This post was originally posted on CenterNetworks.com as part of my blogging on the Israeli startup scene.

A few weeks ago I reviewed Israeli startup 5min.com in a post titled “5min & The $30,000,000 Question“. In it I mentioned that the company’s biggest competition is VideoJug.com which raised staggering $30M.

Doug Kamin, VideoJug’s Chief Marketing Officer, was kind enough to offer CenterNetworks an interview so we can learn about the 800lbs gorilla of the DYI video space.

Roi: can you give us a bit of background on VideoJug?

Doug: The founders are David Tabizel and Dan Thompson. The site launched in September 2006, but we re-launched on June 4th, 2007. There are about 120 employees – split between London and Los Angeles.

Roi: Describe VideoJug in your own words.

Doug: It’s life explained – everything you need to know and things you want to know.

Roi: What was the initial premise?

Doug: The Wisdom Project was the original name. Basically they looked at the internet and thought – this could be more and that we all need a place to get the answers to all of life’s questions but also a place to share our personal wisdom.

Roi: Any noteworthy business development accomplishments?

Doug: We recently inked a syndication deal with MSN. You can read more about it, here. And just our sheer volume, we have 20k professionally produced videos on our site right now and we’re adding thousands more every month.

Roi: Why is your primary focus on production video as opposed to on UGC?

Doug: We do have UGC on our site as well. We encourage our community to submit their own personal wisdom and this will be more of a focus moving forward. But since we’re explaining life and using experts from every field to help convey this knowledge and wisdom, we need to maintain high standards for our videos.

Roi: Is your business model based on ad-revenue only?

Doug: It is an advertising supported model, but we don’t make users watch a commercial before watching our videos. We also have syndication deals with different portals and video sites. There will be many b2b applications that we’ll be rolling out in the near future as well.

Roi: By all accounts, $30M is a phenomenal sum for any startup to raise… What do you need some much money for?

Doug: VideoJug has raised money for the long-term: to develop great content, to create engaging community features, build our commercial operations. We are here for the long haul!

Roi: What should young startups entering this space know before they jump in the water?

Doug: Create something that you’re passionate about. Do it first or do it better.

My friend Allen Stern who runs CenterNetworks.com, launched a new video ad service called Revlayer.

The beauty of the service is its simplicity. After sign-up, site owners (or bloggers), get a piece of code that is added to the header. The result is an ad that covers the space occupied by the video player.

The business model is ad-revenue based, where Revlayer keeps 25% of the revenue.

You can check-out a demo, here.

Also, go and read Mike Arrington’s review of Revlayer, here.

This post was originally posted on CenterNetworks.com as part of my blogging on the Israeli startup scene.

What do you do when your next biggest competitor has $30,000,000 (and you don’t)? That’s exactly what I asked the folks at 5min.

5min pegs itself as a destination site for tutorial videos. The idea is that any questions can be answered in a 5 minute video. This can range from how to kite surf, to how to pour a head of beer. So instead of searching for an exercise program and locating a written one, you would instead locate a video of a workout tutorial in which you can actually see the drills. Right now 5min has over 2000 user generated videos in its catalog. Check out the official 5min introduction video:

The company was founded in late 2006 by Ran Harnevo (CEO), Tal Simantov (CMO) (pictured right) and Hanan Lashover (CTO). The three secured a $350K seed investment from Grey Interactive (Israel) and a few local angels. This allowed them to go live in February and scale-up their operation to 8 full-time employees. They are currently in discussions for Round A financing (although I’ve understood suitors are welcome…).5min believe the how-to video niche to be a viable one. First, from the user-experience angle the assertion is that even though such videos can be found on YouTube, they get swallowed-up by the beast and are difficult to locate. As such, both producers of such content and users seeking it would prefer to have a destination site.Second, from the business-model perspective, 5min believes this niche offers interesting opportunities for advertisers. Think of Gibson advertising alongside/in a guitar tutorial vid.

Side Note on “Traffic = $$$”: It’s all too easy to say “advertising revenue”. Delivering the phenomenal number of views necessary to support such a model is completely different.
I honestly feel too few entrepreneurs truly comprehend the economics and its implications. Jeremy Liew of Lightspeed Venture Partners wrote a great post about this.

