In the last issue of B2.0, I wrote about a startup called Critical Mention that is doing some amazing things with video search (through CriticalTV) and syndicating clips (through ClipSyndicate) of local TV news on the Web.  Excerpt:

By indexing the
closed captions for all the video stored on CriticalTV, the service
creates searchable transcripts on the fly.

And the service is still getting smarter.  Using
speech-to-text software recently licensed from IBM Research, CriticalTV
will soon monitor video that isn’t closed-captioned and also search
Arabic-language TV and translate it into English. Customers ranging
from corporate PR officers to FBI analysts to oil executives will
continue to be alerted via e-mail (with a link to the video clip)
minutes after a company, product, or terrorist name is mentioned on TV
here or abroad.

But while CriticalTV pays the bills, [CEO Sean] Morgan’s ambitions go beyond mere monitoring. In an era when TV stations are losing their audience to channel
surfing, commercial skipping, and the Web, the ClipSyndicate site
promises to find a better audience for news broadcasts. Morgan has
already struck deals with more than 65 affiliates and is in discussions
with all the major station groups to host clips from their local news
and other shows.

Once
the video is on ClipSyndicate, publishers can search for segments,
splice them, and stream them through their own sites. In effect, Morgan
is turning one-time TV broadcasts into media chunks that can be remixed
for more exacting online audiences.

ClipSyndicate will insert
15-second ads in front of each video stream and split revenue 50/30/20
with the affiliate and the web site, a model similar to NBC’s new
business, the National Broadband Co.

Photo-sharing startup Slide received a new round of venture capital today from Khosla Ventures and Mayfield.  I chatted with Slide founder Max Levchin (also a co-founder of PayPal) about the company.  He was tight-lipped about the actual amount he raised (speculation puts it at north of the $8 million he got in his last round, or more than a total of $20 million raised so far).  He was also tight-lipped about exactly how many people are using Slide. 

But the numbers must be pretty good if ex-Kleiner rainmaker Vinod Khosla decided to invest (moreover, Khosla does not typically invest in consumer plays).  comScore ranks Slide as the No. 11 most visited photo site with 3.9 million visitors in October, after Shutterfly (No. 10), SnapFish (No. 9), Flickr (No. 6), and Photobucket (No. 1).  Even Slide’s Alexa graph shows steep growth.  But Levchin does not see Slide as competing with other photo-sharing sites.  He tells me:

The service is fundamentally about self-expression, about letting people express themselves online.  It gets confused with photo sharing. What we do is give you the ability to customize your photos—and perhaps other forms of media in the future—by letting you take what you produce and turn it into a story.  You can think of a slide show as the poor man’s video.

Slide lets you take your digital pictures and present them as a slide show on the Web or your desktop.  The slide shows (which can be either private or public) are all available on Slide.com, but you can also show them on other Websites such as your blog or MySpace page.  What Levchin really wants you to do, though, is download Slide’s desktop software, which lets you make your slide shows into a screen saver.  (Convince your mother to download it and she can get streaming pics of the kids all day long). 

Explains Levchin:

The business model is rooted in this desktop strategy.
The thing we had in mind in the beginning was to build a system that
lives on your desktop that you really want to see. It is
consumer-centric, person-to-person. But it does not need to stop with
what I made for my parents. RSS has made it possible for me to see any
stream of content. 

We are trying to understand what our users are trying to do.  Ultimately, we are building a discovery engine that helps people find
all kinds of content on the Web and deliver it to them.  We
want it to become a delivery engine for content you did not know even existed.

The way this discovery engine will work basically is to look at what slideshows you watch, see who else watches those same slideshows, and then recommend slideshows the other people watch but you don’t.  It will be like Amazon’s "People who bought this book also bought that book" feature, which Levchin says someone from Amazon once told him was the "single best revenue-enhancing feature they ever had."

Okay, but how does Levchin eexpect to make money?  There are no traditional ads on Slide today.  But there is nothing stopping marketers from creating their own slideshows.  And about 80 or 90 of these are featured on the site’s directory and the desktop software, where they function essentially as visual catalogs.   But in order to work as advertising, they must work first as content because no one is forced to watch them.  Once people who are looking for them do find them, reports Levchin:

The odds of you actually buying something from one of these after you choose to go to it is 9 out of 10.  By the time you find the Zappos shoe catalog you are probably in the mood to buy shoes. 

That’s the same attitude YouTube CEO Chad Hurley (another former PayPaler) has about advertising.  I interviewed Hurley a few weeks ago, and he told me almost the exact same thing:

What ads are becoming, even the Superbowl ads, are great pieces of content potentially, if done the right way. If people enjoy those ads it should rise to the top like any other piece of content.

