At least, it may look like that from the outside. The Santa Monica-based outfit spent plenty of time perfecting its platform before taking on a $15m first venture round in November, the latest in German broadcaster RTL Group’s ad-tech roll-up.

Now VideoAmp CEO Ross McCray says 2016 is primed to be “the year of execution” for the company he co-founded. So what does VideoAmp bring to the party?

A “cross-device graph”, McCray says: “We associate multiple device IDs to a user, we append intelligence to those devices. We’ll say, ‘here’s everything those devices have consumed’; it watches these ads or shows on TV.

“Today, we over 150m unique users in the United States and over a billion devices associated underneath those users, and consumption data across all of them.”

That means advertisers will get to more smartly target ads based on a holistic understanding of who exactly is behind the many devices that are now used throughout households.

McCray says an earlier seed round had funded the engineering build-out, but the effort in 2016 will be about sales.

This video is part of a series of interviews about the transformation of television produced at CES and sponsored by SpotX.

Now the Hub is on the hunt for more ad-tech acquisitions.

“We will also look for further investment opportunities that add on, that complement, that strengthen the existing portfolio,” RTL Digital Hub EVP Marcel Reichart tells Beet.TV in this video interview.

So far, RTL Group has made the following moves:

• SpotX: acquiring a 65% stake worth $144 million in the video supply-side platform and programmatic marketplace (July 2014).
• StyleHaul: buying in to multi-channel networks, it invested a further $127 million in the Los Angeles-based fashion and beauty YouTube video network (November 2014), having already taken a controlling stake in BroadbandTV (June 2013) and a minority stake in Divimove (September 2013).
• Clypd: leading a $19.4 million Series B funding in the sell-side programmatic television player (April 2015).

“If you look at the portfolio, those are all strong companies, leaders in their markets,” Reichart adds.

“The 2016 mandate is to ensure these companies and CEOs can grow these companies in the best way forward. 2015 showed very good growth and maturing – we believe 2016 could give that opportunity as well.”

Our coverage of CES is presented by SpotX.

New Spring Capital has become the latest investor in the company, while all previous investors, including Sequoia Capital Israel, Genesis Partners, Vintage Investment Partners, Cisco Ventures and T-Venture, participated in the round as well as Silicon Valley Bank and Triple Point Capital.

The news was first reported by TechCrunch last week.

For our most recent update on Innovid, we spoke with CTO and co-founder Tal Chalozin in September at DMEXCO  We are republishing that video today.

Last year at the Brightcove customer summit, we spoke with Greg Philpott is the founder and CEO.  We have republished that video today.

“Content as original programming remains a very hard category to invest in,” says Saul Klein of Index Ventures, the European VC firm whose portfolio has included Adconion, ChartBeat, OpenX and Songkick. That’s why Klein says content businesses supported by consumer transactions are still more investable than most ad-supported businesses.

“It’s very hard to build an ad-supported business unless you have over 50 million monthly uniques,” Klein says.

Beet.TV spoke with him at the FT Digital Media Conference. To view all our coverage of the conference, please visit this page.

Accel is an investor in several online video companies, including Brightcove, Glam Media, Metacafe, and YuMe. 

I interviewed Ping at last month's Beet.TV Online Video Roundtable at MSNBC.com.

Despite a very difficult 2009, the online video industry is growing quickly.  

Accel could find exis with both Brightcove, which may file for an IPO next year, and Glam Media, which could go public, according to published reports.

Andy Plesser, Managing Editor

The promise of the Web as a means to decrease our reliance on carbon-based transportation is the vision of two of the Internet’s great visionaries:  Robert Metcalfe, who co-invented Ethernet, and Vint Cerf, who is considered the “father” of the Internet.  Today, Cerf is the chief technology evangelist for Google.

I’ve had the wonderful good fortune to interview both over the years on the topic of the Web and the environment and I’ve published both videos here today.

Greenpeace Teams with Google and Cisco

For Earth Day,
Greenpeace has teamed with Google and Cisco on Web seminars about the
values of teleconferencing and “cloud” computing, The New York Times reports.

Happy Earth Day.

Andy Plesser, Executive Producer

In November, we caught up with Clicker CEO Jim Lanzone for this overview of his company. You can find Daisy's original post here.  We are republishing our interview today.

Here's the take by Peter Kafka over at MediaMemo.

