Vidly changes name from TwitVid.io, pulls in angel funding from Ron Conway
Vidly, which builds apps for instantaneous video-sharing from mobile phones, rebranded itself and landed $500,000 in funding from angel investors including Ron Conway.
The company, which used to be TwitVid.io, changed its name partly to emphasize its new focus beyond Twitter. But it also wanted to avoid confusion with another company called TwitVid and conflict with technology journalist Leo Laporte, who filed a cease-and-desist order against using the name. Laporte runs TWiT.tv (or This Week in Tech).
“We wanted to open up our horizons and not get locked into Twitter,” said co-founder and CEO Chrys Bader. “We see a major opportunity to make video sharing easy for mobile.”
The San Francisco-based startup will expand its app to support sharing on YouTube, Facebook and MySpace and release Blackberry and Android versions later this fall.
Conway, dubbed “Godfather of Silicon Valley” in a book by reporter Gary Rivlin, has made no secret of his desire to invest in companies in the real-time space. If Vidly can gain traction among a large base of users who are constantly sharing snippets of video, that would build up a searchable repository of short videos marked by time and location. Bader said he’s more focused on building up a community than on revenue models at this point.
The company has several competitors: TwitVid, 12seconds.tv, Seesmic, CamTweet and TwitCam all are aimed at video-sharing through social networks. Facebook’s latest iPhone app, released yesterday, also lets you share video from an iPhone 3GS.
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About the Author, Kim-Mai Cutler
Kim-Mai was born and raised a stone's throw from Apple headquarters in Cupertino by a devout Hewlett-Packard family. After attending UC Berkeley, Kim-Mai worked for Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires in New York, Los Angeles, London and Buenos Aires. Follow her on Twitter at @kimmaicutler, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat.