Mobile, Search & Digital "Aha" Demos

Last night, Under the Radar teamed up with French Telecom and hosted an event that cross-examined seven technology start-ups in the digital media, search and mobile space.

CNET's Rafe Needleman moderated the session, which included six minute demos from MusicStrands, Sharpcast, JumpCut, WINKsite (Scott Rafer is now Chairman), Sphere (VC turned entrepreneur Tony Conrad is CEO), Pixsy and PIXPO.

After their demos, esteemed VCs Jeff Clavier, Duncan Davidson of VantagePoint Ventures, Larry Marcus of WaldenVC and Evangelos Simoudis of Trident Capital acted as judges and drilled each executive.

Rafe asks the VCs about the variation of the bubble we're now seeing. 'Yes, we are now seeing an inflation in evaluations, we're seeing more and more corporate investors, especially in the last six to nine months, but also noting that we have more experienced entrepreneurs now. Angel investment is also up.

On what is different this time around? Says one, "Many ignored the Internet last time and now you can't. There are also more players now, infrastructure is in place now more than it was and costs are lower."

Although I couldn't help but think - what about the $1 million a month to keep YouTube going?

Venture capital is a series of bubbles and technology bubbles do not wait for the stock market, they come before the stock market.

On what they like to put their money in right now, Clavier focuses more on social media, affinity-based communities, and search and discovery mechanisms (he invested in Feedster), etc. Says Jeff and others agree, "You need less money to start a company today and that also means that its less cost to fail. You can now spend only $25-50K to fail."

Evangelos Simoudis of Trident is more focused on the enterprise. "We've also been spending in the entertainment sector, technologies that allow large companies to offer video to their customers."

Other areas that came up included gaming, social media, music & TV content, content discovery services, social networking and video.

A concern: the danger of investing in companies where there's a low cost barrier to market is that there are tons of competitors. Look at MySpace. Roughly 300 companies in the same space received investment, but look at how few made it, i.e., MySpace, FaceBook and a few following close behind. What about the other 295?

The other key thing that they bet on (no surprise) is the management team. It's important to see passion and commitment from your key executive/founder. If he/she doesn't believe in it, they won't invest.

Client Sharpcast showed synchronization with photos and Outlook. We were just on the D stage last week, where we showed sync across a Mac, PC and mobile device.

Also up on the stage was MusicStrands, which a few of the VCs poked at around the 'way you find valuable content.' Says one, "Search is not the way to find content, its more about discovery."

Frankly, I think its a combination of both. The key problem is relevancy for the user. Each media has a different means for how you discover it. Adds Larry, "Collaborative filtering has its benefits." But collaborative filtering isn't necessarily scalable. Music lists combined with tags is a lot more powerful.

Scott Rafer demos WINKsite, a community-focused microcontent publishing platform designed for personal expression and social networking.

JumpCut's demo struggles. They're about video, photos and music combined and their editor allows you to publish movies instantly. It's not just a clip culture anymore - you can share clips with friends and remix with other people's media.

They target the connected youth (14-24 year olds) and they currently have about 7,000 users today. People can also make their content private should they choose to.

Tony Conrad of Sphere on how their system works around search.....they use a combination of link structure analysis, metadata and symantec analysis. Says Tony, "We think that people will still want to separate mainstream media content and blog content. We look at what key bloggers are talking about and what related media are saying about the same things." They also have featured blogs that focus on a particular topic.

They're doing a cool integration with Time.com. Embedded at the bottom of each story is a 'sphere it' button. Once you click on it, you are redirected to bloggers who are discussing the same topic.

Yes, very cool. In the future, he says, "consumers will be able to create their own page views." A big opportunity for users will be around customization, i.e., vertical markets, like knitting, sports, etc. This is step two for them.

Pixsy, also cool. They're about media search syndication, a next generation visual search engine and advertising syndication platform. Pixsy aggregates and distributes photo and video content from XML/RSS feeds.

Image is one of the fastest growing areas for search. Says Pixsy, "We target companies who want to run their own media search engine and we power it for them, i.e., celebrities, music, etc."

Google's image search is based on relevancy. With Pixsy, its the latest, with an ajax-like interface. It's not just about relevancy but what's interesting and new. They're using RSS and metadata to extract the images and make them searchable.

On what's key here and what they've managed to do that gives us an aha moment: how do you aggregate and index all the visual content across the entire web and then distribute it across the web for companies?

This one got an aha moment from me and others: you can click on a NY Times icon and get all the visual images from the day in a thumb-nail view. The business model is distribution with ad-share, but ultimately they feel that they could charge for this.