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Online dating site SpeedDate has raised $6 million in a Series B funding round led by Menlo Ventures. SpeedDate offers users a series of 3 minute mini-dates, during which they can converse through video, audio, and a chat box. If both partners decide they were a good match when prompted at the end of the date, they can continue communicating through the site until they make the jump to real life.

When we first wrote about SpeedDate, the site had a small userbase, which made it difficult to conduct a series of dates (there simply weren’t enough potential matches). Since then the site has grown substantially (claiming 100,000 dates daily), so you can hop on and hope to find a reasonable match within a few minutes.

I decided to put the site to the test once again now that it can reliably serve up a stream of potential prospects. Unlike most dating sites, there was no lengthy signup process - the site leaves the real matchmaking to your video chats. And while SpeedDate seemed to totally ignore the interests and personality traits I entered anyway, the experience was still surprisingly fun. I typically only had to wait a few minutes between each session, and girls I spoke to during my “dates” told me that their general experience on the site had been quite positive.

SpeedDate is a direct competitor to Woome, a similar speed-dating site that offers quick video sessions.

CrunchBase Information SpeedDate Information provided by CrunchBase

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Attorneys representing online video sites around the country are salivating today over the Veoh summary judgment decision (I know this because I’ve spoken to a few of them). In a nutshell, here’s what we learned today: If you take reasonable precautions against copyrighted materials on your service, you may be ok. And oh yeah, if you are going to get sued, try to get sued in federal court in northern California, because the judges there are a lot more Internet-friendly than some other federal judges we’ve seen.

Specifically, the court said that online video sites are protected under the safe harbor provisions of the DMCA if they do the following (my interpretation of the decision):

• Provide adequate notice to users that uploading copyrighted material is prohibited
• Swiftly comply with DMCA takedown notices “on the same day the notice is received (or within a few days thereafter).”
• Use fingerprinting and other technology to detect copyrighted material, even if the methods are flawed.
• Take measures to control infringing users. Specifically, infringing accounts need to be terminated and the email banned from any new accounts. The court held that IP address banning was not neccesary: “…Io has presented no evidence suggesting that tracking (or verifying) users’ actual identity or that blocking their IP addresses is a more effective reasonable means of implementation.”
• Transcoding files to Flash format does not put the files in the site’s control; they are still protected by the DMCA safe harbor (see previous post).
• Sites are encouraged to spot check videos, and if they do, to remove content that is likely infringing.
• Sites are NOT required to check every video. The court said “this court finds no reasonable juror could conclude that a comprehensive review of every file would be feasible. Even if such a review were feasible, there is no assurance that Veoh could have accurately identified the infringing content in question.”
• It’s important to have lots of non-infringing content. The court noted that Veoh had received DMCA notices on only about 7% of its content. This helped its argument that it was different than Napster, which “existed solely to provide the site and facilities for copyright infringement…the sole purpose of the Napster program was to provide a forum for easy copyright infringement.”

YouTube, which is obviously thrilled with the decision, emailed us the following statement to us from Chief Counsel Zahavah Levine:

It is great to see the Court confirm that the DMCA protects services like YouTube that follow the law and respect copyrights. YouTube has gone above and beyond the law to protect content owners while empowering people to communicate and share their experiences online. We work every day to give content owners choices about whether to take down, leave up, or even earn revenue from their videos, and we are developing state-of-the-art tools to let them do that even better.

The statement by the court that checking every video for infringement isn’t realistic is an important one for Google/YouTube, which has said 13 hours of video content is uploaded every minute on YouTube. If it’s impossible for Veoh to monitor all content, YouTube is going to have an order-of-magnitude larger problem.

Before the parties break out, it’s important to note that this is a district court decision and will very likely be appealed. I imagine YouTube may be lending one or ten of its lawyers to Veoh to assist in that appeal in any way possible.

But this is still a key ruling and one likely to impact the YouTube-Viacom $1 billion ongoing litigation as well as a slew of other cases.

The full order is included below.

