Bob Tedeschi in the NY Times profiles a new video site called TalkMarket, which is a mix of DIY video and online marketplace. The site offers tools and advice to sellers to create online video that would then appear on the TalkMarket site. Here’s how founder Matt Singer describes it:
On The TalkMarket, vendors upload shopping channel style video presentations (personal sell approaches, more informal demonstrations and explanations rather than commercials), and customers can search or browse video product categories, and click on the screen to make a purchase directly from the vendor. We enhance the videos by providing dynamic graphic overlays, motion graphics, soundtracks, and in many cases, vendor training and education, with the goal of helping more vendors connect with their customers with the proven TV shopping channel model. Established shopping channels such as QVC turn away 98% of vendors that apply, so we believe that there are hundreds of thousands of consumer product manufacturers and retailers that could benefit from more access to the TV shopping model. And customers can certainly benefit from learning more about creative and unique products that currently don’t make it into the TV shopping channel networks.
Separately today another SMB-focused online video site, Jivox, launched together with a funding announcement:
Jivox, a self-service online video advertising platform for local businesses, today introduced a service that gives smaller and local advertisers access to online video advertising by making it easy to create, target and deliver online video ads. The Jivox platform combines a video ad creation tool, proprietary targeting technology, sophisticated reporting capabilities and a growing network of publishers to offer advertisers a complete, do-it-yourself service for online video advertising. Founded by Diaz Nesamoney, the visionary entrepreneur behind technology success stories Informatica and Celequest, Jivox aims to bring the power of online video advertising to the mass market.
Jivox also announced today that it has raised a $2.7 million seed round of financing led by Opus Capital, an early-stage venture capital firm. The funds will be used to continue development of the Jivox online video advertising platform, as well as to expand the company’s sales and marketing efforts. This financing announcement is covered in a separate news release.
The challenges for both of these companies is their self-service model. TalkMarket is somewhat different in the sense that if the destination becomes popular, sellers (as with eBay) will be motivated to create videos. Jivox will need to reach out to partners to sell video advertising to get any sort of scale – a lesson that TurnHere learned quite awhile ago.
Screenwerk 
June 16, 2008 at 12:36 pm
[…] video ad creation startup competing in an increasingly crowded space. I briefly wrote about Jivox here. The company initially raised $2.7 million in a seed round and has now announced $10.7 million in a […]
June 17, 2008 at 8:08 am
[…] Matt Singer, Talk Market co-founder said of the gap in the market (taken from Screenwerk): […]