A year after launch, Vpod.tv, makers of flash-based online video publisher tools, released some previously premium tools into public beta. The tools trickling down to the public accounts will be under the umbrella of their myTV product.

Now any account will be able to upload, publish, and monetize their own hosted (600 Mb) myTV video channel, like this one for a series of entrepreneurs speaking in France. You can also see the new version of their embedded player below.

Channels consist of a series of streamed videos (no rewind or fast-forward) navigable by a show menu running along the bottom of the player and are managed by several overlayed menus. The menus let you grab a link to an individual show, RSS feed, or share it over email. Publishers create channels by uploading individual shows (using a new desktop uploader) to their account and ordering the videos in play lists. They can then personalize the player by linking it to their own domain and adding their own logo, and syndicate it through a Netvibes widget.

There are several other startups getting involved in personalized internet video. Both Cozmo, Kyte, me.tv, and Splashcast have RSS based video players that create channels from videos hosted on other sites. Yet to launch, WorldTV will also feature a personalized video player.

Also see TechCrunch France’s complete coverage (French).

Paris and Madrid based startup vpod.tv will open its doors in the next few hours. We covered Vpod.tv back in May at Zaragoza Innovate conference while it was still is closed beta.

vpod.tv is a new online video service, aiming to simplify the technical barriers to working with video online and to enable consumers and corporations to create their personal online and mobile TV channels. The service will open in the next hours in English Spanish and French.

The first release tomorrow will include mainly upload and publishing functions and the company will roll out progressively other features such as footage editing, playlist creation, mixing and broadcast features. Vpod’s service takes video from almost any source and, more importantly, transcodes for almost any device. All you have to do then, is pick your device and download the video.

As we already said, this is a massively competitive space but vpod.tv will take advantage from its European presence where it has a chance to become a local player in video publishing and editing. Other European online video services are already present (like Dailymotion or Sevenload) but with a focus on online video sharing. Vpod.tv approach is more comparable to what BrightCove is doing in the United States. Rodrigo Sepulveda, founder and CEO of vpod.tv precises however that his business model is closer to what Revver is doing when they share ad revenues with contributors.

In case this is not a good reason enough for you to try this video service, vpod.tv is organizing a sweepstake offering one Panasonic video camera every week, during the first 10 weeks. All you have to do is register. I hope this will not be the best reason they have to get new users

Vpod raised 5.1 million dollars from Innovacom and our previous screenshots are here . More on their blog.

Over 100 startups applied to present their companies at the TechCrunch-sponsored Connected Innovators program at the Supernova conference last week. Twelve were selected and had a chance to launch their new products to an audience of hundreds.

I drafted some real-time notes of the products demo’d and launched at event at CrunchNotes, and my more complete notes are below.

Attensa	Ether	lifeio
Netvibes	PostApp	PROTOMOBL
Sharpcast	SoonR	StumbleUpon
Vpod.tv	Webaroo	ZiXXo

Sharpcast

Palo Alto-based Sharpcast (TechCrunch posts here) has developed a platform to sync application data across your computers and mobile devices. Their first showcase application is Sharpcast Photos, which not only pushes photos from one device/computer to others, it also keeps them synced. Make a change on one and it pushes the changes to the other copies as well. There are lots of new applicaitions coming as well (documents, calendar, contacts). The company, which has raised $16.5 million in capital, will be application-agnostic so you don’t have to switch to using new software. Windows only today, Mac coming soon.

Webaroo

Webaroo, headquartered in Santa Clara is a new service that launched in April that allows PC users (no Mac support yet) users to access cached web content when they are offline. Webaroo offers pre-selected content, called “web packs”, and users can also cache whatever websites they would like to have access to. For more, see the TechCrunch Webaroo review here.

PostApp

PostApp is a new company that allows users to pull web services directly into their blog or other website without having the technical skills to use the API supplied by the service provider. With the explosion of widgets, PostApp may be the right application at the right time. They also secured $1.5 million in funding from Hummer Winblad. See the full profile here.

Vpod.tv

Vpod.tv was one of my favorite companies presenting at a conference in Spain last month. It is a video sharing site, similar to YouTube, but that focuses on transcoding to most video devices (ipod, PSP, etc.) and allowing users to download video to those devices. They also have an innovative approach to monetization. See the full TechCrunch post here, which also discusses their $5.1 million funding.

Ether

Ether officially launched at Supernova. They’ve created an “ebay for services” that allows people who wish to sell their time on the phone to do so. Place an Ether logo on your site - when someone clicks on it they can set up a time to speak with you according to the terms you’ve set (price, time of call, etc.). When your phone rings, there is a person on the other end who has already given their credit card information and is looking for your advice. Ether went into beta in March, and we covered the official launch here.

