VIEQUES, PR -- I sure was glad to get out New York early Friday morning just before the snowstorm and get down to Vieques, the Caribbean island just 10 miles off the eastern shore of Puerto Rico.  It's been five years since we discovered the place and nearly four since we've owned our home which we call Casa de Los Frutales, [...]

Starting today and for the next two weeks, Beet.TV's 800 videos will feature a 30 second post-roll ad campaign for "Changing the Present," a nonprofit organization that connects consumers with a choice of 1500 charitable gifts.  Earlier this month, I interviewed Executive Creative Director Kevin McKeon of StrawberryFrog, the highly regarded advertising agency responsible for the campaign. The ads begin [...]

Akamai, the world's largest content delivery network, a giant network of servers around the globe which streams video for Reuters, MySpace, Metacafe NBC, CBS, CNN, the BBC and many others, is sponsoring Beet.TV for the next 30 days with an exclusive in-stream advertising message running in our 800 clips.  The overlay links to a marketing page with video testimonials from [...]

Verizon plans to expand its FiOS and broadband service, which began the first year of its local franchise agreement with New York City in July, to over three million residential units in the city over the next five or six years, Executive Director of Network Operations Chris Levendos says in this interview. Andy was among the first New York city [...]

One of the big software developments of the year was Adobe's introduction of AIR, a desktop computing environment which marries rich, local applications with the live interactivity of the Web.  Today, the company announced that it has brought its version for Linux out of beta.  It already has AIR for Windows and the Mac. Linux is not a big deal right [...]

One of the biggest events of 2008 was the Summer Olympics in Beijing.  The most significant development in online video distribution has been the entrance of Microsoft Silverlight, the new competitor to Adobe's ubiquitous Flash.  The new rich media Web plug-in had its big debut as the online video platform for NBC Sports coverage of the Beijing Games. Beet.TV has [...]

Playable search engine SeeqPod will introduce a Windows mobile application tomorrow that will bring all the free music on the Internet to mobile phones. Users simply have to search for a song, and if it exists anywhere on the web--legally or illegally--SeeqPod will find it with its crawling and indexing technology. Marshall Kirkpatrick at Read Write Web has a story about [...]

Kaltura, the company which provides an open source video platform that allows the public to edit video in a "Wiki-like" environment, just announced its first, prominent media company implementation with Public Television's flagship Station, WNET/Thirteen New York.  The Kaltura player is being used first on Worldfocus, the show about international events. It is featured on the Talk to Us section. Neal [...]

Not all gloom and doom in the online video world, at least according to one prominent industry analyst firm.  A new report out by  eMarketer's David Hallerman predicts that online video ad spending will increase 45 percent in 2009.  Kelsey interviewed David at the Beet.TV Online Video Roundtable at MSNBC in October.  He talks about developments for online video and [...]

Joost, which Portfolio previously described as going "from superhero from life support," is attempting a comeback, CNET's Caroline McCarthy writes today. Part of its revamping includes its new iPhone application, which I interviewed CEO Mike Volpi about from his London office via Skype earlier this month. I republished the interview here. --Kelsey Blodget, Associate Producer  

Young Woong Ha, aka "Hero," a three-year old Korean who speaks no English, has become an Internet sensation by singing Beatles songs.  His rendition of "Hey Jude," sung in his diapers while clutching an acoustic guitar, is the number one viral video hit on on MySpace, Beet.TV has learned.  The clip has garnered 5.7 million views. Why is this such a [...]

Advertisers spend seven to eight percent of their budgets online, but only a tiny percentage of that goes toward brand advertising, according to Vizu CEO Dan Beltramo. Many prefer click-through ads because they're easier to measure, but Vizu has developed a brand lift measurement system called Ad Catalyst to help change that.    "With accountability on the Internet for brand [...]

How will the hugely popular micro-blogging platform Twitter make money?  Caroline McCarthy, the lead social media reporter for CNET News.com, says that while speculation is rampant about various monetization strategies for Twitter, she expects the sale of analytics and non-public data is the most likely scenario. This is the second of two interviews with Caroline which were taped at the [...]

It was a big week in social  media with news that Facebook and MySpace will allow their platforms to be integrated into other web sites. While there is excitement about spreading social media outside of their destination sites, there is growing evidence that major advertisers are not comfortable with placing ads on these networks.  Caroline McCarthy, the lead social media [...]

It's a technique long used by cable programmers, including MTV: keep videos in rotation in an ongoing, 24-hour telecast.  The cable programmers knew that new viewers tune in at different times and are likely to find programming by chance.  The same concept should be applied to web videos, says Max Haot, co-founder and CEO of Mogulus.  He says online video [...]

October was a record breaking month for video views on CNN.com and other sites.  CNN had 134 million videos streamed by 8.3 million unique visitors, according to the latest numbers released by Nielsen Online.  Yahoo! registered the most uniques with 9.9 million, but had only 61 million views.  msnbc.com beat CNN in uniques with 9.5 million, but had a few [...]

Advertising Age's B2B Media Business has just published the winners of the industry's best business video sites. We were pleased to read that that The Deal has won the Regular Program, Small B2B category.  We are mighty proud because Beet provides production services for The Deal and has produced many of the segments in the series. Shooting and editing was easy.  [...]

Google web browser Chrome is leaving beta, Marissa Mayer told Michael Arrington today at the Le Web conference in Paris. I republished my interview with Marissa at TechCrunch50 this summer about Chrome. You can check out TechCrunch's story here. --Kelsey Blodget, Associate Producer

The search solution Kosmix has raised $20 million in a funding round led by TimeWarner, the company announced today--an impressive feat in today's economic climate. Andy interviewed Kosmix Co-founder Anand Rajaraman in New York earlier this year, and I republished the interview here. It seems impossible for any search start-up to raise that kind of money when there's already a Google, [...]

neoSaej, a small Boston area start-up co-founded by Ray Stata and Mukesh Chatter, have quietly raised $10 million in venture funding and have launched a live auction platform--one different from eBay and Priceline.  Stata is best known as co-founder of Analog Devices and whose name graces the Frank Gehry/MIT building; Chatter is founder of Nexabit, which was sold to Lucent [...]