Andy Plesser, Executive Producer

Ross spoke with Daisy about some of his firm’s investments including True/Slant and 5:1.

As far as big trends, top of his list is online video which he says will become “mainstream” this year.

Andy Plesser, Executive Producer

The company has garnered enormous positive media attention since it’s launch in September, starting with a long profile in The New York Times and continuing steadily since then. Last week, Walt Mossberg at All Things D reviewed the site and said that “[t]he videos are the most interesting part of Unigo, because they provide a look at current students and at the campus that isn’t often captured in college guides.”

Unigo currently has information on 250 schools and 18 full-time editors to curate it, but they plan to keep expanding aggressively.

“We have a new homepage. We just brought on a new CTO who for the last five years ran all development of The Princeton Review, Barry Goldberg, who’s great,” he told me in an interview earlier this month. “We just added the forums so people can interact. We’re expanding to more schools. We’re going to expand internationally. [We’re] adding in something called Unigo Match which is going to help match students up with the colleges that are right for them.”

The site has a great design, so definitely take a look. I looked up my alma mater, Dartmouth, and found the description to be very accurate.

–Kelsey Blodget, Associate Producer

Flush with excess in the boom times, this is the right time to dis-intermediate, he told me this morning.

Last year, Chatter and Ray Statta, Chairman of Analog Devices founded MoneyAisle, a reverse auction, Web-based application for consumer finance products.  The Boston-area company is finding the inefficiencies in the market for certificates of deposits by running reverse auctions where 120 banks are asked to compete on individual consumer requests.

In January, some 70,000 visitors went to the MoneyAisle site and spent $45 million on CD purchases.

Mary Pilon of Wall Street Journal reports on MoneyAisle today and offers her experience on the site.

For an extended video interview with Mukesh, check out this one with Robert Scoble. Here is the launch story in Xconomy.

The company was profiled last year in MIT’s Technology Review.

— Andy Plesser,  Executive Producer

Disclaimer:   MoneyAisle is a client of Plesser Holland public relations.

Rather than comparing an image to other known images to determine what it is, Milabra’s algorithms mimic the mammalian brain and can recognize an image independently, CEO Samuel Cox told me at the AlwaysOn conference on Monday.

Neuroscientists from Columbia helped develop the artificial intelligence, which is being marketed to publishers and ad companies as a B2B service and can aid with auto tagging, facial recognition, face search, and identifying channel violations like adult content. The technology is also able to assign priority to objects in an image.

“A lot of other image recognition firms, like IBM’s marble, identifies everything within the image, and that’s not really how you should do it, that’s not the way our brain does it,” Cox says. “…We don’t want to add useless metadata, which would be identifying everything in the image, but we want to have a point of view or perspective, an editorial viewpoint, which is what we as mammals do as well.”

R.J. Pittman at Google told us this summer that Google was exploring facial recognition and scene analysis to help better index the trillion images on the web, and to better pair advertising to those images. It’s exciting to hear about technology advancing at companies like Milabra, and we hope to see the impact of this technology ripple across the web.

Cox told me Milabra has some major announcements coming up in the near future, so stay tuned.

Jason Kincaid at TechCrunch has a write-up on Milabra as well as a video demo of its image recognition which you can check out here.

–Kelsey Blodget, Associate Producer

“We’re certainly going to look back at this one and say, ‘Boy I wish we’d caught that sooner, I wish the overspending in the U.S. market, the financial flows–we hadn’t let things get so out of whack,'” Bill Gates says of the current economic crisis. “Now we’re paying the price for that. It could be two, three, even four years before we’re back on the positive growth track. But I don’t know anybody who questions that the system is fundamentally sound; it’s led to incredible innovation, incredible opportunity.”

Like many foundations buffeted by the market woes, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is down 20 percent in value, but the two tell the BBC they are accelerating spending even if it means shortening the life of the foundation.

Great interview.

The BBC doesn’t use an embeddable player, so we published a screenshot of the interview.

–Kelsey Blodget, Associate Producer

Here is the company’s press release.

— Andy Plesser, Executive Producer

We previously interviewed JibJab about their “Starring You” ecards and videos, which allow users to post their faces into funny animations. Over the holidays, the ElfYourself videos were a big hit. The Starring You product has proved JibJab can do more than make political parodies like This Land, and make money to boot.

