Archive for April, 2008

Today we’re starting one of the most critical projects for VideoPlaza, ever. Project “Talent hunt” is starting now and aims to attract the right talent to build the new half of our company.

What we can offer you, as a future colleague, is the kick-ass-time of your life. You can become one of the early guys in VideoPlaza and experience exciting things in the company’s early history.

Entering the Plaza, we can promise you this:

• Unlimited top-notch coffee
• Nice and well located office
• Superb pizza from around the corner when working late
• The possibility to work weekends and hollydays
• Beer and parties
• A 24 inch monitor (even if you’re not a developer)
• Flexible work hours (work any 16 hours of the day that you like)
• Challenging problems you have never solved before
• A friendly smile every morning

On the other hand, there are other things we can’t promise you:

• Repetitive tasks
• Industry standard salary
• Endless hierarchy loops
• Business class flight tickets

At this stage, we’re currently looking for developers mainly. We need a Flash talent with AS 2/3 skills and a Java developer. Read more here (it’s pretty funny stuff Alfred has put together) and don’t hesitate to give us a call if you get a good vibe about this.

Project Talent hunt is now officially on!

It’s always fun when someone makes a list and today we’re on one of them. Videoplaza is ranked 8th on the Internetworld web entreprenuers list! Our friends at Spotify caught the 5th place and Alex and Eric at SoundCloud was unfairly placed nr 17. The only other online video startup on the list (Bambuser) is right ahead of us on place nr 7.

Place nr 1? Well, it went to the office thieves (a.k.a. Booli).

We all have our todo lists. Not just one, but many and we use them everyday.

More important than the todo lists, is the not-todo-list. It keeps you focused and keeps distractions away. Here, I present to you the VideoPlaza not-todo-list.

1- Advertising solution for mobile video

There are two questions I always get while talking about VideoPlaza: Are you also doing this on the mobile/IPTV? And the answer is no, not in a couple of years at least.

I personally think mobile video still needs more than a couple of years to go mainstream. Just as online video now has more than ten years behind it, we’re still not seeing advertising work in a satisfying way, the same rule applies to mobile. AdAge and MarketingPilgrim tells us more.

2- Interactive advertising solution for IPTV

IPTV is really interesting, but not for VideoPlaza. The medium differs from online video, meaning video on web-sites, in many ways. It’s always consumed passively in a lean back position and there’s no mouse or keyboard to interact with.

And besides that, IPTV business is rather about getting into set-top boxes, dealing with hard core politics and stubborn rival operators. In other words, it’s a pretty tough and closed space for getting new advertising formats in place.

3- Advanced targeting functionality

That’s another question that I get a all the time: how do you make sure the right ad is shown to the right guy? Well we don’t, yet. At least not in a very advanced way with image recognition and data mining. We do the basic categories/tags thing for now.

But don’t get me wrong here, targeting is probably the most interesting part of online advertising and it’s something that we think about all the time. We’re just not offering or building anything really advanced yet. The reason to that is simple, it doesn’t work yet. In order to get advanced targeting to work, you need two things in place:

1. Large base of advertisers
   You need to have a big bank of advertisers and campaigns running for all the different target groups. The better targeting, the smaller the groups and the more advertisers needed in total.
2. Large user reach
   Every target group need to be a critical size in order to make the advertisers investment efficient. The more users you have the more data you collect and the better the targeting can be.

What this means is that once you have the large user reach, you need to create some kind of market place for really targeted ad sales. And this is when you need a kick-ass-rocket-science-technology in place, because the better you can target, the more you get paid.

So before we have that reach, meaning a vast number of customers, we’re focusing on other more acute problems to solve for our customers. More on targeting and online video: VideoInsider.

Update: 4- Advertising sales

This is a really attractive space. We’re seing ad networks popping up like flowers in spring and everyone wants to package a piece of the tail and put it up for sale.  This is maybe even more interesting in the video area where the technology and ad formats are the big obstacles for creating adnetworks, and we got both in place.

Despite all of this, we’re not starting our own ad network, yet. The reason is focus. We believe in doing one thing and becoming the best at it.

The best thing though is that we can turn on the VideoPlaza video ad network at anytime and offer ad sales to our customers. We never have to make a descision to close that door.

What do you think?
Is there something you think we should add to this list or something that should be removed?

Alfred will give a talk at the Disruptive Media Conference in Stockholm this Wednesday. Check the trailer below (swe) for preview.

I’ve been in Paris now since Saturday to do some business and pleasure.

First of all, I spend the weekend with Alexander Ljung, a good old friend of mine. We had a lot of (romantic) dinners talking about our startups (/lovers). Alex i co-founder of SoundCloud based in Berlin doing some cool stuff in the music biz.

On Saturday I visited the first VideoCamp unconference in Paris meeting all kind of different online video people. I also held my own session, the only one in English, on “monetizing online video” which became very interesting.

And finally today I visited the more “business” Ad:tech conference. It’s small but dense and I’ve met a some interesting guys. Will see if there’ll be some more blogging from there.

Tomorrow I’ll be at Ad:tech and also meet the Vpod.tv guys that are doing some kind of Brightcove thing. It’ll be interesting to see their view on advertising in video.

As our site just flipped language from Swedish to English, so will the blog.

We did it! The online video of Kanal 5 is profitable only three weeks after the launch of new ad formats delivered by VideoPlaza. Read the article here (swe) at Dagens Media.

The interesting part here is that Aftonbladet, which has the most trafficed commercial video service in Sweden (source), is not profitable yet. According to Elsa Falk, head of moving images, they aim to be that in 1-2 years from now.