Megavideo: Does It “Beat” YouTube?

Megavideo, a new online video sharing site based out of Hong Kong, has YouTube in its sights. In a video on its homepage, the company claims to best YouTube for ten reasons:

1. Video publishers can earn money through a rewards program
2. Publishers can also earn money through AdBrite in-video advertisements
3. Users can move the playback position to anywhere in the video
4. The website supports twenty languages
5. The video player can be customized to match the designs of websites where you want to embed
6. There is no maximum playtime for video uploads
7. Video conversion takes no more than 30 minutes
8. Videos can be uploaded in batch
9. Original video files can be downloaded
10. Megavideo loves you more than YouTube

Since users can also move the playback position to anywhere within a video on YouTube, and the last given reason is pure filler, only eight of these advantages seem to be justifiable.

The site is notable for its lack of banner advertisements. The company appears to be aiming to generate revenue by charging people for premium features. Premium members must pay at least $10 per month, but they can upload videos up to 5GB in size and their uploads get prioritized before regular members. Also, only premium members can download videos from the site (as opposed to streaming) and earn revenue from advertisements and the Megavideo rewards program.

Megavideo is provided by the same company that created Megaupload.

Watch Megavideo’s self-proclaimed ten reasons for preferring their service to YouTube below:

From Garage to Cubicle: JS-Kit Closes $1.2 Million Seed Round

Web widget provider JS-Kit has been doing a lot of growing up since starting as a simple commenting widget, founder Lev Walkin’s pet project in his off hours. Since then, that single widget has grown into a company with the addition of CEO Kris Loux, 12 engineers from Filmloop, and today’s $1.2 million round of financing led by the Entrepreneur’s Fund III.

JS-Kit’s library of widgets make it dead simple to add interactivity to your site. They have widgets for commenting, rating, polls, top rated content, and a combination for rated comments. Each of the widgets is fully skinable by CSS and only require a couple lines of code to add. Each of the widgets use javascript and are linked to page elements by the URL of the page or a customized id property.

Over 5,000 sites have added the widgets, adding 1,000 more each month. Combined, the sites generate over 70 million impressions each month. They’ve already got some ideas of how they want to monetize that traffic. One route is dropping advertisements into the widgets. Rather than putting ads in all the widgets, they’ve decided to only put ads in the “top rated content” widget. Publishers can either keep the ads and split the revenue 50/50, or pay about $40 a month/1 million pageviews your widget gets.

The Chronicle of Higher Education is one client which has simply opted to pay. They originally added the widget to their site to save themselves unnecessary development time. We made a similar choice when adding their ratings widget to CrunchBase.

Widgets as white labeled website features is a useful concept for publishers who don’t want to re-invent the wheel. Kickapps has done this somewhat with social networking. However, JS-Kit still has a bit to go in making their widgets viable for larger clients.

As easy to use as JS-Kit’s widgets are, it’s a tough proposition to ask larger businesses to hand hosting and control of their user’s data to JS-Kit. Businesses that depend the most on these features (and would therefore pay the most) may choose to spend the time to develop the feature in house and hedge against any future risk from depending on a web service.

Google News Announces Limited Comments. Everyone Needs To Calm Down.

Google made an announcement of an “experimental new feature - they will soon be allowing comments on Google News stories. Comments will only be accepted from a “special subset of readers,” which includes people and organizations who are part of the story. The blogosphere, which is of course all about conversation, seems to think the second coming of Jesus Christ himself is here. An example: normally reserved Tony Hung calls it “pivotal” and that it will “change online news as we know it.”

Here’s how it will work. If you are involved in a story, you send your comments in to Google along with statements supporting how you are connected to the story. Google won’t edit your comments but can have them removed for hate speech, etc. And they aren’t yet saying how connected to a story you have to be to get in. Whatever the rules, this is going to require a ton of manual labor on Google’s end. This stuff simply can’t be automated. Google is going to have to see a very, very large increase in page views to justify the expense.

Having direct participants chime in with their two cents is certainly a good idea. It adds to the debate around a story, which until now on Google and most mainstream media sites is a one sided affair as interpreted by a fair and impartial journalist who may or may not have personal bias, financial bias, or laziness bias screwing up the real facts of a story.

But wow is this going to be a lot of effort on Google’s part. And all just to exclude the opinions of non-participants? That doesn’t make any sense to me. I certainly value the comments of participants in our blog posts. But equally valuable are the insights of third party experts who know more about given subject areas than we do. And getting the opinions of the interested masses also provides deep insight. It’s always good to take the temperature of the readers on story - and that’s why we and most other blogs allow even anonymous comments/rants. The downside is trolling and lobbying, but the upside is one hell of a good conversation/street fight. Good conversation is also why I tend to go to Newsvine for big media news. They’ve always allowed comments, which are usually better than the stories themselves.

At least a few people have avoided the group orgasm and see some problems with Google’s idea. John Murrell says this will result in a huge PR hiring boom and to expect “spin, spin, spin” as every negative fact/opinion is countered. Danny Sullivan says Google doesn’t know what it’s getting itself into. Frank Shaw, who basically controls all Microsoft PR, says this is “stupid” and predicts it will never get out of beta. That’s a pretty clear statement from the king of spin. And I agree 100%.

