad. The technology was previously available as an app for Windows or Mac OS-based laptops and desktop PCs.

Basic Givit service is free; service that provides additional video storage capacity is available as a subscription. While there are plenty of competitors that already enable consumers to share videos online, VMIX says Givit is the only video-sharing service designed to restrict the people who can watch a video.

“One of our big value propositions is private video,” VMIX CEO Greg Kostello told me earlier this week. “There already are a number of ways to share video publicly through Facebook. But everyone who sees it is not necessarily a friend. They just friended me.”

In a statement from the company today, Kostello says, “Smartphones are now the camera of choice for recording everyday moments, but sharing mobile video is often a frustrating process. Givit makes it easy-and most importantly, by default we share securely and privately, rather than broadcasting your personal content across public social networks.”

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There were some interesting portents of things to come in San Diego’s emerging cleantech sector last week. Here is our Monday morning roundup of the news you need to know.

—Battelle’s Bhima Vijayendran told me he’s on the lookout for new business opportunities with local San Diego companies, as both an R&D partner and as a potential investor. As the world’s largest non-profit technical services and R&D company, Battelle’s business is focused primarily on national security, life sciences, and energy. Vijayendran said he moved to San Diego a year ago because he is particularly interested in sustainable chemicals like soy-based plasticizers that use biotechnology to produce high-value chemicals from renewable raw materials—eliminating the need for petroleum-based chemicals.

—QuickPlay Media CEO Wayne Purboo briefed reporters and analysts on the Toronto-based startup’s purchase of the San Diego-based network operations center from Qualcomm, which built the center for its unsuccessful Flo TV business. Purboo said, “We are building a cloud-based, IP video head-end to manage and support video delivered across multiple devices.” With Qualcomm’s center, Purboo says QuickPlay can provide its premium-quality infrastructure for customers like AT&T, enabling them to transmitting Internet video at a lower cost than they might face if they tried to build their own network.

—Based on a series of tests conducted with independent experts, San Diego’s Achates Power said its “opposed-piston” engine shows a 20 percent reduction in diesel fuel consumption when compared to Ford’s state-of-the-art Power Stroke diesel engine. Achates Power has designed its prototype two-stroke internal combustion engine to be smaller, lighter, and more efficient that a conventional heavy-duty diesel engine with separate, in-line cylinders.

—San Diego’s BillMyParents raised $2.5 million in a planned $10 million round of equity and rights to acquire securities. The Web-based startup’s primary product is a prepaid (and reloadable) MasterCard for teens that offers a range of parental controls. Michael R. McCoy was named as chairman and CEO last month.

—Ortiva Wireless raised $2 million in debt, rights, and securities that consist of promissory notes convertible into preferred stock. The San Diego startup, which develops wireless video optimization and streaming hardware and software for wireless operators, has not disclosed other information about the financing.

—San Diego-based Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) said it posted record revenue of $15 billion in fiscal 2011, which ended Sept. 25, along with record earnings and record volumes of its wireless chipsets. Looking forward, Qualcomm said it expects to ship chips for 900 million CDMA-based devices—a 16 percent year-over-year increase. Qualcomm said it also has a little over $20 billion in available cash, with $5.7 billion of that banked in the U.S. A Seeking Alpha transcript of the company’s conference call with analysts is here. ThinkEquity analyst Mark McKechnie told San Diego Union-Tribune reporter Mike Freeman he sees the continuing growth as a good confirmation that Qualcomm is benefitting on the chip side from the Apple iPhone 4S. McKechnie says Qualcomm is providing two chips for the iPhone 4S; the company previously was a supplier for only one other Apple phone—the iPhone 4—but only on Verizon’s network.

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[Clarification 11/5/11, 11:10 am. See below.] Toronto’s QuickPlay Media says its goal is to stream video to any IP-connected device on behalf of any media network or wireless carrier.

