I was today at Dow Jones' Venturewire Consumer Tech conference at the revovated hotel Sofitel (I hate the "robinets") in Redwood Shores. Lots of interesting start-ups and keynoters like Nintendo America President Reggie FIls-Aime and Wall Street Journal star reporter, Walt Mossberg. More on both keynotes later. But first here's my list of favourite start-ups that presented today.

Cast TV: what Google Video should have been!
Let's start with video search engine CastTV. I really liked the quality of the search results that returned the most recent videos of for example the Office or of somewhat important football match that happened over the week-end (nope I'm not an NFL fan!). Also liked the grouping of those results that including both user generated video a la YouTube or commercial videos coming from the TV networks own Hulu site.

"The reason why current video search solutions are not good today is because it's very difficult finding the videos. Flash, media player plug-in and Javascript make it difficult for a web crawler to get at the video and the video metadata. So the text based approach or link based algorithms are not going to scale. Then the second problem is how to rank the videos that you found. And we have a comprehensive method that uses metadata, blogs, permalink and video analysis [that's still mostly done manually]... Blinkx takes a more feed based approach and have partnerships with content owners. Often times it does not include premium content and is helping its customers with video search advertising. And at this point we are focus on delivering the best video search results [but that might change too!]", said Alex Vikati, president and co-founder of Cast TV.

iMemories: Ofoto for your home videos
At first, I didn't think of iMemories as a real high-tech company. It positions itself as the Shutterfly/Ofoto but for home movies and take your videos (film footage, tapes or digital uploads) and transfer it on a DVD. But to do that at a large scale i.e. cheaply and profitably and offer a browser based editing/creation of DVDs, video hosting/sharing, iMemories had to build a large datacentre in Phoenix, AZ, and automate as much as possible all the steps. The cost for a tape transfer is $20 and about $100/yr to leave the videos on iMemories' site. Sounds expensive but worthwhile if you have tons of video archive you want to share/burn, etc. The company is already on a $1 million run-rate and expanding fast.

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