ViTrue - branded communities enabler closes second funding round
By Vivek Puri | October 25th, 2006 at 11:58 am ET
ViTrue, provider of user-created advertising platform, closed Series A-1 round of funding lead by Comcast Interactive Capital and Turner Broadcasting. Previously ViTrue had raised $2.2 million in funding from General Catalyst Partners and ViTrue’s founder Reggie Bradford. ViTrue had launched in May and immediately acquired video sharing site Sharkle.com. ViTrue is among handful of companies, including Eluma and LiveJournal, working aggressively towards enabling branded communities.
ViTrue technology enables brands to host user-created videos on a branded site instead of depending on third party site. The technology also takes care of any copyright issues by providing a stringent review module. ViTrue product suite includes Branded Video Community (BVC) and AdMixer.
Branded Video Community enables users to create and share videos, while interacting with other users in the branded community. AdMixer technology allows users can create mashups of brand’s video ad assets, in an environment that the brand can control, using online editing technology. This enables brands to connect with their loyal customers and leverage their passions and talents. Another advantage of deploying AdMixer technology is that the content created using AdMixer costs fraction of what traditional advertising content creation will cost.
Earlier this month Waterfront Media became the first media company to launch ViTrue’s full-featured community video technology service. Subscribers of Waterfront Media’s WhattoExpect.com are now able to share their videos within their community, as well as, forward video links to their own circle of family and friends.
On the whole, AdMixer technology is a good application of what other startups like Jumpcut and Motionbox have been working on. Maybe Yahoo is also looking into building branded communities, which can be one of the reasons for acquiring Jumpcut last month.
Tags: StartupSquad - Funding - Video - Marketing - Branding - Advertising