To accomplish this, the Canadian startup founded almost eight years ago has raised about $42 million in venture capital, and established several offices in the United States and London for its 150 employees. More importantly, though, QuickPlay also acquired the data and network operations center that Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) built for in a San Diego office park for its independently operated Flo TV subsidiary.

“This is probably the best facility in the world for delivering video content,” says QuickPlay CEO Wayne Purboo, who opened the network center to journalists and wireless industry analysts in mid-October. The network operations center, or NOC, looks like NASA’s mission control, only darker. Rows of computer-equipped desktops face a wall with more than two dozen 50-inch TV monitors. A data center on the other side of the wall has more than 300 terabytes of storage capacity.

QuickPlay is using the 30,000-square-foot control center, which includes a nearby satellite dish farm, to manage the satellite-based feed and Internet Protocol (IP)-based distribution of both live and on-demand content for customers like AT&T, T-Mobile, Sirius XM Radio, Motorola Mobility, Research in Motion, and Sony Pictures Entertainment.

Wayne Purboo

“We’re still in significant growth mode,” says Purboo, who closed the purchase in July. “We are building a cloud-based, IP video head-end to manage and support video delivered across multiple devices,” Purboo says. Flo TV never became a profitable business for Qualcomm, but Purboo says, “We believe there are significant cost savings to delivering video over IP.” With Qualcomm’s NOC, Purboo says QuickPlay can provide its premium-quality infrastructure to media companies at a lower cost than they might face if they tried to build their own network.

QuickPlay is growing fast to ride the growing wave on Internet streaming video. The company’s revenue has grown by 360 percent from 2005 to 2010, enough for QuickPlay to be named to Deloitte’s list of the 500 fastest growing companies in North America. The network ops center in San Diego, though, is key to everything that QuickPlay is pulling together for the next generation of Internet-connected devices.

Purboo won’t say how much QuickPlay paid for … Next Page »

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San Diego-based VMIX, which has revised its strategy to emphasize social media, today unveiled a free Vidcinity iPad 2 app that allows users to create and broadcast video linked to a specific location, and enables users to find other location-specific videos. VMIX, which announced last month that it was offering video rentals on Facebook, says it also has upgraded its Vidcinity iPhone app. Vidcinity creator and VMIX co-founder Ian Miller explains how it works in this video.

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Envivio, a South San Francisco company that makes Internet video distribution software, has filed S-1 registration papers with the Securities and Exchange Commission in preparation for a public offering. The 117-employee company, founded in 2000, has developed compression and networking software that helps mobile, landline, and cable operators transmit Internet-based video to multiple devices. The company, whose top shareholders are HarbourVest, Crescendo Ventures, Crédit Agricole Private Equity, Saints Capital, Atlantic Bridge Ventures, and Fonds de solidarité des travailleurs du Québec, said in its S-1 that it has incurred than $27 million in losses since 2009. Envivio plans to trade on the NASDAQ exchange under the ticker symbol “ENVI.”

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San Mateo, CA-based VideoSurf said today that it has raised $16 million from Pitango Venture Capital and strategic investors, bringing its total financing to $28 million. Using a patended computer vision algorithms to identify Web video content, Videosurf has built a search index that it says is used by 12 million visitors per month. VideoSurf CEO and co-founder Lior Delgo said the new cash “gives us the resources to scale the company as we continue to hire the best talent and invest in our technology.”

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File this under “one to watch more closely.”

Before I tell you about the company or its news, consider a few trends. People are watching more videos on their iPads and other tablet devices. Broadcasters, cable companies, and video content owners are starting to focus more on how to deliver TV shows and other entertainment “over the top,” directly to Internet-connected devices. Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN) is now competing in cloud-based entertainment (online music and video); one of its advantages over Netflix, Hulu, and others is that it’s an early adopter of using graphics chips (GPUs) for cloud-computing applications like video processing.

Speaking of video processing, there has been some interesting activity in that sector. In the last month, North Carolina-based Inlet Technologies was acquired by Cisco Systems (NASDAQ: CSCO) for $95 million. And the Irish Times reported a rumor that San Francisco-based online video firm Envivio plans to file for an IPO in July (with a valuation between $280-$340 million). That might leave Portland, OR-based Elemental Technologies, one of the few independent companies left in the sector, in a good spot.

