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NY-based Kaltura has received a good bit of buzz since I first reported about their presentation at the NY Video Meetup last April. Since then they have gone on to win the people's choice at Techcrunch40 and have launched a useful Facebook application. I had a chance to grab a coffee with co-founder Ron Yekutiel and here are my notes: Ron describes Kaltura as "wiki meets YouTube". He believes there is a movement going on from text publishing to video publishing and that collaboration in the video space is where Kaltura leads the pack. Kaltura is seeking to empower other social networks by their use of the Kaltura application. Ron says that while Kaltura.com is a destination site, the real power is how other sites use the tool within their framework. What I get about Kaltura is that small contributions can equal big productions where everybody has a vested interest in the final product. Ron spoke about four reasons people collaborate on video: For social progression and to see interaction Text is dead (Allen's note: I sure hope not!) The number of contributors help to decrease the barriers to contribution The swarm effect of advertising - he sees this as the new model where instead of a 1-1 advertising or many-many, companies will use collaboration to reach their desired customer The Kaltura team has four co-founders, two are in New York and the other two are in Israel. The team totals 25 people and are in Israel. From what I gather, the leadership of Kaltura might be the most educated group I have come across. Lots of post-graduate degrees from Ivy League schools. We spoke about the Kaltura business model which is largely based on rev share. It's an interesting model because it puts the trust in the sites using the application to report the income back as they use their own advertising not Kaltura's ad platform. For sites that don't have their own advertising platform, Kaltura can provide one with strong advertising players involved. Ron left me with some juicy bits about the future for Kaltura but he asked me not to share them at this time. He said they are coming very soon and as soon as I can share with you, I will.

Avvo's new competitor It has been a few weeks since I mentioned Avvo, the controversial Seattle online attorney rating service that was promptly sued after its debut in June. Now, it turns out that Avvo will be facing some competition from an Arlington, Va.-based startup called HireTrade that has created a "legal marketplace" in which attorneys can post online profiles and clients can attempt to find attorneys to work on their cases. For now, the company is focusing on the legal markets in Washington, D.C., New York and Philadelphia, but it plans to expand to other geographic areas in the future. HireTrade says its HourlyValue Ratings System taps the knowledge of clients to rate attorneys, a method that it believes is more effective than a 1 to 10 rating scale like what Avvo employs. (HireTrade says it will not post a rating of an attorney until it accumulates three projects/reviews of the attorney.) At the present time, HireTrade's database does not appear to be as robust as Avvo's. I searched for three different attorney names and did not get a result or an attorney rating. (Similar searches on Avvo returned hundreds of attorneys.) Still, I asked HireTrade Chief Executive Neil Sandhu how his company is different from Avvo. Here's what he said: We think that existing professional ratings systems, including most numerical ratings systems, result in arbitrary values as it is impossible for a numerical algorithm to really capture every single nuance of a professional's background or decide what is the correct weight to place on different items of information such as experience, education, etc. (not to mention the fact that it appears that some of these systems merely assign higher scores to those professionals who take the time to fill out their profiles in more detail). Thus, meaningful comparisons are difficult to draw from the numerical values that result. Furthermore, there is very little actual intrinsic value in any number generated by such a system. And he continued: But what does a 5.0, 7.5, or 10 really signify when it comes to the seller of a service and, even if a numerical system was somehow perfect at capturing and interpreting data, can you really effectively compare someone who has a 8.8 to someone who has a 9.5--what if the person with an 8.8 has worked on more difficult matters and the person with the 9.5 has worked a long time and done very well with less difficult work? When the service is at the heart of what is being sold, we think an entirely different system must be used. Those are also some of the arguments made in the lawsuit against Avvo. Posted by document.writeln(showE2("johncook","seattlepi.com","John Cook"))John Cook John Cook at August 27, 2007 11:35 a.m.Category: Avvo Comments #48664Posted by unregistered user at 8/27/07 8:33 p.m.hey. i told those guys to turn their site into a myspace for lawyers but nooooo. what do i know Report violation #48671Posted by unregistered user at 8/27/07 9:31 p.m.Avvo's primary competition is certainly their own misguided idea and the shark who pounced on their inane offering. Report violation