Beet TV

Break Media has partnered with a number of top brands geared toward 18-34-year-old males, according to SVP of Sales & Partnerships Andrew Budkofsky. Its recently launched web series sponsored by Twix and Dos Equis, and has upcoming campaigns for Doritos and Denny’s.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — The focus of clean-tech, or as well-known venture capitalist Vinod Khosla prefers to call it, “main-tech,” isn’t wind and corn ethanol. “It’s about the mainstream things we use in life and essentially reinventing society,” he says. Cleantech will impact technologies like engines, lighting, and refridgerators, which have markets worth hundreds of billions […]

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — The create-your-own-social-network platform Ning has now produced nearly half a million social networks, with a new one created every 30 seconds, CEO and founder Gina Bianchini says. The company will launch an iPhone application on Friday. Jason Pontin, Editor of the MIT Technology Review, conducted this interview for Beet.TV on the MIT […]

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Adobe Systems CTO Kevin Lynch is one of the forces behind the Open Screen Project, a collaboration of 20 companies working to bring rich content, like mobile applications and flash, to any screen. Adobe Flash currently reaches over 800 million devices and expects to reach one billion by 2009, he says.   

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — The current financial crisis might actually have a silver lining for venture capital investing, VC titan Vinod Khosla told Andy up on the MIT campus yesterday. “When we go through a period like this, it’s actually healthy in the long run,” he says in this clip. Khosla is an affiliated partner at […]

User-driven news site Digg announced a major expansion today that will include doubling its staff, growing internationally, improving infrastructure and developing new features. The company raised $28.7 million in a new round of funding led by Highland Capital Partners to finance its progress, according to Jay Adelson’s post on the Digg blog.

Yesterday night MySpace launched its Self-Serve Ad Service, which will allow MySpace users to post advertisements directing viewers to their profile pages. Nick O’Neill at Social Times writes that the service seems to be targeted toward musicians, but its a tool companies can take advantage of as well. Major advertisers are creating profile pages for […]

John McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin as a running mate last month may have helped him attract a wider female audience of online video viewers, according to numbers Nielsen released today. Fifty-eight percent of his website’s online video viewers last month were women, compared to 37 percent in June.

The Associated Press announced today that it has chosen the Seattle-based video management and publishing company thePlatform to bring broader coverage and higher-quality video to its Online Video Network. For the first time, the AP’s 2,100 affiliate sites will be able to post AP videos to their destination pages using an embeddable player.

PubMatic, an optimization service that helps publishers earn more ad dollars, announced the launch of AdFlex today, a targeted, on-demand publishing inventory for ad networks. Andy interviewed PubMatic President Rajeev Goel at the Omma Global conference last week.

LG15: The Resistance, the long-awaited follow-up to LonelyGirl15, premiered Saturday to positive reviews. In the new web series from EQAL, LonelyGirl15 characters Jonas and Sarah return to battle evil secret society The Order–and perhaps an even higher threat.

General Electric is currently evaluating which company’s web applications to add to its 400,000 computers worldwide, and a start-up called Zoho has risen to become a serious contender against Microsoft and Google.

Branded content is still a relatively new and developing advertising format, but Ogilvy & Mather is ahead of the curve: In June 2007, while many digital ad agencies were still experimenting, it launched the high-production 12-episode web series "In Search of Real Food" on Yahoo for Unilever’s Hellmann’s. The second season, Real Food Summer School […]

Michael Arrington wrote that Animoto “is one of those start-ups that has success written all over it,” and it’s hard not to be impressed by their platform. Users simply upload pictures and music and Animoto automatically makes them into a high-production quality 30-second video; longer videos cost $3 a piece or $30 a year.

Advertising networks are fragmenting into specialized verticals like travel ad networks, women’s ad networks and gay ad networks, according to Frank Addante, serial entrepreneur and CEO of advertising technology company The Rubicon Project. The fragmentation is mimicking the way television stations split off into cable channels, he says.

Angel investor Ron Conway made a bold prediction to the overflowing audience at TechCrunch50 last Monday: product placement will become the next multi-billion dollar industry. Online video creators rejoiced, but Jim Armstrong, Managing Director for Clearstone Venture Partners, is not convinced. 

A person’s activities on Facebook, Flickr, training sites like Nike plus, and credit card purchases all generate data, and Me-trics wants to put it together in one place, co-founder James Vreeland told me after his presentation at TechCrunch50 last Tuesday. He describes the company as "Google Analytics for your life."

Last Monday, Adgregate Markets launched ShopAds, a banner advertising widget where consumers can purchase products without being navigated away from the page. The credit card purchases within the transactional banner ads are secure, even if the sites they are placed on are not, CEO Henry Wong told me after his presentation last Monday at TechCrunch50.

Universal annotation system DotSpots, created by BizRate and Shopzilla founder Farhad Mohit, made quite a splash at the TechCrunch50 conference last week. Wired’s Besty Schiffman blogged that she had it pegged as the probable TechCrunch50 winner. 

Argentinian start-up Popego brings together a user’s digital life in one place, CEO Santiago Siri told me after he presented at TechCrunch50 last Tuesday. The site creates interest profiles for users based on their Flickr photos, YouTube videos, blog posts, Twitters, and other digital content to help them find things and people that match their […]