And Elemental has some news today: PBS, the broadcasting network, is using Elemental’s software, together with a system from Redmond, WA-based RadiantGrid, to convert video files to the right formats quickly and efficiently for distribution. The significance to Elemental is that the startup now counts seven of the 10 biggest media networks as customers, including Disney/ABC, CBS Interactive, and Time Warner Cable.

“It’s a sign you’ve been approved by someone willing to bet on new technologies to lower their cost and provide a better experience for consumers,” says Elemental CEO and co-founder Sam Blackman. He adds that PBS will save millions of dollars per year by switching to file-based video delivery. (If you know what a transponder is, the PBS system can now use one instead of seven of them, Blackman says.)

A quick update on Elemental: The company, which started in 2006 with the idea of reinventing how people watch video online, now has 39 employees, and its revenues this quarter are “very significantly greater” than in the same period last year, Blackman says. He declined to give more specifics about revenue growth or profitability.

Given some of the ongoing consolidation in online video companies, I asked him about possible exits for Elemental—but he didn’t take the bait. “Elemental is completely focused on creating great products for our customers,” he says. “Our focus is on not getting distracted.”

Nevertheless, the market is opening up to the mainstream, which could bode well for a fundamental technology play like Elemental. “The space is definitely heating up,” Blackman says. The trend towards Internet video delivery to devices like tablets, he says, is “a wave that’s growing very fast right now and lifting companies in the space.”

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San Mateo, CA-based Adap.tv, which offers server software supporting online video advertising campaigns as well as an online marketplace for advertisers and publishers, said today that it has raised $20 million from a group led by new investor Bessemer Venture Partners. Existing investors Gemini Israel Funds, Redpoint Ventures, and Spark Capital joined the round. The company said the new funds will go toward international expansion, technology improvements, and sales and marketing efforts in the U.S.

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Sunnyvale, CA-based Zediva today launched a service aimed at disrupting the DVD rental market currently dominated by companies like Netflix and Coinstar’s Redbox. For $1.99 per DVD, Zediva members can watch a movie that’s physically playing on a DVD player at Zediva’s data center and streaming remotely over the Internet to a computer, tablet, smartphone, or set-top box. (The movies are streamed in the form of Adobe Flash files, meaning Apple iOS devices are left out.) The arrangement allows Zediva to get around the 28-day waiting period imposed on Netflix and Redbox before they can rent out newly released DVDs. “Zediva is designed to allow anyone to enjoy new releases at an affordable price point,” Zediva founder and CEO Venky Srinivasan said in a statement. “Our mission is to provide immediate access to the most current and popular blockbusters.”

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There’s a slew of tools like Apple’s iMovie for turning your raw photos and videos into fun multimedia slide shows that you can share with friends and family. The problem is that none of them are drop-dead simple—except perhaps Animoto’s. The startup, which is based in San Francisco and New York and backed mainly by Seattle investors (and led by Seattle natives), offers the easiest tool I’ve found for uploading photos and short video clips and setting them to music.

A lot more people are likely to stumble across that tool now that Animoto is making the technology available to outside partners such as photo-sharing sites. Kodak Gallery, American Greetings, and Aviary.com are the first three companies participating in Animoto’s new partner program, announced today at the South by Southwest Interactive festival in Austin, TX.

Up to now, the only way to create an Animoto project was to go to the startup’s website or download its iPhone app. But thanks to the new software bridges Animoto has built to partner sites, people who store their digital photos and videos at Kodak Gallery, make free e-cards at American Greetings, or use Aviary.com’s editing tools will be able to make full Animoto videos from their own media without leaving those sites.

That could eventually translate into a lot more visibility—and income—for Animoto. “I think it’s conceivable that in the future, not only will the majority of Animoto videos be created outside of Animoto.com, but also the majority of our revenue will be driven from outside Animoto.com,” says Brad Jefferson, the startup’s co-founder and CEO.

