Vision India 2020: Bioscope

Professor Raj Reddy at Carnegie Mellon University first urged me to look at micro-franchise as a vehicle for economic development. Today, micro-finance has become a world-renowned phenomenon, especially with Dr. Yunus’ Nobel Prize two years back. [You can read my interview with Raj here.]

Deal Radar 2008: Revver

Revver is a video sharing site that hosts user generated content. It was founded by Steven Starr, Ian Clarke and Oliver Luckett in 2004 and went live in 2005. Clarke and Luckett left the company in a management shakeup in 2006.

Deal Radar 2008: Brightcove

Brightcove is an online video publishing company that lets users—both established media networks and independent content makers—monetize their content through ad revenues. It was founded in 2004 by Jeremy Allaire, who is now CEO.

Deal Radar 2008: Metaweb

Metaweb Technologies, a spin off from Applied Minds, aims to build a better infrastructure for the web. The company, co-founded by Danny Hillis, was spun off in January 2005, and is based in San Francisco, California. Its primary product is Freebase, ‘an open, shared database of the world’s knowledge’. This database is free to use

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Deal radar 2008: Veoh

San Diego-based Veoh is an internet television service where users can find and watch major studio content, independent productions and other user generated videos. Founded in 2003 by Dmitry Shapiro, who is also the company’s Chief Innovation officer, Veoh began its full beta service in early 2006.

Deal radar 2008: Motionbox

Motionbox is an online video sharing service based in New York City. The brainchild of Chris O’ Brien and Andrew Wason, MotionBox was dubbed a Youtube clone. It seems to have some interesting features though, and may be a reasonably priced acquisition for a larger player with distribution looking for an online video angle.

Blog Monetization

I have been promising many of you that I will do this post based on where things are currently on the internet. So here it is.

Deal Radar 2008: BitTorrent

BitTorrent—founded by Bram Cohen and Ashwin Navin in September 2004—is one of the players in the peer-to-peer content delivery industry. Headquartered in San Francisco, the company invented the BitTorrent protocol and runs a peer assisted content delivery system based on the protocol.