Veoh v IO Group - Free Legal Forms

CrunchBase Information Veoh Information provided by CrunchBase

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Bungee Labs, a well funded Utah based startup that left private beta only six months ago, laid off 15 employees today to give themselves more runway on their cash burn rate. The last we checked they had 38 employees, so this is nearly 40% of their total headcount.

CEO Martin Plaehn explained: “This change had less to do with the rate of technology development and more to do with actual versus anticipated rates of adoption. Our Platform-as-a-Service, Bungee Connect, has achieved the level of robustness and capability we envisioned and we are committed to its continued regular advancement and support. As with most new breakthrough offerings, Bungee Connect will require longer incubation time to become broadly accepted. As a start-up, our action yesterday extends our operating plan well into 2010 to more deeply establish Bungee Connect in the marketplace.”

The product is somewhat similar to a whole bunch of competitors - platform as a service application development. We’ve mentioned a number of them in our previous posts, including DabbleDB, Zoho Creator, LongJump, Coghead and WyaWorks, among others. Salesforce’s Force.com is also a competitor. So, in a nutshell, the market may well mature, but there is no guarantee they’ll end up at Bungee Labs.

At least one employee says he has no regrets. Alex Barnett wrote: “No regrets, none at all. When I considered the opportunity of joining Bungee Labs (and by doing so leave a relatively safe harbor in order to do so) I knew of the risks involved. Bungee Labs’ mission was - and still is - of the kind that aims to “change the world”. To have been a member of the team tasked with realizing the company’s hugely ambitious mission has been nothing short of an entirely worthwhile and educational pursuit.”

Sounds like someone has vested on some stock to me. I’d be pissed off if I was laid off.

CrunchBase Information Bungee Labs Information provided by CrunchBase

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PayEasy Extends Philippine E-Commerce to China, Taiwan and Thailand
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From: Vanity Fair / Google
Date: August 27, 2008 9:06:32 PM PDT
To: Michael Arrington
Subject: IMPT: Google/Vanity Party Status
Reply-To: demconventionparty@google.com

Thank you for your interest in the Vanity Fair / Google Party.

We have reached full capacity for this event and are unable to accommodate additional guests.

If you have NOT received a Confirmation email–separate from the automated RSVP response– and a Party admission card with your name on it, you will not be admitted to the party. No exceptions.

If you HAVE received a confirmation email but have NOT picked up your admission card, you must reference your confirmation instructions and pick up your card by 4:00pm on Thursday.

Admission cards will not be distributed at the door.

If you use the shuttle service you must have your party admission card to board. No exceptions.

Thank you in advance for your understanding,

Vanity Fair & Google Events team

Google and Vanity Fair took the time to email me this evening to let me know I wouldn’t be able to attend their big party tomorrow night in Denver for the Democratic National Convention. The only problem is I never asked to attend. Actually I never even heard of it until tonight. But I asked around and lots of other people are getting this email as well. Is this their way of letting everyone know that they’re holding a really cool party and hanging out with the Vanity Fair Hollywood crowd? Or just some mixup in the email list? Who knows. But suddenly I feel kind of left out.

In the future though, Google, please wait until I actually ask to get into something really cool before you kick me off the list.

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Update: More analysis of the decision here.

Finally, a judge who may have actually visited the Internet once or twice before deciding a case. Judge Howard Lloyd, a judge on the U.S. District Court in the Northern District of California, threw out adult entertainment company IO Group’s 2006 copyright infringement case against Veoh today. At the time Veoh had some user-uploaded porn on its service that belonged to IO Group. Despite quick takedowns from DMCA notices, IO Group sued anyway.

A key issue of the case turned on whether or not Veoh should lose DMCA safe harbor protection because they transcoded user uploaded videos to the Flash format, something every online Flash video site does as a matter of course.

IO Group argued that the transcoding made Veoh a direct infringer and that the materials were under their direct control. Lloyd disagreed, saying “Here, Veoh has simply established a system whereby software automatically processes user-submitted content and recasts it in a format that is readily accessible to its users. Veoh preselects the software parameters for the process from a range of default values set by the thirdparty software…ButVeoh does not itself actively participate or supervise the uploading of files. Nor does it preview or select the files before the upload is completed. Instead, video files are uploaded through an automated process which is initiated entirely at the volition of Veoh’s users.”

