YC-Backed Videopixie Launches To Create A Marketplace For Video Editors

There are tons of raw video footage out there: Videos taken on vacation or school trips, videos of friends and family, videos taken to show off new restaurants and boutiques. And every day there’s more. But the problem of editing that footage is a problem. For as many of us as there are who like to shoot video, very few of us know how to edit it.

That’s a problem Videopixie is trying to solve, by creating a marketplace devoted entirely to connecting users who have video with those who can edit it. By doing so, it’s providing a way for anyone to have beautiful videos created out of raw footage from professional video editors and animators.

Two years ago, the team behind Videopixie launched Sellstage, which was a platform for marketers to distribute their product videos online. The idea was to store and stream videos that could be easily embedded on product websites online.

It was an okay idea, but what the team found was that many sellers needed help with the actual creation of their videos and not help with their distribution. In particular, there was a bottleneck in the video-editing process. Sellstage’s customers would frequently have video footage that they had shot, but they would have no editing experience.

They could hire an editor, or even a full-service video crew to create videos for them, but that was expensive. What they really needed was an on-demand video editor who would charge a small fee based on the amount of time involved in piecing the video together.

And so, Videopixie was born.

The service works like this: Users log in and upload all their raw video footage, then make it available for editors to have a go at it. They can run a contest, with editors vying for the business by putting together a quick teaser trailer using the footage provided. Or they can submit footage and have editors bid on a project, and choose them based on ratings and price. There are also fixed-price options for smaller projects.

In any case, businesses can use the service to cost-effectively get product videos, customer testimonials, or explainer videos created. And consumers can use it, too, for weddings, vacations, and the like.

Videopixie was founded by Tom Saffell and Thomas Escourrou, who were part of the Y Combinator Summer 2011 class with Sellstage. Funding comes from YC and its Start Fund.

Men’s Clothing Startup Combat Gent Raises $1.84 Million From Tony Hsieh’s VegasTechFund And Others

Men’s clothing retailer Combat Gent wants to be the place where young people turn when they need a new suit or dress shirt for work. To do so, it’s raised $1.84 million in seed funding from a group of investors that includes Tony Hsieh’s VegasTechFund, MHS Capital, Naxuri Capital, Blazer Ventures, Point Nine Capital, and Flint and Tinder’s Jake Bornstein.

More and more, customers are getting comfortable shopping for clothes online. Emboldened by better choice and lower prices, smart shoppers are finding high-quality alternatives to department store clothing from sites that specialize in certain fashions or labels. And then there are startups like Combat Gent, which are creating their own line of clothing options.

Combat Gent was founded with the idea of providing dudes entering their first jobs with a high-quality, low-cost alternative to clothes they would find in shopping malls or department stores. The company sources its own materials and production, and has designed its own line of basic, good-looking business attire.

It was able to do that because its co-founders have deep experience in men’s fashion and tailoring. Co-founders Vishaal and Mo Melwani are cousins who grew up surrounded by fashion, as their parents ran the Las Vegas and Los Angeles Versace boutiques. With that background, they felt confident that they could build a new line of fashionable men’s workwear at affordable prices.

Shirts start at $25, with suits costing $160. That is priced so that even customers just getting their start in the business world will be able to afford a good-looking outfit for work or formal occasions. Even better, the company has a 30-day return policy for all its clothing, with shipping free in both directions.

With the new funding, the Combat Gent founders hope to expand their offerings — including a series of high-quality Italian cotton shirts that will run $40. It’s also looking at potentially expanding internationally. Point Nine Capital is based in Berlin and signals the company’s interest in entering the European market.

Along with the funding news, the company announced that its founders had been named partners at FT Accelerator, a program devoted to helping startups focusing on fashion and technology. That follows their participation in the accelerator, and FT Accelerator’s Enrico Beltramini joining Combat Gent as chairman of the board.

GetGlue Hires Digital Media Veteran Evan Krauss As President To Boost Monetization Of Its Second-Screen Apps

Second-screen TV app startup GetGlue just keeps on trucking. Originally launched as an app for checking in to your favorite TV shows and collecting stickers, the company has been steadily expanding its business to include content discovery for shows on the iPad or on your TV. Now it’s hoping to better monetize its mobile and tablet apps, and has hired long-time digital media exec Evan Krauss as president to help with that.

