Mobile Video Search Firm Veveo Gets $14 Million Second Round
Veveo, a mobile video search firm based out of Andover, MA, has received $14 million in its second round of funding, and getting ready to launch it service after couple of years of hatching the service. The round was led by Norwest Venture Partners, Matrix and North Bridge Venture Partners…the three also invested in the first round of $14 million. This makes it a total of $28 million for a company which hasn’t yet launched its service.
CEO Murali Aravamudan gave me a demo of the service, branded vTap, earlier this week…the service aims to bring all the web video to users on the mobile, using a dedicated application on the phone. It is an impressive service at first glance, with on-the-fly transcoding of web videos for mobile play, and intuitive search shortcuts, using predictive technology. Some of the video searches Aravamudan showed me were spookingly accurate. A description of how it works, here.
The company is a white-label solution, and doesn’t plan to be a destination…The service launches Sept 10 on Windows Mobile devices (presumably an operator tie-up), and will also have an iPhone-only app as well. It also plans to release some online widget-based apps down the line as well. Aravamudan said it has also tied up with a cable TV operator to offer the search on TV, though he declined to name the company yet.
The challenge: the long term-viability of a standalone video search app. And then, when networks become much faster, who needs all these shortcuts?
Posted In: Entertainment, Search, Money, M&A & Venture Capital, Social Media, Video, Technologies / Formats
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Comments (4)
Aug 24, 2007 7:42 AM
If the network becomes faster, does it make search more cumbersome ? And then search features will be very much in need like never before.
Aug 24, 2007 12:07 PM
Sabarish
I meant then normal Google search becomes more viable in the high-speed environment..
Aug 25, 2007 2:49 PM
But Rafat, I think normal Google is still viable in any environment. Google was actually able to beat other search engines because it used to run on slow internet connections also pretty well. Thus in my opinion increasing speeds has no bearing on Google search’s viability.
In fact I agree with the sabarish’s point that with increasing speed the user would like to have more content available and hence search becomes even more important.
Aug 26, 2007 5:57 AM
From my reading, what Veveo hopes to bring to mobile is fewer keystrokes—instead of having to type in a whole word in the search box the service tries to predict what word you’re typing. No matter how fast the connection speed is, that will always be useful. Of course, there’s things like speech-to-text services which could compete with it.