Andy Plesser

NEW YORK — Despite the gloom around the advertising and media world, we found Advertising Week and its many events upbeat. I caught up with AOL CEO Tim Armstrong on Monday evening outside the tent AOL erected in Times Square for a  big advertiser event.        

Online ad inventory company the Rubicon Project, has raised a new round of $9 million from NBCU and other earlier investors, paidContent's David Kaplan reports.

In the view of Huffington Post technology editor Jose Antonio Vargas, if technology were a solar system, the core of the systems around which most technology revolves is Apple, Facebook and Google.

Particle, the San Francisco based start-up funded by Justin Timberlake, launched a product called Robo.to in May, which is a Web application that allows users to upload a four second video created on a mobile device or Web cam and share it on various social network sites .

The Huffington Post, the Web's most influential blog, is launching a technology section today edited by Jose Antonio Vargas, former Washington Post reporter. 

Earlier this summer, the Verizon FiOS, the Internet/television/phone service, integrated Facebook and Twitter into its platform, allowing subscribers to initiate Twitter alongside their favorite shows. Here's the story by CNET's Maggie Reardon.

Ensequence, a software company that provides interactive tools to video producers, has raised $22 million in new funding and is about to close on an additional $14.5 million, bringing its total raise to about $100 million, reports Rafat Ali on paidContent this morning.

Mixpo, the Seattle-based company which integrates local television advertising into local websites, is now offering its platform to advertising agencies, the company announced today.

SAN FRANCISCO — Brightcove, the big video services company which powers the online video technology for a number of news organizations including The New York Times,  the Washington Post and TIME.com, sees growing opportunities in non-media customers.

News videos created for an online publication should "amplify not echo" text stories Caleb Silver, executive producer for video at CNNMoney.com told me in this interview.

We read the TechCrunch report about Mint, the personal finance tool, which will be acquired by Intuit (Quicken, etc) for $170 million.

Lots of buzz this week about the introduction of the iPod Nano with a video camera.  While the new Apple device seems like a cool idea, providing simple video gathering, the images are not nearly as good as the Flip SD, Chris Albrecht shows with a side-by-side video test/demo.

Adobe today announced that it is extending digital rights management, DRM, for Flash files which are downloaded by users.  

Today there is a huge New York Times, four-photo, above-the-fold feature on Gary Vaynerchuk, host of the popular and influential wine video blog Wine Library TV. The paper reports that Gary has a million dollar, 10-book contract with HarperStudio.

Microsoft will preview two new Silverlight features at the IBC in Amsterdam later this week.   Mary-Jo Foley at ZDNet has some of the details. Here is the company press release.

REDMOND, WA — Bing, the newly introduced search engine from Microsoft, assembles videos from sources beyond video sharing sites, an approach which we find more open and "universal."

Interesting first-person story today by Meetup founder Scott Heiferman in The New York Times.

PRAGUE, Czech Republic — Imaging of the streets here has been underway by Google for Street View since April, but this might be the first time the Google car has been caught working in this picturesque capital.

One of the last interviews with Ted Kennedy that was done is up on BigThink, the little New York-based start-up which creates and publishes interviews with thought leaders.

YouTube will stream the OutsideLand’s music festival from San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park this weekend.  It is the first music festival streamed the big video sharing site.