Krauss has spent the last 18 years at a variety of entertainment companies, including Yahoo!, AOL, Excite, JumpTap, Looksmart, and Agency.com. His last big position was as EVP of ad sales for Shazam where he helped build out that company’s second screen ad business.

In addition to Krauss, GetGlue also recently hired Shelby Houston Haro as its EVP of sales, coming from Fandango and Flixster. In an email, GetGlue CEO Alex Iskold wrote, “Evan is joining us a President to lead all the aspects of the business, particularly focusing on revenue… With these two hires, we are now serious about building out and scaling our business.”

The hiring of its new sales leaders follows an attempted — and failed — merger between GetGlue and rewards-based TV companion app Viggle. The deal was first announced last November but called off earlier this spring.

Since then, GetGlue has continued to operate independently, trying to boost monetization along the way. No doubt the startup hopes that its new president Krauss will be able to expand its own business with advertisers. The company has been making a bigger push on that front with recent updates to its mobile apps.

That includes the introduction of a new advertising product for brands, networks, and studios called Promoted Entries. That enables networks and advertisers to highlight their products and shows in users’ Guides. Launched with Pepsi during the Super Bowl, the Promoted Entries offering is designed to boost engagement with viewers who are using the app while watching TV. It allows users to share promoted products with friends who also use the app, as well as on social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

GetGlue now says it has 4 million registered users, and has accrued more than 800 million data points about what they’re tuning into. The company has worked with more than 75 TV networks and 10 movie studios to promote their content. It’s raised about $24 million since being founded in 2007, with investors including Union Square Ventures, RRE Ventures, Time Warner Investments, and Rho Ventures, among others.

FiftyThree, Maker Of Drawing App Paper, Raises $15 Million From Andreessen Horowitz And Others

FiftyThree, the startup behind the wildly popular drawing app Paper, has closed a Series A round of financing led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from Highline Ventures, Thrive Capital, SV Angels, and Jack Dorsey. The investment was led by Chris Dixon, and could help the company to expand its suite of creative tools for mobile and tablet users.

With the funding, FiftyThree is hoping to expand its current product, launch more apps, and look into hardware, all of which is the continuation of a journey it embarked on a few years ago. After working on projects such as Office, Kinect, Sonos, and the Xbox, as well Microsoft’s own early tablet prototype, Courier, the team came together to create Paper. In doing so, it set out to build a set of tools that would change the way people used the iPad.

The app provided a new outlet for creativity on the tablet. While most initial iPad users thought about it as a tool for content consumption, Paper gave users the ability to be more creative. Since then, the app has been downloaded more than 8 million times and has had more than 80 million projects built on it.

FiftyThree has also received a massive amount of critical acclaim for Paper, winning a number of awards since being launched. Among other things, it’s been honored with Apple’s App Of The Year Award and the Apple Design Award, and even won a Crunchie. It’s also been featured on iPads in Apple Stores as just one of the many apps that are available to prospective owners.

With the latest update to the Paper app, FiftyThree added a “Made With Paper” stream to provide new users and creators with inspiration for the types of projects they can embark upon. But there’s more to do, the team believes. Paper is just the first in what is likely a series of applications and tools that the startup plans to make available.

In a blog post announcing the funding, the team said it wanted to enable more social collaboration for creators which could enable them to work on projects together. It also hopes to build tools that go beyond just expressing oneself on the iPad or other tablets. That includes building hardware to create more physical tools for creation.

“With their partnership we’ll be able to expand our software, service, and hardware teams to take on bigger questions around collaboration and physical creation,” the team wrote.

In a conversation with TechCrunch TV earlier this year (embedded below), the company discussed other creative tools that it could come to market with in the future. One idea is a stylus, which could provide a new type of hardware input for its creators.

While FiftyThree doesn’t need to raise money, according to a blog post by investor Chris Dixon, the company plans to use the funding to accelerate its growth and to go after new opportunities. With the investment from Andreessen Horowitz and others, the company will be expanding its engineering team in New York and Seattle.

Squrl Updates iOS Apps To Simplify Video Discovery With Better Recommendations And Social Features

There is no shortage of apps on the market to help users find new, interesting videos to watch and enjoy. But video discovery startup Squrl still thinks there’s work to be done. The company just released a new version of its iPhone and iPad app that provides new ways to share with friends and find content that is more personally relevant to them.