–Kelsey Blodget, Associate Producer

At our marathon filming day at the Mogoulus studio in Soho earlier this month, Peter described the state of digital media to Andy. “If you’re only making a digital product it’s very hard to make a
living, and if you’re used to making a lot of money selling it in
analog form you’re making a lot less,” he says in the interview.

He also discusses how venture capital fundraising is faring, and has a (very slightly) cheerier prognosis on that front.

Kafka’s blog has risen quickly up the Techmeme Leaderboard and is currently number 18.

— Kelsey Blodget, Associate Producer

It seems impossible for any search start-up to raise that kind of money when there’s already a Google, but Kosmix isn’t a direct competitor with the search giant. Instead of producing results for a highly specific search, Kosmix organizes videos (powered by Truveo), audio, and articles on a magazine-style page for users with a more general topic in mind.

“If you know exactly what you’re looking for, if you’re looking to find some information, you should go to a search engine. If you kind of want to explore more broadly, you should go to Kosmix,” Rajaraman says in the segment.

Kosmix also introduced the beta version of its site today. Here’s the take on this development by Venture Beat’s Anthony Ha.  Here’s a story from the BBC.

—Kelsey Blodget, Associate Producer

The first implementation is a system which allows consumers to create a live auction around the best available CD from over 100 banks.  Launched in June as MoneyAisle, the platform has gone live on TheStreet.com.  Here is the press release from TheStreet.com.

For an overview on the company and its technology, we have posted this interview of Mukesh Chatter by Robert Scoble, originally published on Fastcompany.tv in September.

While the CD product is going well, Chatter says that the auction has implications for several business sectors, including retail.

In a story earlier this year in Technology Review,  Robert Freund, a professor of management science at MIT’s Sloan School who sits on neoSaej’s advisory board, said the company’s technology “has the potential to change the way business is conducted on the Internet.”

— Andy Plesser, Executive Producer

Disclosure:  neoSaej is a client of Plesser Holland public relations.

In January, I interviewed Huff Post investor and board member Eric Hippeau of SoftBank about the value of the media property for venture capitalists.  I’ve republished the interview today.

Update 12/2: Ad Age’s Michael Learmonth says that Huff Post now has more value than some big newspaper companies.

— Andy Plesser, Executive Producer

TechCrunch50 runner-up FitBit, a fitness and sleep cycle tracking device that will go on sale next year for $99, has raised $2 million from True Ventures, SoftTech VC and several angel investors, Mark Hendrickson at TechCrunch reports today. This appears to be the first round of institutional funding for the company, according to Hendrickson.

I interviewed FitBit CEO James Park after his presentation at the conference. You can read my previous post about the company here.

The wireless, rechargeable sensor can be worn on clothing or in a pocket and uploads data–which includes calories burned and steps taken–to a user account on the company website.

—Kelsey Blodget, Associate Producer

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — The focus of clean-tech, or as well-known venture capitalist Vinod Khosla prefers to call it, “main-tech,” isn’t wind and corn ethanol. “It’s about the mainstream things we use in life and essentially reinventing society,” he says. Cleantech will impact technologies like engines, lighting, and refridgerators, which have markets worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

Khosla has invested in a number of companies exploring more energy-efficient technologies. “Almost any area you look at, there’s so much innovation going on…The list is endless,” he says.

Andy interviewed Khosla on the MIT campus yesterday, where Khosla delivered a keynote speech about energy and clean-tech at the MIT Technology Review EmTech08 conference. Martin LaMonica at CNET has a report on the speech at CNET.

—Kelsey Blodget, Associate Producer

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — The current financial crisis might actually have a silver lining for venture capital investing, VC titan Vinod Khosla told Andy up on the MIT campus yesterday. “When we go through a period like this, it’s actually healthy in the long run,” he says in this clip. Khosla is an affiliated partner at KPCB and the founder of Khosla Ventures.

He says that people with money will invest it somewhere, and the current complexity of the financial system will drive people to “invest in things we understand and are real,” making it easier, rather than harder, to raise funds in the VC world. “I’m an optimist,” he adds.

This isn’t to say that there won’t be any repercussions–he does anticipate a year or two of more cautious investing.

Andy interviewed him at the MIT Technology Review EmTech08 conference, where Khosla was a keynote speaker.

Martin LaMonica at CNET wrote a story about his presentation, and Khosla expounds upon the opinions he expresses in this interview in a piece he wrote for Forbes that ran on Monday.

—Kelsey Blodget, Associate Producer