Lifeio

Bruce Spector from attap gave the Supernova audience a very early look at Lifeio, “the new life organizer”. Lifeio will combine instant messaging, email, calendaring, contacts, to-do lists, etc in a multipage Ajax site (from what I saw it looks like Lifeio is competing with Goowy, Netvibes, Pageflakes, etc.). Lifeio is also opensourcing the platform framework, called jitsu. Look for more details as the September launch date approaches, and sign up for the beta on the Lifeio homepage.

Other attap companies include Riffs, Buzzvote and personal DNA.

GearON

GearON, a mobile service launching this month from ProtoMobl, centers on your phone’s contact list and creates a social network around it to share photos, music, events and venue information. See the flash demo of GearON here to get a better idea of what it’s all about. Their launch will be covered on MobileCrunch as well as here at TechCrunch.

Soonr

Soonr is a new mobile platform that we’ve previously covered at TechCrunch. One of the most useful applications they’ve launched so far is the ability to use Skype on a normal cell phone (all you pay for are the Skype-out charges from Skype to your own cell, and you can then use Skype to call anyone on your Skype list). The Mac version of Soonr was announced at Supernova.

Zixxo

There are a few ways to look at Zixxo. For users they will deliver highly targeted local and national coupons to you based on whatever personal and demographic information you choose to share with them. For businesses, they are a very cost-effective way of reaching consumers who actually want to receive these coupons. For third parties there is a revenue share opportunity for bringing users and/or businesses to the network. Zixxo is still very young, but the core idea is strong. Look for a potential quick acquisition of this company if they start to get traction.

Attensa

Craig Barnes, the CEO of Attensa, talked about how his suite of RSS reader applications (mobile, outlook, online) analyze user behaviors to recommend specific content and help people deal with information overload. They’ve also just released a new version of Attensa for outlook. TechCrunch posts on Attensa are here.

Netvibes

Founder and Co-CEO Tariq Krim gave the audience an overview of London and Paris-based Netvibes, the Ajax home page that has seen tremendous growth and now has millions of passionate users. Netvibes now has an active community of independent developers creating modules for the site. Netvibes is on a roll. TechCrunch posts are here.

StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon is a social browsing application. Users download a browser toolbar and can find popular sites in different categories, vote on sites, etc. Stumbleupon has nearly 1 million registered users in 139 countries, who “stumble” 2.2 million sites er day. Advertisers can get their ads in front of a targeted audience for 5 cents an impression. I use this service.

I mentioned vpod.tv, a startup headquartered in Paris and Madrid, in my Innovate 2006 roundup. Today they are announcing a $5.1 million Series A round, led by Frédéric Humbert of Innovacom.

vpod is a “best of class” service, in the rapidly evolving and increasingly crowded video sharing space. vpod is doing things that no one else is with transcoding, editing/display and monetization.

Frankly, the online video space is getting so crazy that I put off a demo of the product from founders Rodrigo Sepulveda Schulz and Ivan Communod until the end of the conference. The real winner seems to be Adobe - its new Flash development platform is so robust that everyone seems to be developing their own video product, and most are basically variations on the same thing.

vpod may be different. It’s based in Europe, which will give it an advantage as the U.S. players beat eachother up - they can grow European market share in the meantime. Also, like Revver, vpod is focusing on monetizing videos.

vpod will allow advertisers to easily create advertisements, and play them on their own websites and/or insert them into users’ videos. Ads will be inserted at the beginning, middle or end of videos and will range from 10-60 seconds long. Users can opt out of ads by paying a fee. By opting in, they’ll receive a revenue split from vpod - something in the 50% range. This is further than what competitor Revver has announced to date.

But vpod also shines in other areas. They take video from almost any source and, more importantly, transcode for almost any device. Want Mpeg-4 for the PSP? vpod will let you download that format. Mpeg for the iPod? You can have that too. Just tell vpod your device and it will give you the correct format.

And finally, the tools for creating your own “channel” on vPod are stunning. The only Flash is around the player. Everything else is javascript and dhtml. They allow, for example, resizing of boxes by dragging the mouse, something I’ve only seen in Flash previously.

vpod is in private beta. Sign up on the home page. They are allowing people in slowly, ramping up for a fall launch.

In the meantime, if you have some time to kill, check out my after-three-cocktails video interview with Rodrigo here.

Screen shots (more are here):

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