metarand

Photobucket Expands Features With Customized Themes And Advanced Organizer

Recognizing that photos and videos are how we keep and share the most important moments in our lives, Fox Interactive Media-owned photo and video sharing site Photobucket has taken another step towards making the sharing of memories even more personal and entertaining.

The site’s 46 million unique users worldwide will be able to make use of new album design themes and a new photo and video organizer.

With the themes feature, users can choose from pre-made themes in a range of categories (art, entertainment, holidays, nature, sports etc). Artists will be able to provide pre-made themes for their fans - currently Tokio Hotel has a custom theme on the site. In addition, users can create custom themes of their own.

Themes can be added to both individual and group albums and will be viewable by visitors to an entire album, individual photo or video and when photos or albums are shared. Group albums provide access for multiple people to share and view photos in a single album.

The new organizer allows users to add titles, descriptions and tags to photos and videos in bulk, customize the sort order of media in albums, organize content via drag and drop and search through albums based on descriptions, tag contents or titles.

Elevator Pitches: Rule 1, Don’t Hang Your Pet By Its Tail, Even On TechCrunch!

TechCrunch has set up a community video project called Elevator Pitches. Limited to 60 seconds these pitches are voted up or down by the community.

It looks like a fun way to get entrepreneurs to hone their pitching skills and get some coverage. Below is the video from Ugobe’s CEO, Bob Christopher - it’s an interesting take on the whole elevator pitch by a company with a great product and by the sounds of it, great vision.

But Bob - holding the Pleo by the tail until it squeals breaks the first rule of pitching — keep the focus on your venture and its value proposition…

Metarand Unplugged: Graspr’s Teresa Phillips Talks About Their Venture Funding

Based in Sunnyvale, California, instructional video company Graspr has raised a $2.5M round of funding from Draper Fisher Jurvetson and a number of angel investors.

In this edition of Metarand Unplugged Teresa Phillips, Graspr’s CEO talks about the space and the steps she went through to get this capital infusion, which will be used to build out their syndication platform.

Stream the Session in Quicktime:

here

Stream the Session as an mp3:

here

Tags: Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Graspr, Teresa Phillips

Google Launches A Distributed Media Cavalcade

The entertainment industry has to date taken somewhat of a field of dreams approach to creating content - build it and they will come.

But Google, which up until this point has avowed not to be a content player, is taking a different approach that leverages its existing adsense infrastructure beautifully.

Rather than creating a new comedy series and hoping the audience will come, Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane has teamed up with Google to distribute his new comedy series exclusively via the web.

Seth MacFarlane’s Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy will be syndicated to sites that are determined by the Adsense system to be the right profile for the demographic the series is targeted at. Cavalcade video clips, with a variety of pre-roll, banner and other ad formats will be streamed instead of static Adsense ads.

This Google Content Network is both a brilliant way of leveraging an existing infrastructure and a great example of a distributed content model at work.

[via NY Times]

VentureWrap: Seesmic Raises $6M Series B From Omidyar

No wonder Loic Le Meur, Seesmic’s CEO, was so excited on the call I did with him earlier in the week.

He was in the final stages of closing a $6M Series B round from Omidyar Network and Wellington Partners.

UPDATE: You can watch Loic explaining the rationale here.

[via TechCrunch]

Metarand Unplugged: Seesmic’s Loic Le Meur On Platforms, Hollywood, Twhirl And Opening Up

Seesmic has quietly moved out of invite-only status as the video conversation startup has busied itself integrating its recent acquisition Twhirl into its platform play.

In this session of Metarand Unplugged we also explore the social media landscape with Loic Le Meur, Seesmic’s founder, and talk about open APIs, Hollywood and whether the G-spot exists.

Loic is pictured here on the right with Michael Arrington and Robert Scoble.

Stream the Session in Quicktime:

here

Stream the Session as an mp3:

here

Tags: Loic Le Meur, Seesmic

Animoto Moves To Monetize Personalized Video

Animoto, a New York-based user-generated video creation tool company, has added features to its web app that will allow for the sale of DVDs or DVD-quality formatted video from the Animoto website.

An increasingly popular way of creating highly personalized, professional quality videos from a users own photos and music, Animoto is built on a Cinematic Artificial Intelligence technology that emulates the thought processes of a director and an editor with respect to post-production skills.

This technology takes into account the full gamut of features in a song - genre, song structure, energy, rhythm, instrumentation and vocals. No two videos produced on Animoto are the same, even if they have an identical set of raw materials in the form of images and music.

Videos are produced in widescreen format, can be emailed and embedded in social networks.

DVDs cost $20 and DVD-quality formats $5. It will be interesting to see the level of uptake they get.

iPhone Gets Kicked Into Orb(it)

Orb Networks has enabled TV on the iPhone. By installing the OrbLive app users can stream any video format to their iPhone.

There are a few hoops to go through before you can stream your favorite basketbal game though:

• You need a PC or Parallels
• You need a TV tuner card
• Your iPhone must be jailbroken.

We understand that iPhone 2.0 will support video - will it go so far as supporting live TV streaming?

Metarand Unplugged: Ryan Junee, CEO of Y Combinator Graduate, Omnisio

In this session of Metarand Unplugged we explore the Y Combinator experience with Ryan Junee, CEO of recent graduate, Omnisio.

Based in Palo Alto and set up by Ryan and co-founders, Julian Frumar and Simon Ratner, Omisio provides users with the ability to annotate, add slides and share videos.

Stream the Session in Quicktime:

here