Media

Michael Learmonth, who has been covering the the online video space for Silicon Alley Insider for the past several months, and has been beating the pants off many of his colleagues with numerous scoops, is leaving the Insider to join Advertising Age, Beet.TV has learned.

  Not only was this past Saturday Night Live’s broadcast a big hit on television, with its biggest season premiere audience since 2001, it has created the most popular online video clip ever published by NBC, a network spokesperson has told Beet.TV.  The opening Sarah Palin/Hilary Clinton skit performed by Tina Fey and Amy Poehler […]

  The New York Times broke its record for daily visits to its Website with close to 9 million yesterday (9/16), a spokesperson has told Beet.TV, citing internal numbers.  The upheaval on Wall Street, coupled with the presidential campaign and hurricanes have added to to the record numbers, a spokesperson told me late this afternoon.

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.

Like so many disasters which have driven news consumption, the earthquake that hit Wall Street on Monday has brought record traffic to the Wall Street Journal Online.  Monday set an all time record of two million visitors, a Journal spokeswoman told Beet.TV, citing internal numbers.  Traffic on Tuesday was nearly as high, we are told.  […]

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. 

Allen Stern over at CenterNetworks says that Flixwagon, the company which provides a Web platform for live and recorded mobile phone uploads, will announce a "white label" solution for media organizations and carriers to create their own branded channels. In Hollywood in June, I spoke with Flixwagon co-founder Sarig Reichert. I’ve republished this interview today. […]

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 […]

I’m not sure if the expected announcement at CES of a new industry-wide system to make downloaded media work on any device will become a reality, as Chris Albrecht at NewTeeVee writes today, but it is surely needed.  Here’s the take on this by Cliff Edwards at Business Week.

The immense interest in Republican vice presidential nominee Alaska Governor Sarah Palin has driven 38 million video views over the past week, including YouTube videos, broadcast videos and spoofs, reports the Silicon Alley Insider’s Michael Learmonth.  Michael has created his report on numbers provided TubeMogul.

MIXTT, which has dubbed itself "The Social Network for you Social Life," isn’t another Facebook or MySpace, according to founder and CEO Eve Peters. The site is geared toward meeting new people and offline interaction, and profiles are for groups of friends rather than individuals, she says. Instead of poking or sheep throwing, users can […]

AlleyCorp, the Manhattan incubator run by Kevin Ryan and Dwight Merriman, will jump from $8 million in revenue in 2007 to $50 million this year, Kevin tells The Deal’s TechConfidential’s Mary Kathleen Flynn in this video interview.  He says that AlleyCorp has raised $50 million in financing for its six companies.

Purple States TV, an online political show reported through the eyes of five citizen journalists, will syndicate its videos to The Washington Post politics site beginning tomorrow, founder and executive producer Cynthia Farrar told me in an interview on the Beet.TV rooftop earlier today. The videos will be featured on the front page of the […]

Our colleague Chris Albrecht over at NewTeeVee has done some investigating around reports that Microsoft’s Silverlight had been tossed overboard by NBC in favor of Flash.  It’s just not the case, Microsoft and NBC tell Chris.

Yammer, a Twitter-like microblogging tool for businesses, won the top TechCrunch50 prize of $50,000, TechCrunch announced yesterday. I spoke with CEO David Sacks about the company after he presented on Monday, and he told me that it was "really cool" that judge "Marc Benioff said he liked it the best." Benioff, the CEO of salesforce.com, […]

We are starting to blog dozens of video interviews from the TechCrunch50 conference.  We have a mix of the 50 companies and cool ones we found in the demo pit.  Here is Kelsey’s interview with Pano Anthos, CEO of Boston-based hangout.net — which is one of the TC 50.

Yesterday in San Francisco, Kelsey Blodget, associate producer at Beet.TV sat down for an extensive interview with Google Vice President Marissa Mayer.  In this segment, Marissa talks about the development and functionality of Chrome, the new Web browser from Google.

SAN FRANCISCO — Ashton Kutcher was in San Francisco yesterday at the TechCrunch 50 conference to debut his new animated video celebrity site Blah Girls.  Liz Gannes from NewTeeVee was on the scene with with her video camera and got this interview the Ashton Kutcher and Jason Goldberg. — Andy Plesser, Executive Producer P.S. Thanks […]

SAN DIEGO — Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg, co-executive producers of All Things Digital, are at DEMO in San Diego.  I’ve posted a video of Kara’s first day at the conference including an interview with conference director Chris Shipley.

SAN FRANCISCO — Today at the TechCrunch50 conference, Marissa Mayer, Vice President of Search Product and User Experience at Google, announced Google’s plans to make scanned newspaper archives searchable through Google News. Over 100 newspapers are available at the product’s launch today, Marissa told me in an interview after her session.