Building the application programming interfaces, or APIs, needed to pull this off preoccupied half of Animoto’s developer staff for most of 2010, Jefferson says. The company has been testing the service since last September; it was rolled out today at Kodak Gallery and will be available within a few weeks at Aviary.com and American Greetings.

Partners are interested in adding Animoto to their sites in part because it offers them a way to make money from consumers’ video clips for the first time, says Jefferson. “At least one in five online photo albums has at least one video clip,” he says. “But there’s not a lot of products that allow [photo-sharing sites] to monetize video clips. Their products are mostly tangible things like photo books and prints. Animoto gives photo-sharing sites the ability to offer a product that incorporates video clips and creates a lot of value.”

At Kodak Gallery, users can create their first high-resolution Animoto slide show for free during the month of March, and after that Kodak will charge users for each show they make. That’s similar to the arrangement at Animoto.com, where it’s free to … Next Page »

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Littleton, MA-based ZeeVee has reinvented itself again. The startup launched four years ago to provide hardware for “bringing Internet television together and into the living room,” says CEO Vic Odryna. The ZvBox device didn’t exactly catch on in homes, but has found a niche in commercial settings like hotels, restaurants, and casinos. ZeeVee later introduced a PC, then Mac, software program called Zinc for browsing video content from the Web—from sources like Hulu, Amazon, and Netflix—to watch on TVs that connected to computers.

Today, ZeeVee is introducing a glammed up, cloud-powered Zinc to consumers, and is out to help smaller cable content providers better make sense of content on the Web for customers. So rather than offering Zinc as downloadable software, the service is now entirely HTML- and Javascript-based and accessible via any Web browser thanks to cloud-powered storage. The idea is to unify the Zinc experience across a number of connected consumer devices—from tablets to smartphones to laptops and of course, TVs.

“There’s no killer app, no killer device—it should all work together,” Odryna says.

With this update, for example, consumers can research a show or movie on their smartphones, put it in a queue on their customer account, and later watch it on their tablets, laptops, or connected TVs. Zinc also has a mode called “leanback” that can be better navigated through a TV remote’s arrows, rather than a computer or tablet mouse.

ZeeVee has also revamped the way content can be browsed and accessed on its site, Odryna says. Most users don’t naturally think of which platform they want to view a particular show or movie on (i.e. “I want to watch Glee on Hulu and The King’s Speech on Amazon”) but rather the actual content they want to consume. The new Zinc platform aggregates all of the information so users can simply browse it based on a title, in a “simple, clean, kind of Google-esque search bar,” Odryna says.

“Our new system is built to be completely aware of where all the content lives,” says Odryna. It also allows users to filter out Internet content sources that charge money, and enables them to filter content by the type of device they want to consume it on.

Individually, most of these features can be found in other technologies for connecting the TV to Web-based content (like Boxee), or for aggregating Internet video (like CBS’s recently acquired Clicker or Rovi’s Sidereel), Odryna admits. But Zinc is also focused on providing sophisticated content curation that goes beyond simple recommendations, he says.

And the big kicker is what it can do for smaller cable and telecom companies. Cable giants have been able to cut deals with content providers to deliver integrated Web TV and video to home cable devices like set top boxes and connected televisions, but the smaller providers don’t necessarily have the money to build that capability from the ground up. ZeeVee can provide all of the Zinc capabilities to cable service providers, who can then brand the service as their own and decide what functionality and content they want to offer their subscribers.

“Our intent here is we’ve rebuilt this as a platform for service providers,” who are “trying to find their customers an easier way to get to way more video content than they can offer,” Odryna says.

This is going to be the real moneymaker for Zinc, which has so far been offered for free to consumers, Odryna says. ZeeVee can’t name its cable provider customers, but Odryna says the company has gotten “quite a few” to buy its service.

