Revision3 has partnered with VideoClix to offer viewers clickable web videos.
VideoClix’s technology allows viewers to click on different objects within a video, including show hosts and products, for more information and facts on what they’ve clicked on. The product is pitched as offering curious TV viewers seeking more information on what they’re seeing on the screen the option to obtain that information.
The additional information provided by the service is monetized, with affiliate or sponsored links to products features in the video.
Diggnation is the first Revision3 show to include interactive episodes, with Internet Superstar, Tekzilla and The Totally Rad Show to follow, although currently the clickable versions can only be accessed on the VideoClix site. The first Diggnation show with the technology can be viewed here.
Geek chick celebrity Veronic Belmont has signed to co-host Revision3’s Tekzilla show.
Belmont resigned from the Mahalo Daily podcast last week after only 5 months, with a relatively cool send off from Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis.
Prior to working for Calacanis, Belmont worked for CNET.com, where she produced and co-hosted shows including Buzz Out Loud, MP3 Insider and Crave. She also regularly appears on programs on DL.TV, MSNBC, CNBC, the G4 Network, PC Gamer, and This Week in Tech.
Belmont featured in our list of geek chicks to watch March 21.
Episode 143 of Diggnation: Hosts Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht announce the sale of Revision3 to Fox News at about the 2:05 mark. Rose says “Well, ah, we basically have a big announcement for everyone. Revision3 has been acquired by a bigger company. We’ll be moving to Fox News.” He added “I’m thinking of getting a fox tattoo, its kinda part of my signing bonus, if i do it i get a little extra money.”
It’s an early (very early) April Fool’s joke, of course. Jump to the 3:45 mark. They are clearly playing off a story from two weeks ago, spread quickly via a credulous Robert Scoble Twitter message, that CNET had acquired Revision3 for $58 million.
The company was founded in April 2005 and has raised $9 million in funding.
Here’s a video match made for the Web. Revision3, the video playground of Digg founders Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson, is teaming up with Blip.tv to syndicate all of its shows. That includes Diggnation (shown above with hosts Alex Albrecht and Rose), the GigaOm Show, Web Drifter, and Tekzilla. Some of these shows are already popular, especially Diggnation. And they are distributed in many ways—through Revision3″s Website, through iTunes, as embedded videos. By signing this deal, Revsion3 expands its reach to Blip.tv’s audience.
Blip.tv has done a good job of finding and highlighting the best original Web video shows, including Wallstrip, Alive in Baghdad, Rocketboom, and (back in the day) The Show with Ze Frank. So Revison3 will be in good company. Blip.tv sells advertising against the videos and splits the revenues with the producers, so it is incremental revenue for Revsion3.
I was at Flickr’s fourth birthday party tonight in San Francisco with a few hundred Flickr fans, tech geeks, press and Yahoo/Flickr employees.
At some time around 8 pm Dan Farber, the new Editor in Chief of CNET, says, “huh, I just got an email that says, according to [blogger] Robert Scoble, we bought Revision3 for $58 million.” Uh-oh, I thought. I’m in San Francisco, an hour away from my computer. We’re going to be very late to this story.
I asked Farber if it was true. He said if it was this was the first he’d heard of it. A few moments later, after a couple of phone messages back and forth with his team, he said CNET had posted on the rumor (he was joking with me, but I couldn’t read him and thought he was serious). I emailed our team to look into it and cover the story, pulling Mark Hendrickson away from dinner and back to his computer.
I then called someone at Digg, who said something along the lines of “it’s complete bullshit.” After that call I did two things. I told our team to back off the story, and then promptly lied to Farber and said that Digg confirmed the rumor - Revision3 had definitely sold to CNET. Farber (damn him) didn’t bite - he typed a message or two on his phone, then looked at me and said “no, we didn’t.” At that point I laughed and told him what Kevin really said.
Scoble, meanwhile, sheepishly retracted his original Twitter message and the whole ordeal came to a end.
My guess is that 7 or 8 people between CNET and TechCrunch had their evenings at least partially throw into chaos over this. But my only disappointment was that I couldn’t trick Farber into writing a post on CNET that they had acquired Revision3, when it was nothing more than a figment of Robert Scoble’s imagination.
Today, Web-based IM and chat room provider Meebo is releasing full-fledged APIs for its Meebo Rooms that will allow Websites to embed chat functionality in an automated fashion. Currently, Meebo Rooms can be embedded on sites or blogs manually by pasting in the appropriate code, which has already led to a proliferation of such widgets. There are more than 200,000 Meebo Rooms, attracting millions of visitors a month. (See our previous coverage here and here). Explains Meebo CEO Seth Sternberg:
Now, the servers of our partners can say, “I want to create a room.” It automates the creation process on a server-to-server basis. Also, we will be putting advertising into these rooms.
In addition to the APIs, the company is also announcing the Meebo Network, which will serve ads inside Meebo Rooms across the Web, splitting the revenues with the Websites hosting the rooms. Since each Meebo Room is formed around a particular interest, ads can be targeted. And to the extent that sites participating in the network have demographic data on their members, that can be used for ad targeting as well. Only Meebo Rooms created through the API will show ads, not the ones created manually.
