Man, lots of M&A. Truveo video search was featured at the Search SIG I moderated a couple of months ago. AOL now owns it. From the release:
AOL’s acquisition agreement with Truveo was signed and closed on December 21, 2005. Financial terms were not disclosed. Truveo was previously privately held, and financed by strategic venture and angel investors.
Truveo ( http://www.truveo.com ), based in Burlingame, California, was co-founded by CEO Dr. Tim Tuttle and CTO Dr. Adam Beguelin in January 2004. Truveo subsequently launched its premier video search engine technology in September 2005.
Truveo’s approach to video search utilizes a proprietary web crawling technology called “Visual Crawling”. This unique technology has enabled Truveo to amass one of the most comprehensive indexes of high-quality, current video on the web. The strength of Truveo’s Visual Crawling is its ability to automatically discover video files and related information on complex, dynamic web pages – a task that has been notoriously challenging for existing conventional crawling technologies.
I´ve tried the search engine of Truveo and was surprised how quick they find something about the NBA. I recommend this side to all who want to try it. That AOL owns it don´t care in my opinion.
so what stops these guys from starting their own video store and copying goog’s model? is this search better than goog’s? as good as? good enough? then twx include it in advertising or market it seperately leveraging their content and distribution to do so. seems like this will be a commidity business (just like search in general almost is) unless one of these catches on and gathers ipod-like momentum. goog is ridiculously overvalued and all the gospel according to hype is confirmation bias an unfortunate remnant of nasdaq 2k madness…
anyone else find it interesting this deal was done/announced the same day as the google/AOL deal, what with google’s stake in the IPO, etc?