The new version of Squrl comes with a big redesign that breaks down the design and puts the content or categories that are most important on the front page of the app. There are now nine options available on the home screen, highlighting Featured videos and What’s Hot, as well as Channels, Recommendations and what users have liked, watched or added to their queues.

The typography has gotten bigger and there are simpler icons to click on. And once users have clicked on a certain icon, that icon changes dynamically to highlight content that viewers will see in that section. That gives a little bit of a preview into what’s available to users.

Those cosmetic changes are designed to simplify navigation throughout the app, but Squrl has done a lot more under the hood to improve recommendations and provide more relevant videos. The app combines the search and customize options so that users can customize the channels from within that screen.

There’s also been a big upgrade to its recommendations engine, which uses collaborative filtering and interest-based matching to serve up videos based on what its users have already watched. The app needs users to watch about four or five videos to get started, but once that’s happened, it creates a stream of videos that should interest viewers.

With the update, Squrl has also made its app more social. While it has always been easy for users to share with their friends and followers on Facebook and Twitter, they can now share content and communicate with others within the app, as well. It’s improved the Find Friends feature inside the app, and enabled private messages so that users can share videos and chat privately with each other.

Squrl provides access to videos from a whole bunch of on-demand and live aggregators, including YouTube, Netflix, Hulu, TED, Vimeo, Aol, and Blip.tv. Users who want to download the newest version of the app can get it here.

The YouTube Paradox And The Off-YouTube Solution

When it comes to video distribution on the Internet, there are few solutions better than YouTube. The company is the No. 1 place to search for and find the video content that viewers want to watch, and for creators it provides a size and scale of audience it can offer videos to.

That said, a growing number of YouTube creators and multichannel networks are beginning to grumble about the revenue share that the site has with its partners and their inability to monetize their huge audience of viewers on the site. And, increasingly, they’re looking for off-YouTube solutions to better distribute and monetize their videos.

The problem is that distributing video yourself is costly, whereas distribution on YouTube is free. That’s one reason that so many creators got started on the platform in the first place. With the shrinking cost of cameras and editing equipment, as well as the ability to upload and distribute their content for free, YouTube had an incredibly low barrier of entry for its creators.

As a result, the platform attracted a huge number of talented creators who have, in turn, attracted millions of fans. For those who weren’t part of the traditional TV or movie ecosystem, that created an unprecedented opportunity to get paid to do what they love — make videos and talk to fans. For many first-time YouTube partners, the additional income was likely a nice bonus for a hobby that they never expected to get paid for.

But things have changed over the years. Those same creators now have big audiences and have become their own big brands. The problem is that they aren’t getting compensated very well for all that. At least not as well as they’d like.

As the YouTube ecosystem has grown up, it’s gotten a lot more professional. With more professional video equipment, more professional editing equipment, more highly skilled creators. Huge networks have popped up — like Machinima, Maker, and Fullscreen — to help creators improve their content and reach. Some provide tools to boost views and reach new audiences, some help with production, some help improve monetization.

But it’s become increasingly clear that these businesses will have to find other ways of making money — YouTube can’t be their only solution. That’s in part because YouTube takes nearly half of all ad revenues from partners. Not just that, but the typical YouTube ads have relatively low CPMs — all of which means that revenues aren’t as high as they would like and margins end up being constrained.

The problem is that there’s no other solution for easily reaching the size and scale of audience that YouTube offers. For all the talk of some networks creating a YouTube alternative, it will be difficult for them to move the audience over. Not just that, but they won’t benefit from all the network effects and video search advantages that they get from being on YouTube.

With that in mind, a growing number of YouTube partners are looking for other monetization options. Some are building apps for mobile phones, tablets, and connected TV devices. The idea is that they’ll be able to better these apps through ads, when compared to the revenue share that comes from YouTube’s website and mobile applications. They can also own the user experience and have a more engaged connection to their biggest fans.

That is, they’re not looking for a replacement for YouTube, but a way to augment their YouTube audience and monetization through other channels. Partners like VEVO, for instance, have been putting a lot of effort behind owned and operated apps for various devices. And more will likely follow.

It might be pricey to build out their own apps, but at the end of the day, these networks will benefit from additional distribution outlets. It’s not to become independent of YouTube, but to become less dependent on it.

