It's also clear that businesses of all kinds are increasingly part of the YouTube generation. New products at Demo ranged from those geared for mobile devices, such as those from CellSpin and LiquidTalk, to video infrastructure and management tools.
Two-year-old BitGravity launched BG LiveBroadcast, a service for streaming high-quality video in real time via Web browsers. CEO Perry Wu says the service can scale from thousands of users to millions. The company positions it as a broadcast TV-quality service that's affordable to small businesses, a case that would've been more convincing if it listed pricing.
Two startups, TubeMogul and Visible Measures, demonstrated technology for measuring and tracking video content use. TubeMogul's Premium Products services--comprising analytics, demographic reporting, and aggregate viewership information--give advertisers, marketing professionals, and video publishers new performance tracking capabilities, such as tracking viewership from multiple video sites.
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CEO Dave Peak of LiquidTalk pictures video on a BlackBerry | |
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Visible Measures gauges the behavior of video audiences on the Web. By integrating its technology with Flash players, the company can track the number of times a video clip has been viewed, accumulated viewing time, and where the video has been distributed on the Web. Visible Measures just landed $13.5 million in Series B funding and acquired Vidmeter, an Internet video distribution and analytics company that specializes in user-generated content.
Wu of BitGravity says businesses are almost ready for a big video push. "2009 will really be the year of video for enterprises," he predicts.
VIRTUAL STAMPEDE
The few virtualization pitches at Demo show how the technology's going to do a lot more than consolidate data center servers. Two-year-old StackSafe showed how its first product, Test Center, captures snapshots of the IT production environment, stores them, and then assembles virtualized production environments in which to test software changes. Test-driving changes in a virtual production environment lets IT staffs find glitches before they cause an outage in the real production environment. The $50,000-per-year Test Center comes a week after announcement of a similar product, Stage Manager, by market leader VMware.
Citrix Systems is hardly a startup, but it edged into the Demo event to tout XenDesktop, a product of its $500 million acquisition of a startup, XenSource. XenDesktop generates Xen virtual machines on a central server, provisions them as Windows desktops, and either supplies services to the PC from that central server or streams the entire Windows desktop to the PC.
-- With Charles Babcock and John Foley