The launch partners joining the Meebo Network are Piczo, Revision3, RockYou, Social Project, and Tagged. Revision3, for instance, will create a Meebo room on its site where fans can watch a synchronized loop of Web TV shows while chatting. Access to the full APIs and the ad network is by invitation only at this point. Social networks could use the new APIs to automatically add chat rooms to every group page. Rock bands or movie sites could add Meebo Rooms to their sites for visiting fans.
Comparisons can be made here to Userplane, a white-label chat service which was bought by AOL in 2006 and powers many of the chat rooms on MySpace. But there are subtle differences. Most notable is the fact that Meebo Rooms can spread anywhere on the Web. Anyone can grab the embed code and put it on their blog or MySpace page as I’ve done below. Notes Sternberg:
A user cannot take a room off of MySpace and throw it somewhere else. We have all our rooms networked. A user can take the CBS Jericho room, and throw it on their Wordpress blog. Our chat rooms are networked versus islands within Websites.
It is very hard to get a synchronous conversation going. You won’ get enough people on your MySpace page to have a conversation. But with Meebo Rooms, most of the traffic is coming from somewhere else. It solves the problem of the Web being so distributed.
The power of Meebo Rooms is that they let anyone create live conversations on their site by aggregating people with similar interests from other sites. In fact, it links people between sites. And that, hopes Sternberg, will give it enough scale to become an ad network of sorts. Meebo has raised $12.5 million from Sequoia Capital and Draper Fisher Jurvetson.
Proving that it truly is the airline of bloggers and the technorati, Virgin America (the airline with an electrical socket and Ethernet port at every seat) will be offering episodes of Diggnation and other Web shows produced by Revision3, including Tekzilla, The Totally Rad Show, Web Drifter, XLR8R TV, and The Digg Reel. Diggnation stars Digg (and Revision3) founder Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht, and is popular among the Digg crowd. (The GigaOm Show, which is also produced by Revision3, will not be included.)
The Revision3 shows will be viewable on Virgin America’s seat-back entertainment system throughout the cabin on flights to New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Washington D.C., Las Vegas, San Diego and Seattle. This is a big coup for Web-based video, and Revision3 in particular. The Revision3 shows will sit right alongside options for in-flight movies and satellite TV, exposing its brand of videos to a captive audience. And why not? On a six-hour flight, people will watch anything. This could help Revision3 win more fans, and expand its Web-based audience, which already watch 4.2 million videos a month. The shows will run with the original ads.
Burlingame based BitGravity officially launches their website and content delivery network (CDN) this evening, although the company has been busy working with nearly fifty existing customers for months to work through any last minute issues. We first covered the company when one of its employees sent a live video stream from his car (using BitGravity) during a drive from San Francisco to Los Angeles.
They are focused on delivering high volume rich media (streaming video and audio files) and large software downloads with a near zero buffer time and very low lag time.
Their flagship customer is Revision3, which has a number of popular high definition video shows (such as Diggnation and The GigaOm Show) that a lot of people watch right when a new show becomes available. Given how well those shows tend to stream, it’s the best endorsement BitGravity can get. An example GigaOm Show episode (recorded during the TechCrunch40 conference) is embedded below.
CEO Perry Wu says the company has a lot more planned in the near future. They say they’ll be working specifically with big networks to stream live events and other popular content, and to look for bandwidth-heavy streams that include, for example, 360 degree views of concerts and sporting events.
The company has raised a seed round of capital but will not yet disclose investors or the size of the round.
I’ve speculated previously on the growing conflict Kevin Rose has between his roles at Digg and Pownce, and now it would appear that we may finally be on the eve of Rose being forced to decide between the two.
Leah Culver, a co-founder of Pownce with Rose has made a bizarre post to Digg suggesting that Digg’s new features were a direct copy of those from Pownce:
Since I originally came up with the Pownce gender list, I’m somewhat miffed that Digg copied Pownce.
Culver also linked to an image on Flickr which she subsequently deleted.
The first and most obvious question: has there been a complete break down in communications and trust between Pownce’s founders that they now find it necessary to air their dirty laundry (ironically) on Digg? Second: why did Culver delete the picture after posting the link on Digg? Was pressure brought to bare?
As much as we all admire Kevin Rose’s tenacity and creativity, there is always a point where you can be wearing too many hats. Rose has three (Digg, Rev3, Pownce), which I’m guessing is at least one too many, possibly two.
Bill Snitzer, one of the tech guys at BitGravity, is driving to Los Angeles and showing it live on the Internet. He’s got a webcam up showing the drive and a Google Map mashup with a GPS device showing his progress.
Bitgravity, located in Burlingame, California, hasn’t officially launched. But the company is the content delivery network (CDN) for Revision3 and other video sites. The quality of the video on this site is significantly better than what you see with other live streaming services like Justin.tv and Ustream. I’m looking forward to hearing more about the streaming technology, as well as the Google Maps/GPS hack (some resources for GPS mashup here and here).
Geek chick celebrity Veronic Belmont has signed to co-host Revision3’s 
I was at Flickr’s fourth birthday 
I’ve 