The 5min team spent the first months developing their platform. This includes the backend magic, which they architected to be laden with metadata potential. They also developed their “SmartPlayer” (embedded above), a very good looking embeddable Flash Player specifically designed for how-to videos. It includes features the 5min team dubs “must-haves”, including: Zoom control, speed (frames, slow-motion), etc. The feature that caught my eye is the Storyboard which allows video producers to add text in relation to the video. Users can then print-off the storyboard for a complete step-by-step tutorial. This will be especially useful when dealing with musical notes and recipe ingredients.

Leading the competition pack is VideoJug which announced a $30M funding round in May. Unlike 5min, VideoJug produces their videos in-house. I don’t see this as a disadvantage. UGC is great, but it’s far from perfect. Take for example issues such as tempo, timing and cadence. Rarely would you find a UGC producer that takes these into consideration before shooting the video. With VideoJug these come first and foremost.

On an excitement meter of 1 to 10, I would rate VideoJug as a 4, but I would also rate About.com as a 4. Thing is, About.com is a big money maker. “Boring” is a solid business principle and VideoJug clearly knows this. In fact, what I imagine is driving them is knowing that Big advertisers (Procter & Gamble, General Motor, etc.) feel more comfortable with such in-house/professional content, as opposed to UGC.

Now, does knowing their main competitor has $30,000,000 keep the 5min team up at night? Seems not. They give VideoJug the appropriate respect, but feel that UGC how-to’s is where they should focus their efforts on. In fact, they’re gaining traction… There a few promising business development deals in the works with well established companies (sorry, can’t comment on these).

As I see it, the problem is that VideoJug can’t be completely incompetent if it raised $30M. Meaning, UGC vids can’t possibly have escaped their mind. They can all too easily take $10K, produce a UGC platform in a month and just see what happens. I don’t see what they have to loose.

Is this space big enough for more than one large player? My gut says no. Smaller players can certainly make some nice money but I doubt we’ll see $xxM acquisitions.

This post was originally posted on CenterNetworks.com as part of my blogging on the Israeli startup scene.

Fixya harnesses collective wisdom to deal with one of the modern age’s greatest woes… Tech Support. Let’s face it, Plug-n-Play is anything but and dealing with phone support is costly and exceedingly frustrating. This is where Fixya comes in.

I recently had a chance to sit down with Yaniv Bar-Lev, Fixya’s VP of User Acquisition to learn more about the company.

Fixya is a simple service (simple = good). Users can submit a product related question from across a catalog of 700,000 consumer products. The scope is quite broad, from gadgets to baby strollers. Solutions are then posted by both everyday folks, as well as “Experts”.

Pay attention all you entrepreneurs with “+1″ solutions: 1) Got a problem, 2) Post a question, 3) Get an answer, 4) Problem solved.

It seems common place that companies in the social space have a mélange for a business model. Fixya’s is no different: On-site advertising, repair and part affiliations, as well as premium services such as “Guaranteed Answers” and Online 1-1 tech support. Revenue derived outside of the destination site includes content syndication and white-labeling the Fixya platform to be implemented within support service sites of consumer product companies.

Founded in 2005, Fixya is led by co-founder and CEO, Yaniv Ben-Saadon, formerly of Hotbar. The company was originally funded by a few Angels, most notable among them is Yossi Vardi (see below). Pitango Venture Capital and Mayfield Fund participated in a second funding round, reportedly in the $4M range.

Vardi Side Note: Dr. Yossi Vardi is considered the grand poobah of the Israeli Internet industry. He was the founding investor of ICQ in which his son, Arik Vardi, was one of the co-founders. Today he is a well-regarded Angel that falls under the “smart money” status. He’s also known to be extremely supportive of startups and entrepreneurs. I’ve yet to be at a startup shindig in which I haven’t heard, “Has Yossi Vardi seen this…?”.

Competition-wise, the two big players of this space are unquestionably AllExperts (owned by mammoth About.com) and Experts Exchange. Out in the boonies are the likes of TechLore, and Retrevo.

While the big challenge for Fixya will be to establish itself as the obvious destination site for tech support, the more logical course of action is to focus on SEO and reach users organically. This point has not gone unnoticed at Fixya. Just try Googling “Sony troubleshooting” and they’ll come-up as the second result, right after Sony’s own support site.

It’s going to be a long hard battle for Fixya and we technically baffled folk have only to gain from their work.