Alex Blum, CEO of KickApps, met with me at Digital Hollywood. KickApps like some of the other companies Digital Podcast interviewed at the show provides an on demand white label social network application. Unlike some of the other services, KickApps can be self administered and if you are willing to give up some advertising inventory KickApps can be used without cost.

A KickApps-enabled website provides your visitors with a complete rich media community experience. Users are invited to upload media and create their very own “personal space” directly at your site. Site visitors are provided with easy to use media management tools to manage their personal space. Similarly, your site administrator is provided an array of easy-to-use media management and administrative tools to ensure that only appropriate content makes it on to your website.

KickApps has a rich feature set focused on social networking, community building and managing user generated content.

Sites that use KickApps have lots of features to choose from including uploading videos, audio and photos, user customizable profiles, guest books, blogs, feeds and a variety of widgets. They also go beyond technology and offer help via white papers such as their current whitepaper called Nine Steps to a Successful Online Community which you can download for free.

You can use KickApps for free if you allow KickApps to take part of the advertising. If you want to keep all the advertising for yourself, then you can use their paid version which is based upon a CPM model.

This is definitely worth checking out if you want to add social networking features to your site.

[tags]KickApps, Social Networking Application, Social Networking, Digital Hollywood[/tags]

Rex Wong, CEO of DAVE Networks, met with me at Digital Hollywood. DAVE Networks provides white label social networks. That means that DAVE Networks provides the infrastructure to power sites like America’s Funniest Home Videos, Stargate’s Community and Dave.TV. The users of the sites don’t see DAVE Networks, they see the customer’s brand. The customers get the benefits of offering a wide range of social community tools to their users.

The system provides the tools to deploy a custom social broadcast network, including

• Self publishing
• Video upload, download, rating, comments
• Blog, video blog, moblog
• DAVE points system
• A modular player can be customized with your brand and embedded in user’s MySpace, blog or web page
• User contests

Rex also told me about an exciting new project that DAVE Networks has launched called Next.TV. NEXT.TV, a competitor to the much hyped Joost, is a new Internet TV service that delivers over 50 channels of high quality TV content. NEXT.TV’s content is sponsored by advertisers so that you can get premium TV content for free.

NEXT.TV will be available initially in October 2007 on HP consumer notebooks. A version will also be available to the general public shortly thereafter for download of which you can sign up to be part of the Private Beta Program by signing up at www.next.tv.

[tags]DAVE Networks, Rex Wong, Next.TV, IPTV, online video, video, Digital Hollywood[/tags]

David Becker, Chief Marketing Officer, of ExpoTv told me the ExpoTV story. I had not heard of ExpoTV before I met David, but I checked it out as soon as I could. ExpoTV is a place where regular people get to review products and make a few bucks in the process.

ExpoTV is a great find. It has over 200,000 user generated reviews on everything from Art Supplies to Video Games and everything in between.

The site encourages users to post their reviews and ExpoTV will pay you to do it. The payments seem to range from $2 up to $10 for a review depending upon product category and how many more reviews ExpoTV needs for a given category. There’s also a pay for plays component to the payment as a bonus.

You can even get seen on 23 million TVs as ExpoTV puts together a TV show based on the submitted videos. ExpoTV’s Video On Demand Network is available through Comcast Cable, Time Warner Cable, Cox Communications, Charter Communications, Mediacom Communications, Insight Communications, Bright House Networks, VerizonFiOS, Bresnan Communications, Blue Ridge Communications, and PurDigital Media.

As for a business model, ExpoTV seems to have lots of options. Selling products right with the reviews seems like a natural. And if they don’t want to sell things themselves it seems like you should be able to put up really relevant advertising to people who are in shopping mode. The other big option is to set it up as a platform that other sites can use to put up a quick review of an interesting product.

ExpoTV is worth watching. Here’s a sample – Go Halo:)

[tags]ExpoTV, David Becker, User Generated Reviews, UGC[/tags]

Definitely worth checking out.

Anne Keegan of Vividas met with me at Digital Hollywood to discuss streaming full screen high definition video.

Vividas provides technology and services that enable video streaming live or on demand, full-screen and up to high-definition quality. Vividas’ technology allows the user to view content over a variety of bandwidths without needing to install software.

Vividas’ technology offers an array of online video streaming options. The technology can be used for pay-per view movies, live events, Internet television, corporate advertisements, movie trailers and more.

The Vividas PPV technology provides filmmakers an easy to implement, high-quality presentation that, unlike other competing technologies, requires no player download and plays instantly in full-screen on virtually every computer. Vividas technology has powered a number of previous online film successes such as “The Secret,” for which Vividas received a Webby Award nomination.

The Vividas technology completely changes the economics of movie distribution providing both the streaming and also the payment infrastructure. A great example of how Vividas can provide a pay per view infrastructure for movie producers can be found at Home:The Movie.

“As an independent filmmaker, we had to get through many gate keepers with ‘Home,’ the final one being distribution. Formerly, if a filmmaker couldn’t get through that gate, the film went on the shelf,” said filmmaker Dawn Scibilia. “Because of the Internet and Vividas, that final gate is nonexistent and we can deliver ‘Home’ directly to our audience. The quality of the video is good and will only get better, it’s an affordable solution and the fact that it plays automatically and in full-screen are all big pluses as well.”

And here are some links to some great high definition movie trailers that show off Vividas in action.

It’s exciting to see what Vividas is doing as it is the kind of technology that will ultimately completely change the video value chain. Watch out Hollywood.

