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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.

Bar Association Enters the 21st Century Lawyers have been using the Internet for a decade, and even the most unsophisticated consumers have had Internet access at home for at least five years. In this context, a directory that would enable consumers to find lawyers online should have seemed like a logical project for bar associations -- which purport to serve the public by helping increase access to law. The bars did little to provide lawyers with ways to list themselves online and, consequently, a few months ago, one company -- Avvo -- stepped in to fill this void  and, in doing so, attracted a controversial response.

Monday, October 29, 2007 The Semantic Web Goes Mainstream Continued from page 1 By Kate Greene Print E-mail Audio » New! Listen - Flash Listen - MP3 Subscribe to podcast What is this? Powered by Share » Digg this Add to del.icio.us Add to Reddit Add to Facebook

Three products in the social-software toolbox -- blogs, wikis and RSS -- have begun to gain traction inside companies. Blogs are probably the best known, thanks in part to their popularity on the Web and partly because of the handful of executives who use blogs to address customers and employees and to muse about industry trends. Lately, blogs are showing up inside companies -- including Procter & Gamble Co., Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Co. and ad agency TBWA Worldwide, among others -- as a way for rank-and-file employees to discuss important industry trends, to bring project team members up to speed, or for employees to vent about changes within the company. Wikis aren't as familiar as blogs, but they may be even better suited for business use. They're versatile tools for doing almost any sort of collaboration, from project management to building vast repositories of knowledge. (That's what the best-known public wiki, Wikipedia, has done.) At Walt Disney Co.'s Pixar studio, for instance, wiki technology is being used to help coordinate new computerized animation tools for the studio's planned 2008 release of a film called "WALL-E." Finally, RSS (for Really Simple Syndication) knits together all the material created on blogs and in wikis and delivers it in easy-to-find fashion. RSS lets employees keep up to date on the latest blog post or change in the project-team wiki. It also can alert users to changes in business-critical information like an entry in a spreadsheet or even the computerized output from production equipment, such as error messages from semiconductor machinery. Other Web 2.0 te