Photo Credit: Rego – d4u.hu via Compfight cc

ZEFR Launches BrandID To Give Advanced YouTube Analytics And Tools To Brands

Over the past year, Los Angeles-based startup ZEFR has been using its technology platform to help content owners identify and monetize videos on YouTube that have been uploaded by fans. Now it’s hoping to extend its technology to brands with a new product called BrandID that enables customers to figure out just how many of their fans are discussing their products on the video network.

Once upon a time, the company was known as Movieclips, and specialized in helping Hollywood studios to monetize the long tail of *ahem* MOVIE CLIPS that they had gathering dust in their vaults, by putting them on YouTube and serving up ads against them. Then last summer, it rebranded as ZEFR as it is focusing on providing a robust Content ID system for finding videos that users have uploaded and monetizing them on behalf of content owners.

ZEFR has found a whole new market for that Content ID technology in major brand marketers, who will now have a suite of analytics tools for identifying their influence and return on investment from campaigns on YouTube. Before BrandID, brands only had analytics for their own individual channels, so they could measure just the viewership on videos they uploaded.

But of course, YouTube is full of content that users upload in which they talk about their favorite brands. With BrandID, marketers will be able to see what all those users are saying about their brands, identify their biggest and most influential fans, and connect with them directly.

BrandID gives them a comprehensive dashboard that combines brand alerts, discovery, and insights into videos people are publishing that mention them. The insights section shows the number of videos and channels and views that user-generated videos mentioning those brands and products, notable YouTube creators and highly ranked, most engaged videos mentioning them. The dashboard also provides comprehensive competitive analysis, enabling marketers to see how their brand stacks up against competitors among fans in the same category.

The platform allows them to reach out to fans who are creating videos directly. They can send messages directly from their YouTube accounts as a way to reach video creators and possibly start working with them to amplify their videos. Marketers can also view comments and respond to commenters on the channels of third-party creators through the dashboard.

In addition to deep analytics tools, the platform can also be customized to provide alerts when new videos are created about a certain brand, or a competitor. It can even keep tabs on trending video memes across YouTube, you know, just in case a brand marketer wants to jump on the Gangnam Style bandwagon or whatever.

While BrandID is just entering beta, it’s already gotten a few big brands using it: P&G’s COVERGIRL and Pantene are launch partners for the SaaS-based platform. The company sees a huge opportunity to get more onboard in the coming months as BrandID really takes off.

Airbnb’s Parisian Guests Want To Live Like Locals, With 70% Staying Outside Typical Hotel Districts

Airbnb has released the results of a new economic study in one of its major international markets. After a similar study conducted in San Francisco last year, Airbnb this time is profiling the effect that its peer-to-peer marketplace for housing accommodations has had on hosts and nearby businesses in Paris.

The study was put together through a combination of proprietary host and guest data, as well as survey results that it collected from users. It also takes into account economic impact data from French economic consulting firm Asterès.

As the company’s second-largest market, the study in Paris shows similar guest activity to San Francisco. In both cases, guests tended to stay in and spend money in neighborhoods that aren’t in the central hotel districts. Also, Airbnb guests tended to stay longer and spend more than hotel visitors.

Airbnb found that 93 percent of its users said they wanted to “live like a local” while visiting Paris, and 70 percent stayed in Airbnbs that were outside the main hotel districts of Paris. A significant number of Airbnb guests surveyed were visiting Paris for the first time — 34 percent. And nearly three-quarters of them said Airbnb made it more likely that they would return.

Just as in San Francisco, Airbnb’s visitors to Paris tend to stay longer and spend more over the course of their trip than hotel guests. Guests who stayed with Airbnb averaged more than five days per visit, compared to about 2.3 days spent by hotel guests.

While they save money on accommodations, however, those visitors end up spending significantly more during the day. The end result, according to the economic study, is that visitors spend about €865 per visit, compared to €439 for hotel guests. Visitors generally spent more at local businesses that aren’t in the typical tourist locations within the city. The Airbnb study estimates that 38 percent of guest dollars were spent in the neighborhood they were staying in.

In addition to data about guest behavior, Airbnb also released information about the economic impact the marketplace provides to hosts. It has more than 10,500 hosts in the city currently, with more than 80 percent renting out space in their primary residence. The average host there rents out his or her place for 3.8 nights and makes €297 per month, according to Airbnb.

