Report from Under the Radar

Had a grand time at last night’s Under the Radar event at Fenwick West in Mountain View, where four startup founders showcased their video and vlogging technologies. Snapped these three photos with my Nokia N90 smart phone.

I happened to know all four presenters: Mary Hodder of Bloqx gave the first public showing of Dabble, which will be in a closed beta for another week or so — I’m really excited about the service, which Mary describes as a video remix and bookmarking community. They’re building a remix tool, something I’ve been hoping to include as part of Ourmedia’s toolset, so perhaps we can work together on that. “Ten to 15 percent of the community wants to be remixers,” Mary said.

Kevin Sladek showed off VideoEgg, a service that lets you drag and drop video from your desktop or camcorder onto a blog service like TypePad, converting it on the fly to Flash 7 and 8. “Getting video off your devices and onto the Web is still hard,” he said. It’s a great and easy drag-and-drop solution.

Dave Samuel, president of Grouper (and former founder of Spinner), said Grouper has moved away from a private space/darknet model toward a community video-sharing model. The software has had 1.5 million downloads. He showed how easy it is to create a short video clip, add sound, and upload it to the Web.

Josh Kinberg showed off FireAnt, the cross-platform, cross-codec RSS reader and video aggregation service. (If you like video and you’re not using FireAnt, you should!) They offer a directory of video content and are incorporating ratings, tagging, social networking and collaborative filtering. They have 25,000 users so far and are tracking about 3,000 video podcasts.

JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.