hotspotting

HowTo.tv, a London-based digital marketing agency specializing in interactive video, said Tuesday that it is partnering with online video platform provider, Ooyala, to offer its LinkTo.tv interactive video technology to the latter's customers (note: another London-based company, Quick.tv, made a similar announcement last week--see the article published on itvt.com, July 11th).

Because the [itvt] editorial team has been on the road the past few weeks, we are covering recent news stories in summary/round-up form. We anticipate that it will take a couple of days for us to catch up with all the recent news: so if your company has sent us a press release or briefed us on an announcement, and you don't yet see your news covered in this issue, please bear with us. We apologize for any inconvenience to our readers.

Here is a round-up of some other interactive TV-related stories we didn't have room for in this issue:

London shopping mall, Westfield London, has published an interactive video of its recent fashion show, "The Greatest Fashion Show on Earth," which took place March 18th. The video--which can be viewed here--uses hotspotting technology to enable viewers to click on any of the items of clothing worn by the show's models, in order to access more information about it.

Broadband video platform provider, Ooyala, said Monday that it has deployed Cassandra as its new database system. Cassandra is a distributed database system that Facebook developed and open-sourced in 2008, and that is billed as "bring[ing] together the scalability and reliability of both Amazon's Dynamo and Google's Bigtable storage systems in a single data model." According to Ooyala, it is used by Cisco, Facebook, Digg and IBM to manage large data sets for various applications.

In this recorded episode of [itvt]'s talk radio show, "Radio [i]tvt," the inventor of YouTube Annotations (i.e.

At the NAB show in Las Vegas, Tuesday, mobile video and in-stream ad management company, mDialog, launched in-stream interactive overlay ads for the new Apple iPad. According to the company, which says it delivers video across Akamai's HD Network, advertisers can now offer "perfectly targeted" interactive overlay advertising on live events and pre-recorded video streamed on the iPad. The overlays also allow viewers to choose on the fly which ad they would prefer to view, the company says.

At the NAB show in Las Vegas, Tuesday, Coincident TV (CTV)--the San Francisco-based start-up which earlier this week launched its flagship "hypervideo" software suite (note: the company bills the platform as combining online video, social media, Web links and commerce into a single immersive experience--see the article published on itvt.com, April 13th; the platform is currently powering a Facebook-integrated, interactive "social trailer" for Fox's primetime musical series, "Glee"--see the article published on itvt.com, Apri

At the NAB show in Las Vegas Monday, San Francisco-based start-up, Coincident TV (CTV), officially launched its flagship "hypervideo" technology in private beta. The technology--a software suite that the company bills as combining online video, social media, Web links and commerce into a single immersive experience--is currently powering a Facebook-integrated, interactive "social trailer" for Fox's primetime musical series, "Glee" (see the article published on itvt.com, April 6th).

Italian clothing company, Diesel, is promoting its new Spring/Summer collection via a vcommerce-enabled interactive video that is the result of a collaboration between advertising agency, Anomaly, and production company, Stink Digital.

Interactive video commerce company, WatchNBuy.com, announced Wednesday that it is offering its interactive video player on a white-label basis to other Web site operators. The player, which is powered by technologies from Jivox, allows viewers to click on items for sale in a video, in order to launch supplemental product information that appears to the right of the screen, and lets them make purchases without stopping the video or leaving the video page. According to WatchNBuy.com, the player will work on any third-party Web site: Web site operators simply insert a line of code in the page in which they want the player to operate, the company says.

Earlier this month (see the article published on itvt.com, January 12th), broadband video platform provider, Ooyala, announced that it had entered into a partnership with NTT Smartconnect--a subsidiary of Asia's largest telco, NTT Holdings--to sell a localized, co-branded version of its flagship Backlot video platform in Japan. On Wednesday, the company launched the new Japanese version of the platform, together with a Japanese Web site.

Veeple, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based company that specializes in interactive online video solutions for marketers (note: for an in-depth overview of the company's products and strategy, see the interview with its co-founder and CEO, Scott Broomfield, that was published on itvt.com, April 22nd), has developed an interactive API and plug-in, called interPlay, which it says will allow users to add Veeple interactive functionality to their existing, third-party online video player.

Broadband video platform provider, Ooyala, announced late Monday that it has closed a $10 million Series C funding round. The round--which brings the total raised by the company to date to $20 million--was led by new investor, Rembrandt Venture Partners, and saw the participation of current investors, including Sierra Ventures. As part of the investment, Rembrandt general partner, Sik Rhee, will join Ooyala's board.

In a posting on its corporate blog, Monday, Overlay.TV, an Ottawa, Canada-based start-up that offers a platform which, among other things, allows users to add a layer of custom-designed, clickable content over broadband videos (note: for a detailed overview of Overlay.TV's platform, see the article published on itvt.com, October 2nd, 2008), announced that it has decided to focus its efforts on Overlay.TV for Retail, the interactive video commerce platform that it launched in June (