I had the pleasure to talk to Olivier Maurel who had the great idea to organize in Paris a Videocamp two weeks ago. Olivier is working for Vpod.tv and is one of the guy you must know in Paris.
Archive for the ‘Interview’ Category
15
Apr
Interview with Fabrice Boutain – Aujourdhui.com
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by Videoagency
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1 Comment |
I had the opportunity to talk during Videocamp with Fabrice Boutain who is one of my old friend. He is also one of the smartest french guy i know on the french scene and he’s really a talented e-marketer.
He talked to me about his new venture aujourdhui.com and about video on Internet. Have a look.
Aujourdui.com is the next-gen woman portal and is competing with aufeminin and doctissimo. Two french portals targeting women and recently acquired respectively by Axel Springer group (german media group) and Lagardere (French media group)
12
Apr
Interview with Eric FONTAINE – HeySpread, Heywatch
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by Videoagency
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4 Comments |
Last week i had the pleasure to meet some folks at Videocamp Paris. Eric Fontaine from Particle-S has two great and unique services to encode and spread videos on all major hosting platforms such as Youtube, Dailymotion… Have a look to this french company, they are really doing well and compete with Tubemogul that i met this week in SFO at Video search summit.
15
Feb
Interview with Matt Cutler, VP of Marketing and Analytics at Visible Measures
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by Videoagency
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No Comments |
Matt Cutler, VP of Marketing and Analytics at Visible Measures.
Thomas Owadenko: When did your company launch and where is it located?
Matt Cutler: Headquartered in Boston, Visible Measures officially raised the curtain on the company and our new product, VisibleSuite, at DEMO 08 in January. As part of this launch, Visible Measures introduced the industry’s first Internet video audience behavior measurement suite.
TO: Why did you launch it and what is your mission?
MC: While competition for online viewers is fierce and growing fiercer, confusion persists around how publishers, advertisers, and Internet video sites track, measure, and analyze audience behavior patterns. Many companies are competing to capture the attention of Internet video viewers but publishers and advertisers lacked a means to quantitatively measure audience engagement. Our solution: Internet video requires a new set of metrics to understand audience behaviors and more accurately predict and analyze the success of Internet videos.
TO: What is the strength of your products?
MC: With our product, it is now possible to capture and measure every video interaction in every video from every viewer, from play to pause to rewind to forward-to-a-friend and more. VisibleSuite provides high-value, high-impact solutions to the audience valuation and content monetization challenge. Built from the ground up to measure Internet video, VisibleSuite audience behavior measurement solutions provide video publishers and advertisers with precise performance data including how audiences find, view, interact with, and share each video. This allows publishers to make data-driven management decisions about their content portfolios, distribution strategies, and audience targeting. Advertisers can know not just that their placement was viewed, but how much the audience was involved in the message and then map results to specific campaigns.
To add capabilities in viral video distribution and analytics services, we also recently acquired Vidmeter, an Internet video distribution and analytics company that manages universal upload, syndicated tracking and rankings of user-generated video content.
TO: How many people work in your company?
MC: We have offices in Boston and the Bay area, and employ about 25 people.
TO: Who are your clients?
MC: Partners and early adopters include:
- Boston.com
- Brightcove
- DEMO
- Funny or Die
- Hill Holliday
- HoneyShed/Droga5
- Streefire.net
TO: Why did they choose you?
MC: We are the only solution on the market today that allows video publishers to make data-driven management decisions about their content portfolios, distribution strategies, and audience targeting. As they look to grow their total audience while increasing viewing time and viewer involvement, Internet video publishers can now use our technology to understand exactly how their online audiences engage with their video content.
And, with VisibleSuite’s ability to measure the behavior of their Internet video audiences, video advertisers can know not just that their placement was viewed, but how much the audience was involved in the message and then map results to specific campaigns.
TO: Who are your competitors?
MC: No direct competitors.
TO: SEO and Video? Myth or reality?
MC: Reality. As video becomes a larger and larger percentage of the content available on the Web, effective video search will become an important aspect of the general user experience. And as the audience discovers more and more videos via search, video SEO will likely emerge as an important aspect of marketing video content.
TO: What do you think about google universal and how it should be?
MC: Google Universal shows promise though is in the early stages of its maturation cycle. We support any approach that makes it easier for Internet video audiences to find content that they are interested in and they will find engaging.
TO: Did you raise money? How much and who invested or do you plan to raise?
MC: We recently closed a $13.5 million series B round of financing. The round was led by MDV-Mohr Davidow Ventures with participation from General Catalyst Partners, the lead investor in the company’s Series A Funding announced in early 2007. The company plans to use the additional funding to fuel expansion and growth.
TO: What are the “top 3″ priorities for your company in the coming year ?
MC:
1) Continued research and development of our VisibleSuite and related product and service offerings.
2) Growth and expansion through customer acquisition
3) Market education and industry thought leadership around Internet video audience behavior measurement topics
14
Feb
Interview with David Burch, TubeMogul’s Marketing Manager
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by Videoagency
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No Comments |
Thomas Owadenko: When did your company launch?
David Burch: TubeMogul was founded in February of 2006 and we launched our free beta product in March of 2007, which had great reception. Through our users’ feedback, we developed more and more features, adding more sites and tools like distribution. We also started getting feedback from larger media companies willing to pay for other features, so we launched our new Premium Products at DEMO 08.
TO: Where is the company located?
DB: The company was founded in Berkeley, California by UC Berkeley graduate students and was housed in a new business incubator there. The company recently moved into larger offices in nearby Emeryville, California.
TO: Why did you launch?
DB: We recognized that video creators were posting videos across the internet and had no easy way to measure the performance of those videos, nor a good way of effectively distributing them.