[tags]video, streaming, video value chain, video distribution, pay per view, ppv, digital hollywood[/tags]

David Bankston, Executive Vice President and CTO of Neighborhood America, sat down with me to talk about Enterprise Social Networks. Neighborhood America is in the business of helping enterprises create and manage social networks. They provide a software as a service based platform to enable uploads of user generated content, user web pages, and social networking tools.

They have quite few customers in both the business & media sector and the public sector. The service powers sites like Fox News where Neighborhood America powers Fox News uReport section that enables users to upload content to Fox News. It also powers HGTV’s Rate My Space community site where users can share, comment on and rate photos of redecorating projects.

They have a very impressive list of clients using the service to power various aspects of their websites. If you need an enterprise class social network for your site, Neighborhood America should be on your list of potential vendors.

[tags]Neighborhood America, social networks, Digital Hollywood[/tags]

Jim Hollingsworth, SVP of Gracenote, met with me at Digital Hollywood. Jim was kind enough to go through interview twice, as it appeared our first take didn’t seem to record. It took some work, but I was able to recover the first interview session and I’m glad because the first take is almost always the best. Jim told me about each of the major Gracenote businesses.

Gracenote is a fascinating company with an incredible database of information about the music we listen to. Metadata about the music, artwork, lyrics and popularity information all get used to provide music retailers such as iTunes and digital device companies like Sony with the platform to provide information to the music consumer. The company supports over 2 billion searches for music every month and as a result knows what music is popular right down to the neighborhood level.

The service powers music search, play list creation, music discovery on the web, in digital devices and even in the cars we drive.

Gracenote also powers the Yahoo service that allows you to search for lyrics. If you to go to Yahoo Music and search for a song you will see the lyrics below the song. I put a red arrow on the screen shot to highlight the lyrics.

In addition to music, Gracenote has entered the video marketplace with a similar database about video and is rolling out new products in that area. Jim tells me to stay tuned as they have some exciting news ahead in the video area that they plan to announce at the Consumer Electronics Show.

[tags]Gracenote, Digital Hollywood,Music[/tags]

I sat down with Derrick Oien, the President and Co-founder of Intercasting, at Digital Hollywood. Derrick shared with me the exciting new things Intercasting has going on in the mobile space.

Intercasting got started running a mobile social networking service called Rabble. From there, Intercasting has extended its offering to enable wireless network operators to integrate other social networking or community services through a social networking platform interface called Anthem.

The Anthem client is a user interface that provides access all of the user’s social networking providers. Anthem is currently used by Sprint, Virgin Mobile and Boost Mobile and will be launching on other top tier carriers. Through Anthem, wireless carriers are able to offer their subscribers access to social networking sites including LiveJournal, Vox, Xanga, AsianAve.com, BlackPlanet.com, Faithbase.com, GLEE.com, MiGente.com and Rabble.

With Anthem, camera on phone can be set up for one-click distribution of photos to PCs, email recipients, imaging services and social networking providers on the Anthem platform.

Anthem also provides users with the ability to connect their address books or Personal Information Manager(PIM) with some of the most popular social networking providers.

It’s exciting to see the extension of social networking services onto the mobile environment. The integration with the phone has so much potential to make social networking even more powerful when you have 24 hour access to your connections and data.

[tags]derrick oien, derrickoien, mobile, intercasting, anthem, rabble, social networking, mobile social networking[/tags]

BSG Clearing Solutions is a provider of clearing, settlement, payment and financial risk management services for communication service providers. Lance Devin, a vice president with BSG, sat down with me at Digital Hollywood to discuss BSG and a new service they are launching called Bill2Phone which allows content providers to sell and deliver products to mobile phones and bill those content charges to the subscriber’s mobile phone bill.

The transaction flow shown below shows how the process works from time your user selects your service or product through the billing and payment cycle.

If you want to sell content through mobile phones, BSG seems like an interesting option for getting a payment process set up.

UPDATE:

Here’s the mobile version of the transaction flows:

[tags]BSG Clearing Solutions, Digital Hollywood, mobile payments, payments, mobile[/tags]

Origin Digital is a service provider that provides hosted applications, tools and services to simplify the capture, conversion, and control of digital media. Darcy Lorincz, CEO of Origin Digital, spent some time with me at Digital Hollywood explaining how the service works and what you can do with it.

As you can see from the workflow illustration, the service ingests digital media, transforms it into different media types, enables advertising insertions and helps you manage the scheduling and distribution of the content out onto the web. This type of service should be very useful to anyone who needs to manage significant distribution of media out onto various platforms around the web.

[tags]Origin Digital, Media Distribution, Digital Hollywood[/tags]

I met Gilles BianRosa, CEO of Azureus, at Digital Hollywood today. Azureus has long been one of the most popular bittorrent applications for sharing and downloading content off the web. The application has been downloaded over 140 million and Azureus users connect with one another from more than 100 countries and 40 languages.

Azureus operates a video aggregation and distribution platform to support the exchange of long-form, High Definition or DVD quality videos, as well as niche, licensed digital content from leading media companies. The company has recently announced content partnerships with Showtime Networks, BBC Worldwide, Bennett Media Worldwide, G4, A&E Networks (including A&E, History, and Biography channels), National Geographic, and Starz Media.

The new platform called Vuze is supported by peer-sharing technology, providing users the ability to browse, share, search and discover multimedia entertainment in a high-resolution format.

Gilles was kind enough to sit down and tell about Azureus and their new direction called Vuze (Vuze.com). I hope you enjoy this interview with Gilles.

[tags]Azureus, Bittorrent, Vuze, Gilles BianRosa, Digital Hollywood, DigitalHollywood[/tags]