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Santa Clara, CA-based Rovi (Nasdaq: ROVI), a provider of entertainment guide information and copy protection technology, announced yesterday that it has acquired San Francisco-based SideReel, a startup that provides personalized guides to online television content. Rovi said SideReel’s data will complement its new AllRovi film and music search and recommendation service. “By adding the SideReel.com website to our online portfolio, we believe Rovi can be the go-to source for finding and enjoying online content,” said Rovi vice president of marketing Dave Jordan in a statement. The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. Xconomy profiled SideReel and its founder Roman Arzhintar last month.

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I was too busy to write a regular column this week. Or maybe I’ve simply run out of weighty things to say about mobile gadgets, digital media, the future of journalism, and the like. In any case, I thought I’d entertain you instead with a few of my favorite startup cartoons. These animated shorts all satirize some aspect of life at a technology startup, whether it’s fundraising, social media marketing, dealing with journalists, or adopting a “lean startup” methodology.

All of these shorts were made using Xtranormal, a Web-based moviemaking tool that I first wrote about a couple of years ago. The Montreal-based startup that created Xtranormal and its desktop cousin, called State, lets users pick from a few stock characters and settings, then applies text-to-speech technology to turn users’ scripts into dialogue “acted” by the animated characters. Writers can even choose camera angles and add pauses, gestures, and basic inflections.

In my first column about Xtranormal, I wrote that the company’s “easy-to-use toolkit of commands and its endearing cartoon people give it the feel of a big Lego set for adults.” Which turns out to be pretty funny, since some of Xtranormal’s newer characters actually are Lego people. But the most popular characters seem to be the “Pawz” people—vaguely anime-inspired raccoons (or maybe they’re dogs or teddy bears) with big eye patches.

Overall the technology is pretty amazing, but what I really like about Xtranormal is its primitiveness. These days, you can do a lot to enhance synthesized speech with emotion and nuance (pun intended). But the algorithms behind Xtranormal’s free moviemaking tool are at least a couple of years old, meaning the characters deliver their lines in a flat, deadpan tone that can render even badly written copy hilarious.

I wish I knew who created all these videos, but Xtranormal actually makes it pretty difficult to find out. The last one, however, was my own concoction.

Warning: Xtranormal is great at TTSW (text-to-swear-word) technology, so most of these videos are very NSFW. Listen with headphones on.

Stupid Questions VCs Ask

I Will Honor the Embargo

Lean Startups

What’s a Meme?

So You Want to Start a Web Startup

Pitching a Venture Capitalist

Social Media Lunch

I Need an iPhone 4

Outmoded

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Animoto would have knocked my grandfather’s socks off. A freelance photographer, he spent countless evenings assembling his Ektachrome transparencies into multimedia slide shows—but back in the 1970s and 1980s, “multimedia” meant a pair of carousel slide projectors with a dissolve unit controlled by time codes embedded on a musical cassette tape. At Animoto’s site, by contrast, you can upload a few dozen digital photos and video clips to the Web, select some music, get back a professional animated video within minutes, then share it with your friends via e-mail, Facebook, or YouTube. It’s one of the slickest and easiest ways to package and share all those photos and clips from your last trip or party—and sharing, after all, is what photography is all about.

“It really is digital storytelling,” says Brad Jefferson, co-founder and CEO of the New York- and San Francisco-based startup, which is expanding into a gleaming new office on Kearny Street. “My co-founders come from the film and TV industry, and at the end of the day what we are trying to do is help people create short-form documentaries from the photos on their SD cards and computers. We like to call it ‘Hollywood production with the click of a button.’”

And just as in Hollywood, there’s a lot going on behind the scenes. It was around 2007, when Animoto was founded, that cloud-computing platforms like Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) were beginning to make it possible for companies to offer such services online without having to build their own huge data centers. In fact, Animoto has always used EC2′s computing power for most of its hard-core rendering work—taking users’ photos, adding fancy motion graphics, dissolves, and other effects, and putting it all to music. But it was always a bit of a stretch, because Animoto was trying to get Amazon’s plain-vanilla CPUs to act like graphical processing units (GPUs), which are specially designed to speed the mathematical operations behind 2D and 3D rendering.

