Today I talked with David Geller (pictured), co-founder of EyeJot about a version of the startup's Flash-based 1-to-1 video email service for small and medium businesses (SMBs), as well as the very competitive landscape and more.

EyeJot is a small Seattle company (about 5 employees according to the Seattle Times) that launched last year at the Demo conference, have users in 120 different countries and so far only raised money from FAF (friends and family). Geller started the company while also running WhatCounts, also Seattle-based and that distributes permission-based e-mails.

"The genesis of EyeJot really started when I was trying to do live video with my parents, sharing with them my daughter who was then 3 years old. It was great when everybody was online. But even when we were online, a 3 year old isn't always in the right mood. So live doesn't always work well. So we shift back to this model of record and send, the asynchronous model like email, and we found it to be fantastic", said Geller.

Business model: advertising+pay version

Today, the still unprofitable Web 2.0 start-up generates revenue through advertising banners and charges about $30 a year for a Pro version that lets users record a video message up to 5 minutes and upload videos to EyeJot. According to Geller, the conversion rate from being exposed to EyeJot to actually signing up for the free service is about 10%. However less than 10% of the registered users end subscribing to the Pro version.

EyeJot Pro Plus for SMBs

Next month at the Under the Radar conference, EyeJot will be launching a version of the service for SMBs that will carry the SMB's brand and that they can expose to their customers for simple video recording and targeted sending.

"Increasingly, small businesses are using it as a great way to increase the touch factor of communications. If you are an SMB and you want to communicate with your clients, email is perfectly good, calls is even better. But email is very convenient. Well, what's even better than that? Sending a short video message. They're so much you can impart in just a brief message besides enthousiasm and energy. Basically reduce confusion and often put forward more complicated ideas simpler".

Video email is convenient but has limitations

My experience of video email services is that it's still limited, especially if you're time constrained and don't always have an internet connection to access the videos. And reading text is still for me a lot faster than sitting through a minute or more of video.

"Some people have been critical of video as a medium because unlike the written word, we read at different rates. Some people read very quickly. But if you receive a 30 seconds video, it has the potential to take 30 seconds of your time. So, I don't think we want video for everything".

Lots of competition: Azoocamail, Bubble Joy, Gabmail and Youthru in the 1-to-1 video e-mail category; Facebook video application, Seesmic, Yahoo Live and YouTube that are video distribution plays.

For me, the closest competitor to EyeJot is Gabmail. 4 things I like about Gabmail:
- it's also free;
- allows 5 minutes of recording versus 1mn for the free EyeJot;
- does not require to sign up, unlike EyeJot;
- works with virtually any email clients thus avoiding uploading my address book to yet another online service.

Gabmail site is certainly not as fancy as EyeJot's but does the work if you just want to send a quick video email and don't really care about keeping track of the videos you're sending. However, there's no video upload feature, no way to save the videos back to your PC and no widget that you can place on a blog that lets people record/send you video email messages. I also really like EyeJot's iPod/iTunes (through an RSS feed) integration that actually solves my issue of not having a permanent Internet connection: like any other podcasts, iTunes automatically downloads EyeJot video emails and stores it on my computer.

Facebook's video application would be the second closest competitor for me. Uploading/sending videos to your Facebook friends is just super easy. But everything stays in the cloud and no way to save it for offline consumption.

"YouTube is more about publishing and broadcasting [...} They have limited messaging capabilities but it's a little more cumbersome than EyeJot that is far more convenient for private communications [...] Yahoo new Live service is live multi-user chat [...] right now, skewing to young male adults and it's a little too crazy for a lot of people. Seesmic is basically between Yahoo's Live service and ours: it's asynchronous but it's conversational. Its not a private messaging platform. Its basically Twitter and bulletin boards mashed up with video [...] The Facebook video application was launched many months ago [...] It's elegant because its simple [...] But EyeJot is a far more comprehensive product and is not tied-up to any social network product [...] Our goal is to build tools that can service multiple social networks".