Michael Arrington wrote that Animoto "is one of those start-ups that has success written all over it," and it's hard not to be impressed by their platform. Users simply upload pictures and music and Animoto automatically makes them into a high-production quality 30-second video; longer videos cost $3 a piece or $30 a year. Animoto made the custom videos for TechCrunch50 [...]

Nearly 2 million visitors downloaded Chrome, the new web browser from Google, during its first week, Nielsen has just reported. Last week in San Francisco, Kelsey interviewed Google VP Marissa Mayer on the development and utility of the new browser.  Timed with today's news, we are republishing the interview. Here's the take of Stephen Shankland at CNET News.com -- Andy Plesser, Executive Producer

Like so many disasters which have driven news consumption, the earthquake that hit Wall Street on Monday has brought record traffic to the Wall Street Journal Online.  Monday set an all time record of two million visitors, a Journal spokeswoman told Beet.TV, citing internal numbers.  Traffic on Tuesday was nearly as high, we are told.  These are pretty big numbers, [...]

Advertising networks are fragmenting into specialized verticals like travel ad networks, women's ad networks and gay ad networks, according to Frank Addante, serial entrepreneur and CEO of advertising technology company The Rubicon Project. The fragmentation is mimicking the way television stations split off into cable channels, he says. Addante discussed the benefits and challenges of this trend when I interviewed [...]

Angel investor Ron Conway made a bold prediction to the overflowing audience at TechCrunch50 last Monday: product placement will become the next multi-billion dollar industry. Online video creators rejoiced, but Jim Armstrong, Managing Director for Clearstone Venture Partners, is not convinced.  One problem with product placement, Armstrong says, is knowing knowing when enough is enough: Product placement that is too [...]

A person's activities on Facebook, Flickr, training sites like Nike plus, and credit card purchases all generate data, and Me-trics wants to put it together in one place, co-founder James Vreeland told me after his presentation at TechCrunch50 last Tuesday. He describes the company as "Google Analytics for your life." Me-trics wants to unearth trends from correlations in the data [...]

Allen Stern over at CenterNetworks says that Flixwagon, the company which provides a Web platform for live and recorded mobile phone uploads, will announce a "white label" solution for media organizations and carriers to create their own branded channels. In Hollywood in June, I spoke with Flixwagon co-founder Sarig Reichert. I've republished this interview today. Update: Here's the company press release. -- Andy [...]

comScore just released numbers on the dramatic increase in mobile search in the United States and Europe.  Mobile search has jumped 68 percent in twelve months, the web measurement firm has found.  Google is by far the leader. As mobile text search has grown, so has mobile video search, we expect.  Video search is not covered in this report by comScore.  One [...]

Last Monday, Adgregate Markets launched ShopAds, a banner advertising widget where consumers can purchase products without being navigated away from the page. The credit card purchases within the transactional banner ads are secure, even if the sites they are placed on are not, CEO Henry Wong told me after his presentation last Monday at TechCrunch50. VideoEgg also has a shop [...]

Universal annotation system DotSpots, created by BizRate and Shopzilla founder Farhad Mohit, made quite a splash at the TechCrunch50 conference last week. Wired's Besty Schiffman blogged that she had it pegged as the probable TechCrunch50 winner.  DotSpots wants to bring a Wikipedia-like annotation system to every meme on the web, but is currently focusing on the news, COO Navid Aslani [...]

Argentinian start-up Popego brings together a user's digital life in one place, CEO Santiago Siri told me after he presented at TechCrunch50 last Tuesday. The site creates interest profiles for users based on their Flickr photos, YouTube videos, blog posts, Twitters, and other digital content to help them find things and people that match their interests. Users input their social [...]

I'm not sure if the expected announcement at CES of a new industry-wide system to make downloaded media work on any device will become a reality, as Chris Albrecht at NewTeeVee writes today, but it is surely needed.  Here's the take on this by Cliff Edwards at Business Week. Over at CNET, Greg Sandoval wonders if Apple will join the rest [...]

The immense interest in Republican vice presidential nominee Alaska Governor Sarah Palin has driven 38 million video views over the past week, including YouTube videos, broadcast videos and spoofs, reports the Silicon Alley Insider's Michael Learmonth.  Michael has created his report on numbers provided TubeMogul. One of the most creative spoofs is Scott Bateman's animation of ABC News Charles Gibson's interview of Governor [...]

Google Alerts can't distinguish people with common names, according to Angstro CEO Salim Ismael. His company, which presented at Techcrunch 50 Monday, uses an algorithmic solution to find news mentions of a user's specific contacts and aggregate them into a personalized newspaper. "When we do a news crawl, we find the right people and disambiguate; we also then are able to figure [...]

There are a lot of widgets on the web, but TechCrunch50 presenter Tingz has created a solution that works across almost any platform, including iPhones, Blackberrys, Macs OS X, and Windows Media Center. The widgets look and act the same on each device and automatically sync up, according to CEO Patrick Hunt. Tingz widgets also interact with one another: The [...]

MIXTT, which has dubbed itself "The Social Network for you Social Life," isn't another Facebook or MySpace, according to founder and CEO Eve Peters. The site is geared toward meeting new people and offline interaction, and profiles are for groups of friends rather than individuals, she says. Instead of poking or sheep throwing, users can use the "Ask Out" feature [...]

AlleyCorp, the Manhattan incubator run by Kevin Ryan and Dwight Merriman, will jump from $8 million in revenue in 2007 to $50 million this year, Kevin tells The Deal's TechConfidential's Mary Kathleen Flynn in this video interview.  He says that AlleyCorp has raised $50 million in financing for its six companies. Also interviewed is Silicon Alley Insider editor Henry Blodget [...]

Conference attendees voted alternative newsroom iamnews the best of the 100-plus companies exhibiting in the TechCrunch50 demo pit, awarding the company People's Choice and the opportunity to present onstage Wednesday as the conference's 52nd start-up. Attendees received three TC50 poker chips when they checked in and could vote for one company in the Demo Pit each day of the conference. [...]

Ovi, Nokia's online platform for sharing information from mobile devices, just expanded considerably, reports John Biggs over at CrunchGear.  He writes: "The first and most important update is their file sharing system. After installing the Nokia Ovi Suite on your PC or laptop - it doesn’t work with Mac although there is some talk this will be remedied - you can visit all [...]

Purple States TV, an online political show reported through the eyes of five citizen journalists, will syndicate its videos to The Washington Post politics site beginning tomorrow, founder and executive producer Cynthia Farrar told me in an interview on the Beet.TV rooftop earlier today. The videos will be featured on the front page of the online politics section as part [...]