It is a much more organic way to market yourself. We really believe you don’t need to force your message on the community, With all of these ads, with what Wendy is doing, advertisers are putting these videos into our system like a piece of content. If the viewer does not want to watch it, they don’t have to watch it.  It is a democratic way for the community to determine what is interesting to them and what will continue to rise to the top. Advertising in the past has not been optional.

I like the idea of optional advertising.  But where Levchin and Hurley need to be careful with is to make sure the proportion of advertising to content never gets out of hand.  Otherwise, people using these services will stumble upon advertising thinking it is something else and feel cheated when they realize what they are watching is just a dumb ad for Wendy’s (or Zappos).

Austin-based HomeAway raised a whopping $160 million from VC firms like Redpoint Ventures, IVP, and Trident to go on an acquisition binge and roll up the fragmented vacation rental Website industry.  Usually rollups like this are done in more mature industries.  File this one under, "Bubble Watch."

  Brainstorms at INDEX: Views 
  Originally uploaded by Jacob Bøtter.

At IBM, brainstorming is now a company wide affair.  Over the past few months, more than 150,000 employees, business partners, and clients have been coming up with new business ideas for IBM to pursue in a series of "Innovation Jams" and smaller face-to-face meetings.  They’ve boiled the ocean  down from 46,000 initial ideas and postings to ten, and IBM CEO Sam Palmisano is about to announce the final winners from a corporate event in China (and on Second Life simultaneously—it’s the trendy thing to do).  He is putting $100 million into the final ten ideas in the hopes that a few may turn into billion-dollar businesses. Here is where he is placing his bets:     

Smart Healthcare Payment Systems:  Speeding healthcare payments by connecting patients, doctors, and insurance companies through smart cards.

Simplified Business Engines: A suite of  Web 2.0 business apps (running on blade servers) for small businesses.

Real-time Translation Services: Seamless speech-to-text-to-speech software that can translate one language to another like a Babble Fish (based on IBM Research’s impressive MASTOR technology).

Intelligent Utility Networks:  Bringing network management and monitoring to the utility grid. 

3D
Internet:  Build a technology platform for virtual worlds so that
businesses can conduct meetings, presentations, focus groups, product
demos or run virtual stores in a "standards-based 3D Internet" (sort of
like Second Life).

“Digital Me”: Online storage and management
for personal digital photos, videos, music, files, identification
documents, and health and financial records.

Branchless
Banking for the Masses: Sell technology to financial institutions that
lets them provide basic banking services to the unbanked in remote
parts of India, China, and other fast-growing emerging markets.

Integrated
Mass Transit Information System: Back-end systems for connecting and
managing real-time data for all of a region’s transit systems, and
coordinating among buses, rail, highways, waterways and airlines.

Electronic
Health Record System: Create a central repository for health records
that accepts data from any provider, integrates with the health payment
system (see above), and offers personal healthcare records to consumers
and their doctors. 

“Big Green” Innovations: A new business
unit that will focus on emerging environmental opportunities, such as
advanced water modeling (looking for water like today we look for oil),
nanotech-based water filtration and efficient solar power systems.

Many
of these are not particularly new ideas, but they represent big
opportunities nonetheless for Big Blue.  And if they can make a
billion-dollar business out of one or two of these ideas, so could one or two
clever entrepreneurs.  (Ahem, that would be you).

The conference business is back, and now there is a Website where you can search and review more than 16,000 different conference options.   It’s called Confabb.  The site has lots of features—everything from speaker ratings to tags to social networking (i.e, finding out where the best after-parties will be held).  Confabb competes with more general event database sites like Eventful, which has its own conference category. 

On Monday, a wireless startup from Seattle called IceBreaker (run by some ex-Microsofties) will launch Crush or Flush—a mobile version of Hot or Not, with an added twist.  (Here’s a link to the beta site for those who cannot wait). 

On your cell phone, you can cycle through pictures of men and women and either "crush" them or "flush" them.  You can search by location or by some of the self-describing tags people put on their profiles.  If two people crush each other, they both get a text message inviting them to chat with each other anonymously (via text, for now—with anonymous voice calling in the works). 

The company plans to eventually charge a few dollars a month for those chatting privileges (through the mobile carriers) once the service gets up and running.  To make it more viral, there is a"tell a friend" link that lets you send profiles to friends you’d like to set up.  And the mutual crush requirement should help weed out some of the creeps. 

Here is a video I shot in my office of a demo:

Click To Play

We’re seeing this in a dating app first.  But how long before all social apps make their way from computers to phones?  It is happening already.  If the underpinning of a social network is instant messaging (another feature that will soon be added to Crush or Flush) and the presence management which that affords, then being able to contact a "friend" on their phone is even more powerful because people carry their phones with them everywhere they go.

What do readers think: will the dating set crush or flush this service?