Ooma Goes On Sale A Month Early

New VOIP startup Ooma, which is proving a free phone service to U.S. residents who purchase the basic hardware, started taking pre-orders about five minutes ago (6 AM PST). Orders are being taken by phone only, with delivery guaranteed before September 10. The phone number to call is 866-452-6662.

The basic unit, called a “hub,” is $399. Additional “scouts” which you can plug into the various phone jacks in our house cost $40 each. Sales tax is being collected on top of that for California deliveries. Once you’ve purchased the hardware, all calls to U.S. numbers are free. International calls are at Skype-like prices.

I don’t expect to see millions of people calling to buy an Ooma today. But for the early adopter crowd, this may be something they want to try out. I’ve been testing it for a few weeks and the call quality is good.

Pay Per Call Company VoiceStar Acquired by Marchex

Pay per call advertising service VoiceStar has been acquired by local advertising company Marchex.

Terms of the deal are as follows:

Marchex total anticipated investment to acquire VoiceStar will be $28 million, consisting of approximately $20 million in transaction consideration and $8 million in company investment. Specifically, transaction consideration consists of approximately $12.9 million in cash consideration and Marchex will issue approximately $7.1 million in restricted stock that is subject to vesting over two-and-one-half years from closing to certain employees of VoiceStar; and company investment consists of $8 million relating to products, infrastructure, human resources and other items through 2008. The acquisition is expected to close by October 1, 2007.

VoiceStar helps track how effective your newspaper and online advertising campaigns are at generating calls to your business. To do this, they sell advertisers a block of phone numbers ($10/month/number) to be placed in news papers or on websites. Each number is unique to an advertising campaign and can be linked through a softswitch to your existing phone lines.

For instance, the number from a newspaper campaign can be routed to a specific department or only accept calls during business hours. VoiceStar then tracks calls from these numbers as they are routed through their softswitch to your phone line. They can then compile data on the return on investment from each of these campaigns distinguished by phone number.

VoiceStars primary clients are advertising networks, who use the service to help individual advertisers. As of this past February, they claimed 400 clients with 20,000 individual advertisers working through those clients.

Other competitors include Ingenio and eStara. Google has also dabbled in click to call.

Meetro And AOL Quietly Developing New Forum Products

Only very long time readers will remember our coverage of proximity-based instant messaging service Meetro back in 2005. Meetro is an instant messaging client for Windows and Mac that shows you other users (and their picture) that are physically close to you. Want to make friends with someone sitting near you in a cafe, or who lives in the same, apartment building? Meetro can help you do that.

One problem though…the company has not gathered a critical mass of users and has sort of gone sideways. The company has survived on a very low burn rate, but there isn’t much buzz about it.

Now we’re hearing a rumor that the Meetro team is quietly building a new product - an easy “one-click” way of creating new forum on the fly. Instant messaging and forums are very similar businesses. In effect they are the same thing except that one is synchronous (IM) and one is asynchronous (forums). So the meetro team should have the expertise to create an interesting forum product. As an aside, another startup, Tangler, is tying the instant messaging and forum worlds together.

Meetro is being tight lipped about this, but some of the investors they are pitching are talking. We’ll post more information as we get it.

AOL is also rumored to be releasing a new forum product in the Fall. We’re hearing that the product was handed over to the Userplane team after some development difficulties (Userplane was acquired by AOL in August 2006). The new product is to be called Userplane Boards. Update: Userplane says this is not quite how things are. See CEO Michael Jones’ comment below.

Verwandt.de: German Geni Clone

Germany is starting to build a name for itself as the startup cloning capital of the world. German clones of popular U.S. services keep popping up. Twitter (Frazr, Dukudu). and Facebook (Studi.vz) are two recent examples. TechCrunch contributor Gregor Hochmuth termed these German clones Copy/Paste innovation.

The latest German clone, Verwandt, means “related” in English. Its design and functionality is very similar to its U.S. counterpart, Geni. In fact it goes well beyond similar - Verwandt is a Geni clone dressed up in some cuddlier graphics. It uses the same layout and quick sign-up flash-based registration form as the U.S. site. They’ve also copied the family tree navigation and profile pages. Take a look below to judge the similarities for yourself.

The motivation and business process is clear: 1) Find a proven concept in the U.S. or elsewhere, 2) Clone the service, 3) Profit. And they have been profiting off these clones quite a bit. The Samwer Brothers have invested in Alando.de (eBay clone sold to eBay) and Studi.vz (Facebook clone sold for $100 million). They’re also investors in Frazr. See Gregor’s post for a longer list of clones. Certainly other countries, including the U.S., engage in their fair share of cloning as well. However, the flood of clones coming from Germany suggests an unwelcome trend.

Vanderwandt seems to be cloning some of Geni’s success as well. They have over 1.5 million profiles in under 2 months of operation, compared to Geni’s 5 million. They’ve also secured an undisclosed level of financing, most certainly helped by Geni’s $100 million valuation.

There’s a lot of great innovation going on outside the U.S., but this rip and flip mentality may prove short-sighted as the real McCoys continue to innovate and internationalize, and solid German startups like Xing are forgotten in the controversy.