Another Dot Com

Earlier this month, Photobucket ran into a little problem with MySpace. MySpace locked out users from publishing to Photobucket from their site. Photobucket worked out a deal with MySpace to get the publishing feature turned on again…but, I’m wondering if MySpace used that as a strategy or way to value Photobucket/uers? The rumor is MySpace may acquire Photobucket for $200 million to $400 million range. Whatever the price is, soon we’ll be seeing ‘Photobucket by Myspace’.

I read today that Facebook is getting around 1.5 billion daily pageviews. Just last month, Facebook reported around 1 billion daily pageviews. Impressive growth! Now, if Facebook can come up with way to monetize the pageviews….

Myspace is targeting Digg with its launch of Myspace News. Myspace News will allow users to add news items, comment, rate, discuss, etc. Watch your back, Digg…

Divvio is another web startup that lets users create channels, grouping interesting videos. More and more sites are popping up leveraging the existing video stream sites and content. So far, most of these sites allow users to create a channel with videos from various sites on the web. I’ll throw my hat into the mix….I’m working on something as well around video.

Video sites that host/encode/stream has been big since early 2000. Broadband penetration in S. Korea is highest in the world…which translates to heavy use of multimedia content on the web.

Here are some cool video sites in S. Korea.

- TV pot (by Daum.net)
- Pandora
- MNcast
- Damoim
- Aura (Operated by Damoim)
- Mgoon
- Freechal
- Noriter (Operated by Ipop)
- Diodeo

There are many more…too many to list. Some of the sites above offer live broadcasting feature. How cool…I’m sure that feature will be coming soon to the states.

Comeeko.com is a cool little site that let’s you upload your photos, create photo strips (you can add speech bubbles and layout). I actually saw something like this at Daum.net. Though…Daum.net’s photo sharing service (They call it Daum Pie) doesn’t let you add speech bubbles and make the collection of photos tell a funny/interesting story. Anyhow, I think Comeeko has taken photo sharing to another level by adding fun factor.

I just found a new web 2.0 site called Izumi.com. Izumi take a different approach to sharing photos, vids, and other media files. Izumi lets you publish media content, but the content is not actually uploaded to izumi server or any other server to be accessed by visitors. Only meta data and media locator file is uploaded…you host the media files on your computer and serve them. Cool idea…mixing in the P2P concept. But, what happens if you are not online to serve the files? Currently, Izumi software doesn’t support mac ;-( I’ll get on my PC later this week and try it out.

I’ll report back soon.

Most folks working on Internet start-ups have big dreams. Dreams for innovation, making a difference, and cashing out BIG! Well, YouTube co-founders achieved all of the above.

According to Google SEC filings, YouTube co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen are each worth about $326 million, and the third co-founder Jawed Karim, who returned to Stanford before YouTube was bought last year is worth about $65 million.

Good going guys. Now, if I can only get my turn at the big bucks!!

Viacom requested YouTube to remove around 100,000 unauthorized video clips. This is a sign….sign? Well, this is a sign that there will be a business model to be introduced soon around online videos. Just look back to the Napter days with mp3 files.