More Web Videos on your Cell Phone and TV: vTap Taps into Mobile Videos
Cell Video Paradise
Access to video content is still very limited and way to slow: this is exactly what vTap, which is a trademark of Veveo, is building on providing solutions for Edge-frustrated users on the new iPhone, or Microsoft Mobile people on the go. But there will soon be services for Java-enabled phones from Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, LG and Sony Ericsson.
It is speedy with its predictive technology. Aravamudan, the founder says “the trick to making it so quick is in indexing content by individual letters/characters, instead of words, like most search engines do.” And it is not only for video contents but for other on the go sources like Wikipedia (with the same predictive tech) or thesaurus to define words.
The Database
Now you can reach millions of videos on your cell from… from vTap’s own database crawled from the web ocean. Quite simply it’s only stated that “the search engine has indexed “tens of millions” of videos and considers it among the most comprehensive index of videos on the Web.” (Beet TV) or “searches a major index of video-related sites, and produces it a blazing speed” (VentureBeat). “Veveo’s Web crawler crawls the Web for video content; it then builds a smart index using the company’s own algorithms.” (NewTeeVee) “vTap, … has indexed the largest collection of videos on the web” (RedHerring). YouTube is definitely used, what else?
Ranking SERPs
The search results pages follow the logic of the social rank rather than the measurement of popularity based on the number and quality of incoming links to a a video. vTap uses data like the number of times a video was favorited. (VentureBeat: “Mining what people have selected as their favorite channels on sites like YouTube and elsewhere.”). And of course vTap uses the customary metadata: tags, text on the page where the file is hosted.
The Team
Murali Aravamudan (Founder and CEO, plus the author of 31 US patents) and Ajit Rajasekharan (Founder and VP of Technology) have been working on vTap since late 2004, and the management team has got a strong background in mobile software related areas: “They have worked at companies that include: Motorola, Audible, AT&T, Winphoria, Lucent, Readia, IBM, and others.” If you look at the news section on Veveo, you’ll notice that it’s the tech, geek blogs, the earliest of which is VentureBeat: “The company will launch Sept. 10, but VentureBeat got an early look.”
The Competitors
No, it is not the general online video searches that are posing a challenge to vTap (see some of them in the blogroll), but other mobile search engines. vTap wisely limited itself to cell phones. So its competitors are more like Taptu that has delayed its launch till the middle of September.
Business model
“Eventually, Mr. Aravamudan intends to support this technology through advertising, but he also hopes to partner with providers of set top boxes and IPTV for easier search through the remote control.” (Redherring)
In person Demo
can be requested here.
Venture Capital
As for the VC, one of the board members is Paul J Ferri who was selected as one of the Top 20 Venture Investors of all time and the “Best VC in Boston in 2001, by Forbes magazine. ” Also, in 2001, Ferri received the Massachusetts Telecommunications Council Award for “Venture Capitalist of the Year.”
The list is :
Matrix Partners
North Bridge Venture Partners
Norwest Venture Partners
OmniCapital Group