Featured Pitch: Veeple
Web Site: www.veeple.com
Headquarters: Palo Alto, CA
Year Founded: August, 2007
Founders: Scott Broomfield, CEO, and Craig Sproule, CTO
Investors: Self-financed and friends-and-family
Employees: 12
The Insight:
Two years ago, my co-founder, Craig, brought me an idea. It was one so simple that I was surprised that no one had implemented it on the Web. That is, however, the essence of technology start-ups: great ideas abound. The idea was visioned out of the observation that the Internet, a lean-in medium, was showing passive video where a viewer just sat and stared. Why not, Craig and a few others reasoned, make the video interactive and marry the passive video paradigm to the active Internet paradigm? The idea was compelling so we decided to build an alpha version of the product and test our thesis by testing the market.
We created clickable video through a YouTube type model we called Veeple Labs. It was in this laboratory where we learned what people thought was cool and interesting, and equally important where we learned what people felt was not interesting. This direct market feedback was critical to the creation of the Veeple service. In parallel, we studied the market to determine the size of the business opportunity. The best way to describe the business opportunity is with a simple metaphor: If one were to take all the video that is forecasted to be viewed on the Internet by 2012 (Cisco’s Zettabyte Era) and put all that video onto DVDs and then stack those DVDs, the stack would reach over three-quarters of the way to the moon, or 207,000 miles high. Amazing! By 2012, nearly every Web site in the world will have rich, interactive video telling one’s story in ways much more compelling than a static Web site. Our decision was to go for it!
The Advent of Clickable Video:
So we built a fully encapsulated, turnkey solution. If you use Veeple you get everything you need in five easy pieces: 1.) a content management capability to keep track of all your video; 2.) a content-delivery capability so you don’t worry about how your video gets to the Web; 3.) a configurable and branded player so it is what you want; 4.) a full suite of all things clickable, including annotations, attachments and rich media files; and 5.) comprehensive video analytics, including analytics related to anything you made clickable. How you measure the performance of your video is imperative. Items four and five above are unique to Veeple.In addition to the five items above, Veeple was built with three overarching design principles in mind:One Click (Amazon): When Jeff Bezos founded Amazon he had a design goal that his customer should be able to purchase a book with just one click. We wanted the Veeple experience to be similar for our customers. We met this goal. Using Veeple is simple. If a person knows how to drag and drop a text box or an image onto a Word Document or PowerPoint presentation, then one can use Veeple. One Degree (YouTube, plus one): We all know the story; everyone in the world is connected by a mere six degrees of separation. Six degrees, however, is far too many degrees of separation when one is talking about user behavior on the Web.
So we chose to follow the video paradigms that existed on the Web and then added one simple step: to make a video clickable—our unique and compelling value. Think of the great stories that you can tell by having the information inside the video instead of the video being inside a static Web page.The traveling Web site: have a look at www.lehdmedia.com as a great example of the use of Veeple. Take note that it is a video you are watching, not Flash.One Feel (“Cover Flowish”): We cannot often describe it before hand, but we know it when we see it. We wanted the Veeple experience to have a ‘feel’ to it that would be clearly Web2.0 and Flash. Our site is an example of how the service feels. If you like our site, you will like our service.
The Veeple Business – Video as a Service (VaaS, or “Cloud Computing”):Similar to SaaS, VaaS is cloud computing for video. For you, this means there is nothing to download and no software to license. When you sign up for Veeple, you simply register for an account and you are up and running within minutes. Veeple is a service where businesses large or small simply subscribe to the service and pay an initial fee of $49 per month to get started. No storage fees. No streaming fees. No one time set up charges. No hidden fees. Simple! Further, if you anticipate over 100,000 streams a month, then contact us directly and we will set you up with our premium model. And by the way, we’re offering a 30-day free trial to get started.People’s Reaction So Far?:
Incredible! We launched our B2B service in October and have surpassed 530 confirmed registrations. Veeple is seeing a great deal of press coverage. Interest in our service and in our business model is high because it is simple to understand and compelling in value. Last—and this is especially cool—people love using the service, claiming to have a great deal of fun using Veeple. As for funding, stay tuned for some good news on that front, but we cannot comment at this time. So hang on, 2009 will be an amazing year.
