Andy Plesser

Techmeme founder Gabe Rivera today announced the introduction of human editors to the automated news aggregator.  Gabe lays out his reasons on the site today.  TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington wonders if it will spoil the system;  TechCrunch is the single most popular news source on Techmeme, so I can see why Michael might have some concerns. […]

Video search works, particularly around professionally-produced content.  Suranga Chandratillake, CEO of  Blinkx, the London/San Francisco-based video search engine, told TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld in this segment from the Beet.TV Online Video Roundtable that his company is serving ads on 80-90 percent of professionally produced content and on 10-20 percent on user-generated content.  The ads are both […]

ExtendMedia has raised an additional venture round of $10 million, Liz Gannes of NewTeeVee confirms tonight. News of the funding was first reported by peHUB. In October of 2007, I interviewed CEO Keith Kocho. He speaks about the ScanDisk project, which has since been canceled.   I’ve republished the interview here. — Andy Plesser, Executive Producer

The Huffington Post has raised an additional $25 million in venture funding, according to a report this morning by Kara Swisher of AllThingsD.  In a subsequent post, she reports that the Huff Post has formally announced the news. In January, I interviewed Huff Post investor and board member Eric Hippeau of SoftBank about the value […]

CNN’s live streaming channel has had continuous coverage of the attacks in Mumbai since the events first broke on Wednesday at just after 1 p.m. EST.  CNN’s live coverage has gotten 1.4 million views as of 11:30 a.m. EST, a CNN spokeswoman told me. We have seen how live streaming of events has taken hold […]

As the world has tuned into to live coverage of breaking news on network news channels, others found videos on demand on most of the major news sites and on YouTube, which has uploads of coverage of Indian broadcasters.  I’ve posted the video below.  We haven’t seen much in the way of user-generated video yet, […]

Stephen Shankland has done a little research on adoption of Chrome, the recently introduced Web browser from Google. He finds that 3.6 percent of visitors to CNET used Chrome in October, up from just one percent in September. While CNET users are earlier adopters, the general population uses Chrome less one percent, he finds. In […]

Kyte has launched new monetization with major ad server integrations and mobile web apps, the company announced today.  Danial Graf, president and CEO of Kyte, spoke with Kelsey about these and others developments immediately after the Beet.TV Online Video Roundtable last month in New York at MSNBC. For more on this development, check out these […]

For some time, Beet.TV has been available on the iPod and the iPhone, in the form of a downloaded file via iTunes.  Now, those clever engineers at Blip.tv have a work around to allow iPhone owners watch videos streamed on demand.  Very cool development.  Meghan Keane over at Epicenter has the story along with comments […]

Lawrence Summers, former cabinet secretary under Bill Clinton and a past president of Harvard, has been tapped to be head of the National Economic Counsel, the top economics spot in White House, the Wall Street Journal reported tonight. Summers is an investor in BigThink, a New York-based video site for featuring short, well-edited comments by […]

We are fascinated that President-elect Barack Obama is addressing the nation on Saturdays both on radio and on video via YouTube.  Today he outlined an economic stimulus plan. Last week’s address garnered nearly 1 million views, as CNET’s Dan Farber points out in his post.  Today’s YouTube address has just 65,000 views as of 2 […]

BitGravity, a new content delivery network (CDN) which is largely focused on streaming high-quality live video, has a new product out which delivers six high-def video streams at once.  The development was reported by Michael Arrington at TechCrunch.  Live streaming, while a niche, is growing, and BitGravity, with customers like Revision3, could be well positioned […]

Many of the experimental advertising budgets for online video are “now gone” as a result of the fiscal crisis, says Dina Kaplan, co-founder of Blip.tv.  I caught up with her yesterday at the “Future of Television” conference in Manhattan where she was a panelist. Moving beyond the the experimental stage, Dina says she is working […]

Move Networks, the small Utah-based company which has created an impressive high quality, low bandwidth solution to streaming video for ABC, FOX, the and others, will now provide its technology to much smaller publishers through an association with Boston-based PermissionTV. Move’s streaming technology is not Flash or Microsoft based, it is a technology it calls […]

On TechCrunch today, Roi Carthy explores the new direction of pioneering video sharing site Metacafe.  Roi interviews founder Eyal Hertzog about the implementation of a system by which users are invited to annotate the metadata around video, in a Wiki-type process.  In August, I interviewed Eyal about the Wiki application here in New York; I […]

VideoEgg, the San Francisco-based video ad network, will introduce advertising to the iPhone, reports TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld. For the story, Erick interviewed VideoEgg’s Troy Young, who talks about the opportunity of the iPhone for marketers.  Troy disses AdMob, a mobile phone ad network which presently serves ads to the iPhone. Here’s the company press release. […]

Boxee, a home media networking solution provider (for an explanation read these posts by MG Siegler at VentureBeat and Robin Wauters at TechCrunch) has closed its first financing round with $4 million from Spark Capital and Union Square Ventures.  Earlier this year, we interviewed CEO Avner Ronen about the company.  In the segment, he shows […]

StumbleUpon, the content recommendation site owned by eBay, has extended it premium service to several new publishers including Funny Or Die, Atom, Scientific American, and 5min.com, according to a report in CNET this morning.

Late yesterday, Google announced that it is putting text advertising onto Google Finance, the financial news and portfolio/stock tracking site. Google is putting considerable resources into the site and plans to expand it globally, according to an interview with Google’s R.J. Pittman we did in July.  R.J. indicated in the interview that Google will likely […]

Adobe has landed a two-year agreement with MLB.com to stream its 2,500-plus spring training, regular season and post-season games live to MLB.com’s 1.5 million subscribers.  Games were previously streamed on Microsoft Silverlight, an arrangement announced in August of 2007.  In the rich media platform game, Adobe has a home run here.  Details were released a […]