1. www.stumbleupon.com Launched in 2002 by three 20-somethings in a Calgary, Alberta, apartment, StumbleUpon now has 2 million registered users drawn by its knack for finding websites that match their interests and those of others with similar tastes as they "stumble" around the Net.Co-founder Garrett Camp (shown right), who totes around a mid-'80s Nikon F3 (yes, with actual film), came up with the idea as he was working on a master's in software engineering.
Frustrated as he tried to indulge his hobby online - "There wasn't a good way to find the best photo sites," Camp says - he tapped his own background in clustering technology. With coding help from Justin LaFrance and Geoff Smith, he created an early version of StumbleUpon. Having nailed the photo problem, the team quickly saw how the technology could click with all sorts of media.
In the same way that it matches users with like-minded websites, StumbleUpon's technology also pairs online ads with targeted demographics and interests. Now StumbleUpon is attempting to do the same for online video and video advertising. In December the startup launched StumbleVideo, a service that offers the closest thing to channelsurfing that you'll find on the Web.
Business model: Advertising, subscriptions
2. www.slide.com Slide has developed customizable and easily assembled slide shows of photos that can be embedded in a blog or a MySpace page, sent out in an RSS feed, and streamed to a desktop as a screensaver.
Funding: Not disclosed (Peter Thiel, Vinod Khosla, others)
Founder & CEO: Max Levchin (shown right)
Business model: Advertising, subscription
Bebo has built a social network, more than 30 million members strong, that keeps users' pages private but still allows them to share things like video and drawings made on an online whiteboard.
Founders: Michael Birch (also CEO), Xochi Birch (shown right)
Business model: Advertising
Meebo lets users manage multiple instant-messaging services from one site. Meebo's killer app is a widget that places an IM window on your blog or webpage.
Founders: Sandy Jen, Seth Sternberg (also CEO), Elaine Wherry (shown right)
Business model: Advertising
Wikia operates a hosting service for ad-supported community sites that use the same software and collaborative content model that made Wikipedia a Web phenomenon.
Launched in 2004, Wikia communities range from fans of 24 to politics junkies. Wikia is also working on an open-source, user-generated search engine.
Founders: Angela Beesley, Jimmy Wales (shown right)
Business model: Advertising
6.www.joost.com
Forget the three-minute video blog. The 30-minute, broadcast-quality Web 2.0 TV show is coming in all its full-screen glory. And if serial disrupters Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom have their way, neither television nor the Internet will be the same.
The duo behind peer-to-peer services Kazaa and Skype will officially launch Joost this spring, aiming to merge the best of TV with the best of the Net.
The service provides more of a television-style experience than current online video sites, with channels you can flip through randomly or program yourself. Viewers can also share playlists of their favorite shows with friends or chat with them online while watching the same program.
Joost will be free, supported by highly targeted ads based on people's actual watching habits, their friends' viewing patterns, and information they volunteer. Ad revenue will be split between Joost and the content owners.
Joost can offload much of the heavy bandwidth and storage costs borne by Web video companies like YouTube because the service is a partial peer-to-peer system, with content distributed among viewers' computers. And to reassure Hollywood moguls who watched the music industry get burned by Kazaa's legions of illegal file sharers, all Joost video is streamed and encrypted.
Founders: Janus Friis, Niklas Zennstrom (shown above)
Business model: Advertising
Dabble has designed a tool for organizing videos into playlists of favorites. Users share them across the network, so, say, food lovers can dabble in one another's video collections.
Founder & CEO: Mary Hodder (shown right)
Business model: Advertising
Metacafe's service ranks uploaded videos by popularity and feedback from a community of 17 million monthly visitors - and pays the creators for the success of their work. The auteurs get $100 after 20,000 viewings and $5 for every 1,000 subsequent views. Since September, Metacafe has paid a total of $250,000 to 200 contributors.
CEO: Erick Hachenburg (shown right)
Business model: Advertising
9. www.revision3.comRevision 3 is a production studio for geek-oriented online shows. Started by Digg founder Kevin Rose and its CEO, Jay Adelson, Revision3 sells sponsorships to companies like Go Daddy, Microsoft, and Sony for as much as $10,000 per episode.
Cofounder & CEO: Jay Adelson (shown right)
Business model: Advertising
10. www.blip.tv Blip.tv has built a platform for syndicating serialized online shows such as Starring Amanda Congdon and TreeHugger TV. Blip provides producers with software, ads, and distribution to websites and blogs. A deal is already signed with Web TV service Akimbo, which lets producers send their videos to TV sets.
Cofounders: Dina Kaplan, Mike Hudack (also CEO; shown right with Kaplan)
Business model: Licensing, advertising
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