Mobile video search specialist Veveo has landed $14 million for a second round of funding, and will use the money to come out of stealth and go into product launch mode. The funding round was from its existing funders Norwest Venture Partners, Matrix and North Bridge Venture Partners and with the $14 million it raised last time this means it has raised $28 million so far.
Veveo will offer a white label service to operators called vTap which searches for, and then transcodes, any web held video before sending it in the right codec and right resolution for a particular handset. It will be available through its first, unnamed operator from September, but only for Windows Mobile devices at first, followed by an iPhone version later. It also claims to have signed up with one of the US cable operators to offer the same kind of internet held video search on a TV.
This puts us in mind with the Dilithium Networks service creation environment that we discussed last week, which offers much the same, but with the operator defining the video source, not just web video. One of the major obstacles Dilithium talked about was the process of transmitting preferences messages between the video source and the device and negotiating a preferred codec, resolution and data format in under 1 second, something that ended up leading to the ITU standard called MONA or Media Oriented Acceleration Negotiations.
It looks to us like this application will either be very slow or must only work well with handsets that have the same kind of MONA technology.
The Veveo system also features lots of autofilling and shortcuts for finding the kind of video that a handset customer is looking for. The search solution is character-based and has a dictionary for infilling and can also be personalized to remember past requests and consider them using the type of clustering algorithms that are used in technology like Autonomy.
A downloadable thin-client sits on the handset and converts any video arriving for display. The company offers a simple XHTML version for WAP browsers and an AJAX-based system for others like the iPhone. The client will be ported to J2ME, Windows Mobile, Symbian and RIM.
We haven’t seen it work, but it would shock us if this system isn’t slow, cumbersome, battery eating and only works on 40% of videos. If it is slick, and quick, it will catch on quickly.