Web Highlights

Livestream, the New York-based live video services company, is getting traction with its premium service, booking some $350,000 per month in revenue from 1000 premium customers who pay $350 each.

IMINDI collects your thoughts and connects minds across the web, Co-founder Galen Kaufman says. IMINDI presented at the TechCrunch50 conference last week and got tough criticism from the judges.

Here's my second interview with Dan'l Lewin, Microsoft's main man in Silicon Valley and the executive in charge of finding and cultivating promising start-ups around the globe. The company is seeking to align, provide services, and in some cases acquire start-ups through a global program called Microsoft StartZone. Innovation is happening far beyond Silicon Valley and Redmond.

We caught up with Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield in Manhattan last week. He was in town to announce the winners in Flickr's photo contest ; The Blink of an Eye. Stewart and his wife and co-founder Caterina Fake sold the company to Yahoo! last year. The two were featured on the cover of Newsweek not too long ago. Far from living a celebrity high life, Stewart is deeply involved with the success of the photo sharing site, working days and some sleepless nights too.

NBC Direct, the platform to deliver downloads of high quality programming, is opening its beta testing, according to a report in NewTeeVee. This is different from Hulu, the joint venture of NBC and News Corp. Hulu streams flash video. NBC Direct provides a download to save and watch "true" 720 HD. As HD files are so large, NBC will incorporate a substantial peer-to-peer component. Providing the P2P technology is New York-based Pando Networks.

Rich media on Facebook, exemplified by the CNN/Facebook Inauguration collaboration and simple games made by companies like Playfish, have made Facebook an increasingly multimedia experience. Adobe and Facebook announced the alliance earlier this week. The two companies are collaborating on tools to make the social site more media-rich.

Ping Li, a partner at powerhouse venture capital firm Accel Partners, says the big opportunity around video is mobile. He says the iPad will lead to the emergence of new sorts of video programming from the device's "use case." While he is bullish on innovation around mobile, the one video sector he is bearish on is connected TV devices. A recent hit for Accel is AdMob which was sold to Google.

Tania Yuki talks about the new ComSore report which centers around how people are tuning in to programming and platforms of choice.

Here's our second interview with Suranga Chandratillake, the Cambridge-trained computer scientist and co-founder of Blinkx, the San Francisco-based start-up which is doing pioneering work in video search. Suranga speaks about the different set of skills need to solve the search on the Web. He says the technology is not purely numbers - not "black and white" - but "fuzzy" -- more of an art than science.

Creative online video programming is getting funding and proliferating, but its financial success won't rival television's until it can reach a much larger audience, TelevisionWeek editor Greg Baumann says. A key breakthrough will come when consumers can watch online video easily in their living rooms. Greg, who is based in Los Angeles, is also the editor of Web Video Report, launched under TelevisionWeek and now a part of fellow Crain Communications pub The Ad Age.

Tens of millions of video clips, organized by one of the Web's "most comprehensive" video search engines, are now available on the Apple iPhone and on Microsoft Mobile-powered phones, through a thin application downloaded to a mobile browser. vTap is an offering of Veveo, a Boston-area mobile that has received some $28 million in funding. The company will extend the range of the phones that play videos with the upcoming release of vTap for Java-enabled phones from Nokia, Motorola and Samsung.

According to a new report on the valuation of the top 25 blogs, the eight month-old Silicon Alley Insider is worth $5.4 million. Not bad work for founder/backer Kevin Ryan and editor/pundit/power blogger Henry Blodget. I'm not quite sold on the valuation equation and find it hard to believe that SAI is worth $2 million more than paidContent, but there's no doubt that the SAI is a hit.

Video search works, particularly around professionally-produced content. Suranga Chandratillake CEO of Blinkx, the London/San Francisco-based video search engine told TechCrunch's Erick Schonfeld in this segment from the Beet.TV Online Video Roundtable, that his company is serving ads on 80-90 percent of professionally produced content and on 10-20 percent on user generated content. The ads are both display and in-stream.

Reuters, the giant global news and information company, is expanding the offering of its content via mobile with the launch of an iPhone application and an application for Nokia's OVI store.