In other words, nice try but no dice.

Viacom-YouTube and a host of other Internet video related lawsuits continue to rage on, but the good guys won this one. But those of you thinking you’ll find a little adult content on Veoh now that they’ve won the case will be dissapointed. Veoh banned it permanently back in 2006. This case was about nothing but money.

The full order is included below.

Veoh v IO Group - Free Legal Forms

CrunchBase Information Veoh Information provided by CrunchBase

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The business card needs to die, and everyone knows it. They’re clumsy, easy to lose, and virtually useless as one of the last bits of information that we pass non-digitally (they kill trees, too). The cell phone market could easily put business cards out of their misery, but instead of conforming to a single standard for contact exchange, handset manufacturers offer proprietary solutions or none at all.

FriendBook, an iPhone application from Tapulous, looked like it might hold the answer. The app uses a physical “handshake” to swap information - users simply put their iPhones next to each other and shake them. Granted, this would only work on iPhones, but it could have paved the way for similar apps on other phones. But as of yesterday the fate of FriendBook is now in jeopardy due to the departure of its lead developer (and Tapulous cofounder) Mike Lee. So is all hope lost?

Gabe Zichermann, CEO of rmbrME (”remember me”), thinks that his startup holds the answer. The service uses standard SMS or a web app to initiate the transfer of contact information, so it should work on nearly any phone. rmbrME initially launched last spring under a paid model (you’d have to pay around 50 cents every time you wanted to add a new contact). But because of an immediate poor response to the model, rmbrME is now free, though it plans to offer a premium service in the future.

To begin using the rmbrME, you first set up a profile including your standard contact information as well as links to your presence across various social networks. After meeting a potential new contact, you send a text message containing either the contact’s email address or phone number to a designated rmbrME shortcode. rmbrME then sends your new contact a SMS or email message with a link to your details, and asks them to create their own profile so that you can receive theirs.

Zichermann says it only takes about 3 seconds to initiate the process - just send your contact’s email to rmbrME, and you can complete the rest later. That may be the case, but each user still needs to create an account, logon to the site, and download the contact information from there. People may be willing to jump through a few hoops for essential contacts, but the process is still too involved, especially when meeting a large number of people at once. rmbrME is a step up from the antiquated business card, but at this point it isn’t the ultimate solution.

So what is the answer? Handset manufacturers need to agree on a format for proximity-based exchange over the air between devices - whip out the phones, detect nearby acquaintances, and hit accept. Palm was doing this a decade ago (albeit with a proprietary format), yet we’re still fumbling with Email exchanges and workaround solutions.

CrunchBase Information rmbrME Information provided by CrunchBase

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BackType is the newest YCombinator startup to launch from their summer program. They’re a blog-comment focused startup - founders Christoper Golda and Michael Montano are for the first time aggregating all comments from millions of blogs into a single, searchable, parsable stream. Think Twitter for all comments on the web.

They are not like the recent barrage of startups focusing on cleaning up the comment experience on blogs - see Disqus, SezWho, JS-Kit, etc. Blogs (and even commenters) don’t have to actively participate to be included. Instead BackType is grabbing all comments from millions of blogs (via feeds and scraping) and adding them to the site.

Like Twitter it’s a gold mine of information. I tried searches for TechCrunch50, Obama and Olympics and got back all kinds of content that I would normally miss. RSS feeds for searches are also available.

You can also track by commenter. BackType aggregates comments made by a name that matches to a linked URL. So if you, like most people, leave comments with the same URL across multiple blogs, they will be aggregated. You can also claim an account, like i did, and have your comments aggregated even if you use different URLs. Since there is not authentication other than what people type into comment boxes, there’s a big fake comment problem. That can be fixed by turning moderation on so that you have to approve anything that goes under your name.

I like this one a lot.

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