Now there’s an alternative: in November, Seattle-based Amazon Web Services announced that EC2 users could rent access to actual GPUs as well as CPUs. And that has allowed Animoto to take a big leap forward. Starting yesterday, Animoto upgraded its standard videos from 240p or pixels of height—the size of a small embeddable box on a blog page—to 360p, the size of a standard YouTube video.

Premium users previously had the option of upgrading their videos beyond that to 480p, which is DVD quality. But now they can also scale beyond that to 720p, or HD quality. And on top of all that, videos handled by Amazon’s GPUs are rendered about 10 times faster than before—and at lower cost.

“We knew that the direction our video rendering had to go was GPU, but the problem was that [until recently] there were no cloud providers with GPUs,” says Jefferson. “We looked at buying a bunch of servers and putting them in a colo [a colocation center]. But it was not having to invest in hardware that made us very nimble and allowed us to focus on what we’re good at, and we still don’t want to. Using Amazon GPU instances is the next evolution of that vision.”

There’s one caveat: Animoto offers 24 styles of videos, from abstract to cutesy, and so far HD videos and faster rendering are available for just one of them, the “Animoto Original” style. (For a look at that style, see the 2-minute Animoto video below, which I created last night using photos from a trip last weekend to California’s Sonoma County.) The reason is that Animoto has, in essence, …NEXT PAGE>

… Next Page »

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It’s a great time to be a cord-cutter. Thanks to Internet companies like Amazon, Apple, Boxee, Google, Hulu, Netflix, and Roku, it’s getting easier every day to cancel your cable or satellite TV subscription without giving up on your favorite TV shows. There’s just one problem. If you do cut the cord—as I did two years ago—it gets a lot more complicated to figure out where to watch your shows, and when new episodes are available. These are things that your DVR usually handles if you’re a cable subscriber—and for better or worse, there’s no equivalent (yet) of a universal DVR for Internet video.

But there is help. The best service I’ve found for locating and tracking my favorite shows comes from a San Francisco startup called Sidereel. At the Sidereel website, you can search for your favorite shows, add them to a personalized calendar, and sign up for e-mails that will notify you when new episodes are out. There are also handy links to all the places online where you can watch the shows. For example, my current favorite show, Fringe, is available on Amazon, Hulu, iTunes, and Xfinity TV, and a Hong Kong-based site called Megavideo (who knew?). Last week, Sidereel also came out with an iOS app that lets you do most of the same things from your iPhone or iPad.

Sidereel isn’t a household name like YouTube or Netflix, but the angel-funded, 35-employee startup says it’s the world’s largest independent TV site. It attracts a million users every day, and over 10 million per month (the average user comes back once every three days). Unlike Apple or Hulu or most of the other players in the Internet TV space, Sidereel isn’t in bed with—or at war with—any particular TV network or media conglomerate, so its advertising-driven episode guide and tracking service can afford to be all-inclusive. With 9,200 shows in Sidereel’s catalogue, you’re pretty sure to find the shows you like.

I wanted to find out more about this unusual and under-recognized startup, so I headed over to Sidereel recently to spend some time with founder and CEO Roman Arzhintar. Right off the bat it was clear that Arzhintar isn’t your typical brash SoMa/Silicon Valley CEO—he’s more John Hodgman than Master of the Universe. He came to startup life only after abandoning careers as a lawyer and a globetrotting novelist. He says it’s “almost the story of my life” that “things end up being great but for all the wrong reasons.”

Arzhintar got interested in media at Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania, where he was a protege of the college president, former CBS president Arthur Taylor. But he took a roundabout path into the media business, getting a law degree, spending three years as a corporate attorney for a technology firm, realizing that “not only was I a bad lawyer but I also hated being a lawyer—there’s no interaction with people,” then spending a while writing fiction while touring France, Spain, Argentina, and Chile.

