Kaltura Wins Spot as 40th Company at TechCrunch40
Mark Hendrickson
19 comments »
Brooklyn-based Kaltura has earned the honor to present as the 40th company in this year’s TechCrunch40 conference, beating next generation forums provider Tangler by a handful of votes.
The company, which has been demoing in our DemoPit all of today, received the most poker chips of any company in the pit over the past two days. Conference attendees were given two chips - one to give to their favorite company in the pit on Monday, and one to give to their favorite company from today’s pit. Therefore, Kaltura is the people’s choice out of about 100 non-presenting companies that have showcased their products at TC40.
Kaltura calls itself a “pioneer in collaborative media” and claims that its product enables users to do with video, audio, and animation what wikis have enabled them to do with text. The company works with both both end-users and channel providers. Collaborations are largely centered at kaltura.com, but they can be embedded elsewhere on the net well.
Take a tour of Kaltura here.
Kaltura was founded in October 2006 and has 20 employees. It has so far received $2.1M in funding from angels and Avalon Ventures.
“Whoops Kathura does not support Safari, Help us to help you”
Okay then, my first point of advice, support Safari.
The Kaltura team really looks very polished.
They fact that they have had a seed round speaks volumes about the percieved value of their solution.
Will be interesting to read feedback from their presentation
Totally agree about supporting Safari.
I assume they will make it compatible. You cannot just throw out all those potential visitors.
I wonder how fair it was to put prefunded, Angel-funded, and VC-funded companies in the same competition. The funded companies had more spit and polish and were impressive that way, so of course one of them made it to the stage, but I don’t think they necessarily had the best ideas or business plans.
I liked that cartoons on your digital refrigerator thing. I also liked that suggestion box idea, although I wasn’t clear on the business model.
Well, as you all know, Safari browser has many many open issues with W3C standards support, and is, in fact, very buggy a browser.
I, as a web developer, would recommend EVERYONE to use Firefox browser, which is currently the NO.1 to support web standards.
As Kaltura website is a very complicated site, which involves thousands of Javascript and CSS lines of code, it becomes an ugly fight to support all the non-Standard-Compliant browsers.
anyway, as site has just opened its gates to the world, i’m certain that much bugs will be closed in the shortest amount of time. be not worried.
Note for the Saffari team - Start making your browser to support Standard-Compliant Websites and not make our lives harder.
we developers has already tough life with IE6 and 7
The site supports firefox on Mac. Saffari support is in the works.
Great Idea !! love the site
I could take a dump between two slices of bread and make a shit sandwich too. But who would eat it? Fact is, if I put that sandwich on eBay a small number of lunatics, that reside in the darkest bowls of the Internet, would actually bid for it. Wikis work because everyone online can read and write. The latest research over the last six months suggests that online video users across all demographics are increasinly watching less low-quality UGC. The novelty is wearing off and applying collaborative Web 2.0 technology to user generated video production isn’t really progressive to people who understand video production. An infinitesimal percentage of YouTube’s UGC filmmakers know who to make films. The wisdom of the crowd with video is nice in theory but doesn’t work. Imagine trying to defend a complex corporate lawsuit using a wiki for paralegals. This model very effectively demonstrates the common misunderstanding of basic visual storytelling, video technology/production and most importantly, emerging trends in online viewer behavior.
Look at the basics nuts and bolts of this thing. Imagine white/color balancing disparate videos transcoded in multiple bit rates, frame rates, aspect ratios etc. Just because you can patch a freak show together with technology doesn’t mean budding filmmakers will waste their (considerable) time doing it. Even if a small percentage of non-filmmakers did (say for a class project), where’s the revenue model? It’s not going to be user volume. Every filmmaker I know who’s invested time learning visual storytelling (news, local video ads, music videos, documentary, industrial, PR video, wedding videos, vlogs etc) would consider this elementary. This reeks of a few tech startup execs that thought they could disrupt the way video gets produced by solving it with a (blah) wiki (yawn) platform. Kaltura is an illogical Web2.0 Frankenstein-shit-sandwich and I imagine will end up being another waste of investors money. Does anyone understand filmmaking in the valley?
Simon -
If your shit sandwich was any good, perhaps it would have ended up in the museum just like Marcel Duchamp’s toilet seat.
Wouldn’t you think that film makers could find on kaltura an easy platform to collaborate on? What if your project requires a pan of the Serengeti, featuring two zebra’s? Are you going to fly to Africa to get the shot?
As William Shakespeare wrote: it is better to have kaltura than not to have anything at all.
Cool Idea. I think we all need to remember these “companies” are still ideas without proven business models.
Very good presentation for such short notice. Makes me wonder how many other companies out in the demo pit should have been on stage???
David,
Nice, Marcel Duchamps’s toilet seat is an excellent choice of metaphor here. However I don’t think you would quite get a fountain when you turn production on it’s side in this way. Covered in urine possibly, but certainly not a piece of art. If my project required a pan of the Serengeti featuring two Zebras. I would do what any competent producer would do, call/email Getty Images or the BBC and have them send me a stock footage selects-bin of a hundred different versions to choose from, for free. If I needed it for professional purposes I would simply pay the $400 and have them send me a clean un-watermarked master emailed/ftp to me. Let me guess your solution would be to try and find some African kid/filmmaker with a DV camera to go into the desert for days, risk life and limb, to find a couple of zebra/unicorn. Then he would go home to his hut and upload his video to his PC. His family’s entire life salary probably wouldn’t cover the cost of that. This hilarious example you gave is priceless and a perfect proves my earlier point. My man, your 100% wrong and it’s totally apparent that you know very little about the complexities of quality video/film production.
Shakespeare also said “it’s not enough to speak, but to speak the truth”
There are many areas where there is value in joint creation (other than the production value). for example - an activist call for action - I saw a call for action posted by the dolphin organization, or an event coverage, where you get footage from many people, or a documentary, where you need support to access footage and more and more, a family greeting, or a fairewell video to a fellow worker, etc etc.
This will create a different model of creatorship/viewership.
there will be more creators, creating to smaller viewer groups who are interested in the content because of its relevancy.
Seems that there is much more to it than a toilet seat.
jumpcut.com has been doing this since april 2006, including group movie creation. . kaltura is pretty much a copy of jumpcut with a few more advanced features . . . what’s the big news?