While the company has seen tremendous growth in Paris over the last two years, the incumbent hotel industry has continued to go strong, with a nearly 80 percent occupancy and an average nightly rate of €164. That compares to the average €125 that Airbnb guests pay.

Photo Credit: Henry_Marion via Compfight cc

Uber Confirms UberX Price Cuts In San Francisco To Target Rivals Lyft And SideCar

On-demand transportation startup Uber is making a serious commitment to its UBERx service, making on-demand rides with hybrid cars and community drivers less expensive. Today on the Uber Blog, the company confirmed what we reported last week — that it will be cutting fares on UBERx rides in an effort to be more competitive with ride sharing apps like Lyft and SideCar.

It’s been about three years since Uber launched its service as “Everyone’s Private Driver,” offering a convenient and reliable alternative to taxi cabs in San Francisco. Since then, the company has expanded pretty rapidly, offering its on-demand UberBLACK black car service in dozens of cities around the world.

At the same time, Uber has begun offering lower-priced options in many of its markets. In some cities, it’s launched UBERx, which is kind of like UberBLACK except that passengers are generally driven around in hybrid vehicles. In others, it’s partnered with local taxi drivers to launch UberTAXI. (In Paris, passengers can hail motorcycle taxis!)

Lower-priced options are becoming necessary now that Uber is facing competition from other on-demand transportation apps. On one hand, there are services like Lyft and SideCar, which connect passengers with community drivers — i.e., people who haven’t been licensed to drive commercial vehicles like taxis or black cars. And there’s also a proliferation of apps that hail taxicabs from a user’s mobile device, like Hailo, Flywheel, and Taxi Magic.

San Francisco, which was the first market for Uber, has become one of the most competitive cities, with a wide range of low-priced options. With convenience and reliability becoming a commodity, now the battle has moved to price.

Even with its UBERx option, Uber struggled to compete with Lyft and SideCar. It had previously lowered fares by 10 percent, as it began to offer its own ride-sharing offerings, but still tends to be priced above other options. But today’s announcement will likely bring it in line, or even below, the fares offered by competing services.

Uber says that UBERx rides will now be priced at 10 percent cheaper than its UberTAXI service, and gave some sample fares to show users how much typical rides might cost:

uberX at cheaper-than-taxi pricing means never, ever waiting for a bus in the rain or walking alone at night. It means $8 from FiDi to AT&T Park, $15 from the Marina to the Mission, and $50 from North Beach to SFO. It means a single, cost-effective solution for dependable pickups in minutes, 24 hours a day, all over the Bay.

Now that Uber has lowered prices in its home market, the company could look to expand UBERx availability elsewhere. The company has already said that it will offer peer-to-peer ride-sharing services anywhere that its competition has gotten “tacit approval” to operate. We expect to see it make cheaper options available in even more cities as time goes on.

Event Ticketing And Crowdfunding Platform Picatic Now Lets Event Organizers Pay What They Want

Online event ticketing startup Picatic is taking a novel new approach to signing up event organizers and getting them to use its services. The company’s new FairPay initiative will allow users to pay what they want after their events are successful.

Picatic launched as an event ticketing startup — sort of an alternative to the Ticketmasters and Eventbrites of the world. Later, it unveiled a platform to enable organizers to crowdfund their events. That was designed in part to boost the number of events that would run on its platform by increasing the chance of running a successful event.

Now Picatic is removing another barrier to using its platform for events or ticketing by getting rid of fees that it charges event organizers and allowing them to pay what they want. The company’s new FairPay payment model gets rid of application fees, setup fees, transaction fees and service fees. The platform will continue to charge a small fee for payment processing, but otherwise it’s up to the event organizer to decide how much he or she should pay.

Event organizers will be able to go through the entire process of setting up an event, whether it’s crowdfunded or not. Once it’s been successfully executed, they’ll be prompted to pay what they think is fair, based on the service that has been provided. The hope is that they’ll find Picatic so valuable that they’d pay as much, if not more, than Picatic might have charged them.

The problem with the ticketing industry is that, while consumers generally don’t care where they purchase their tickets from, event organizers and venues generally get locked into long-term contracts with the agencies that provide those services. Picatic is hoping to get event organizers in at the ground floor, before they’re locked in, by enabling crowdfunding and partnering to ensure their success.

Will it work? Who knows! But good luck to ‘em.