He finally ended up in San Francisco working for Guba, a startup that had created a search tool for Usenet, the vast Internet discussion system that predates … Next Page »

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San Diego’s Covario, a five-year-old startup that provides analytics and services for digital marketing, convened its annual users conference in downtown San Diego yesterday. The event draws top marketing executives from companies like Intel, Procter & Gamble, and Research In Motion (RIM), which led Covario to develop a movie theme around the “Top Guns” of search, social media, and digital advertising.

Dressed like Tom Cruise in a leather jacket and aviator glasses, Covario co-founder Russ Mann took the stage to announce, “I’m Russ Mann, CEO of Covario—and ‘Maverick.’ “

Yet with the Super Bowl looming as the single biggest U.S. advertising event (distinct from the weeks-long World Cup or Olympic Games), Mann might have made a bigger impression if he had dressed like Pittsburgh Steelers safety Troy Polamalu, with his trademark long, curly hair.

Russ Mann (aka "Maverick")

TV commercials for the Super Bowl, which are estimated this year to cost $3 million for 30 seconds, have long been in a league of their own. Nielsen Sports media research estimates that almost half of those watching the game this Sunday are actually tuning in to watch the commercials more than the game. More than 106 million people watch last year’s game.

At Covario’s event yesterday, some of the most interesting insights stemmed from efforts by the chief marketing officers at major companies to bridge the gap between online digital marketing, where everything can be quantified, and old media marketing, where advertisers relied on focus groups and intuition in the hopes that ad spending will translate into greater product sales.

Advertisers these days view TV advertising as a catalyst, said Sean Corcoran, a senior interactive marketing analyst for Cambridge, MA-based Forrester Research. In a keynote presentation yesterday, Corcoran said “the Millenials” (people born in 1980 and later) tend to multi-task—they’ll check the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) during a movie and player stats during … Next Page »

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Palo Alto, CA-based Auditude, which makes tools to help track and manage Internet video advertising campaigns, said today (PDF) that it has collected $11 million in Series B venture financing. The round was led by new investors Granite Ventures and Silicon Valley Bank, and included existing backers Greylock Partners and Redpoint Ventures. Granite Ventures managing director Chris Hollenbeck has joined Auditude’s board of directors.

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CastTV, a four-year-old video search site in San Francisco backed by investors Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Ron Conway, and Marc Andreessen, has been acquired by Tribune Media Services of Chicago, according to an announcement yesterday. Tribune sells access to a database of TV and movie information that’s used in media guides published by Microsoft, Google, TiVo, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Amazon, The New York Times, and other companies. Tribune said the CastTV acquisition would enhance this database and give customers “access to all the metadata necessary to create entertainment-discovery guides that direct consumers to programs available on linear, on-demand and online video platforms.” Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

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Celebrity obsession isn’t limited to Hollywood. Here in Silicon Valley, we’ve got our own versions of Brangelina and Justin Timberlake—they just go by names like Google, Apple, Facebook, and Twitter. Part of Xconomy’s mission, though, is to look beyond the headlines for firms that are innovating in unusual ways. So it’s been a pleasure to get reacquainted lately with a San Francisco video search company called Blinkx.

I first met Blinkx’s founder, Suranga Chandratillake, back in 2004, shortly after the startup had been spun out by Autonomy, the San Francisco- and Cambridge, UK-based enterprise software company. Blinkx was taking technology developed at Autonomy to search unstructured data such as corporate documents and applying it to the consumer world, especially desktop computers. But within a year or two it had switched its focus to Web video. Even then, at the very dawn of the YouTube era, online video was burgeoning. Now, of course, it sucks up more bandwidth than anything else on the Internet. So Blinkx’s switch was prescient. And today it’s accumulated the single largest index of video content on the planet, covering more than 35 million hours of searchable content—more than Yahoo or even Google.