TO: What are the strengths of your products?
DB: Because we partner with video sharing sites and have APIs to both distribute content and bring back viewership information, we have a very rich data set and a scalable product.
TO: How many people work for the company?
DB: We have 12 employees, and are growing quickly.
TO: Who are your clients?
DB: Our clients vary from larger media companies, agencies and marketers managing large brands on down to smaller film-makers, journalists and politicians–in short, the panoply of people who want to gain large audiences online and need to know information about their viewership.
TO: Why did they choose you?
DB: Our intuitive interface, our free distribution and reporting tools and our more-advanced Premium Products are all raved about by customers. We give the small guy free tools to maximize and measure his reach online, and larger media and marketers the tools they need for their sponsors and clients.
TO: What are your thoughts on the Google Universal and video SEO frontier?
DB: Video SEO is a reality that a lot of people are just starting to figure out. If you distribute across video sharing sites and are intelligent with your meta data, you are very likely to be in top organic search results. This is largely made possible by Google Universal (and the equivalent at Ask, Yahoo, and MSN), which integrates relevant video results into search pages, boosting video’s relevance. The highest results at Google are not necessarily videos from YouTube or Google Video, either.
We are providing the tools to empower the foremost experts in video SEO and the new media marketing agencies that are involved in video SEO. Together we are at the beginning of the learning curve of what can be done.
TO: Did you raise money?
DB: The company recently announced $1.5 million in Series A funding from Knight’s Bridge Capital Partners. Prior to that, seed financing was provided by investors such as David Toth, the founder of Net Ratings, the first internet metrics company.
TO: What are your priorities for the coming year?
DB: This year, we are focused on growing our user base and continuing to improve upon our valuable products.
13
Feb
Interview with Eric Fontaine, Hey!Spread’s chief business officer.
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by Videoagency
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No Comments |
Hey!Spread helps any producer to publish and track videos on different platforms. I invite you to read the interview I had with him. Hey!spread is evolving in the same space as Tubemogul, Divinitymetrics and Visible measures.
Thomas Owadenko: Hello, in a few lines, please introduce yourself (name, age…) and your track record?
Eric Fontaine: My name is Eric Fontaine. I am 30 years old. I did all my studies in Marketing and Strategy. Before launching my own company, I worked at Universal Music Group International and the mobile phone department for 5 years.
TO: When was your company launched and where is it located?
EF: Hey!Spread was launched in July 07. We are in located in Marseille, in the South of France.
TO: Why did you launch it and what is its mission?
EF: Actually, we always try to develop tools that can help people do everything video-realted as easily as possible. And we do it pretty well through our two services Hey!Watch, our video encoding web service, and of course Hey!Spread. On the one hand, video is the trendiest medium on the web and online video platforms pop up like mushrooms. And on the other hand, people are becoming video web producers and want to create the buzz around their video content. Unfortunately, spreading their content over all the platforms is something very boring and time consuming. That’s how Hey!Spread was born. From now on, promoting your video content over the best video portals can be done in one shot. Easy, efficient and quick.
TO: What are the strengths of your products?
EF: Actually, we do not only distribute content. We promote it and allow our client to highlight their video creations. We propose many innovative options like watermarking, encoding, real time monitoring, cross-posting, credentials-checking, job-restarting… All thees features optimize the distribution. It’s not a closed or blind service. The user is almighty. Besides, as we do for all our products, we propose an API. That way, companies can integrate Hey!Spread as a white label and offer it as a new feature. They can spread from one platform to another. It’s very successful.
TO: How many people work in your company?
EF: We are two founders. I, Chief Business Officer and Bruno Celeste, Chief Technical Officer. When there is a peak of activity, we hire external people.
TO: Who are your clients?
EF: We have many different clients. Live streaming video platforms, online video portals, User Generated Content websites, Web agencies and individuals. Actually, most of our clients combine our two services to have a global and powerful video tool.
TO: Why did they choose you?
EF: The main words that we heard are Flexibility, Reliability and Reactivity. Even if we are a small team, we do not need to sleep a lot. We want to be available for our clients at any time. We do not only want to provide tools. We also want to work closely with them to make their project successful. Proposing a good tool is not sufficient, people need human relationships too.
TO: What is your turnover?
EF: We have not closed our first year of activity, so we can’t provide that information.
TO: Who are your competitors?
EF: Actually, we do not have “real” competitors. I mean our tool was thought out for integration as a white label. Both Hey!Spread and Hey!Watch are technical and business enabler tools. Some other services propose the distribution of content, but only through their interface. We want to free our clients from any technical prison.
TO: SEO and Video ? Myth or reality?
EF: As video content is like text or images, we need to find it. But the way it is right now things are still a little confusing. You can use many methods to find videos, like classic search engines or directly on a well-known video portal like YouTube. The main problem is the same with the text 10 years ago: Relevance.
TO: What do you think about Google universal and how it should be?
EF: Google is a company that impresses. How can one not be impressed by two men building an empire based on free tools and Ads. Actually, they invented the current most used business model. The only problem is what is great for Google is not the same for all. Free is not a business model at all. I am sure that too many small companies suffer from this philosophy that everything must be free on the Web. So, each time the same story, you raise funds, propose a free service hoping you will have huge traffic and wait to be bought. I hate this idea.
TO: Did you raise money? How much and who invested or do you plan to raise?
EF: We are self-funded and very proud of it. We are often approached by VC’s but we want to be independent. We make money, we like our clients and they trust us. We keep the good work.
TO: What are the “top 3″ priorities for your company in the coming year?
EF: We are working a new version of Hey!Watch. We will develop 2 new services this year. We are currently negotiating some nice partnerships.
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