Blinkx hasn’t become a household name like YouTube, in part because the lion’s share of its business is providing video search services to other companies, such as Ask.com, Real Networks, and Infospace. But it’s a solid company that went public in 2007 and recently finished its first profitable half-year ever. When I caught up with Chandratillake recently (it’s pronounced Chawn-dra-TILL-a-kuh), I asked him to brief me on the company’s latest search technology, its revenue sources, and its unusual (for a U.S.-based company) decision to float its stock on the London Stock Exchange.

The tale Chandratillake told—involving years of experimentation and fine-tuning, both on the technology side and the business side—is actually far more typical of most Silicon Valley startups than the instant-riches stories that garner so much press attention.

What Autonomy, and its offspring Blinkx, are best at is working with unstructured data—stuff that doesn’t fit into the neat rows and columns of relational databases. That covers a lot, from e-mails to word-processing documents to Web pages, music, photos, and video clips. In fact, in its first couple of years Blinkx was known mainly for its desktop search tool, which indexed files on the hard drives of Windows computers and automatically grouped them into folders by context.

“Local machines were getting complex enough that you needed advanced search technology for that,” says Chandratillake. And for a short while, Blinkx’s tool was the only comprehensive desktop search utility available. But Microsoft, Apple, and Google were working hard to catch up, and they had the advantage of having hooks into their own operating systems and Web search indexes. Blinkx was overtaken, and ultimately abandoned desktop search. “What brings our team to work is not fighting a battle that everyone is fighting, but being able to define a new battlefield,” Chandratillake says now.

To survive, the company refocused its efforts on video search, which was “a great example of a place where our technology can provide a very valuable difference,” Chandratillake says. It’s also “a fast-growing area, with lots of opportunities to start new businesses,” he notes. To index a video clip—that is, to make it easier to find through an online search—Blinkx’s technology goes at the clip from … Next Page »

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[Updated, see below] Proving that he has the power to move markets with an odd aside, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak sparked rumors this week that Apple is buying Nuance Communications (NASDAQ: NUAN), the giant Burlington, MA-based maker of speech recognition software.

The source of the speculation is a passing remark in a video interview about the future of the Apple iPhone between Wozniak and TVDeck.com founder Romil Patel (see below, at about the 0:45 mark). “I think voice recognition is going to become more and more a big part of these machines,” Wozniak says in the video. “Apple is probably thinking the same way. They recently bought the company Nuance, that does a lot of really great voice recognition for that program I just described, Siri Assistant.”

That was enough to set off the blog 9to5Mac headline “Whoa! Did Apple buy Voice Recognition company Nuance?,” a meme which quickly spread to mocoNews, MobileBeat, and TechCrunch.

Neither Nuance nor Apple have issued official statements about the rumors, and Nuance makes no mention of acquisition discussions with Apple in its quarterly report, issued yesterday. However, Mass High Tech is reporting today that it received e-mail from Nuance spokesman Richard Mack calling Wozniak’s statement “speculation.”

Several commentators conclude that Wozniak’s remark is a misstatement born of confusion over the Siri iPhone app, a voice-driven personal assistant that can make restaurant reservations, book concert tickets, look up weather forecasts, and the like. Apple did acquire Siri, the maker of app, in April 2010. And the voice recognition software used in the app is licensed from Nuance.

Nuance is valued at about $5.3 billion, so Apple, which has more than $51 billion in the bank, could easily afford to snap up the company if it wanted to. But such an acquisition would be unusual for Apple, particularly given that Nuance’s speech recognition products are in such widespread use within businesses and on Windows computers, markets that Apple has traditionally shunned.

Nuance shares were up as much as 12 percent on the rumors today, the stock’s largest intraday gain since April 2009, according to Bloomberg News. As this article went to press, Nuance was trading at $18.16, up about 6 percent.

Update, 6:25 pm PST 11/23/10: Reuters is reporting that Wozniak has acknowledged that he misspoke. “I thought I’d read about it but obviously got it all wrong,” Wozniak told the news service in an e-mail.

Here’s the video that started the whole hullabaloo:

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