Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis have been talking about the idea behind Joost™ for a long time – even before their last venture, Skype, was born. But to make it work, they needed the right combination of factors – widespread broadband and powerful computers in particular. In early 2006, the time was right. Gathering the world’s best engineers, web gurus and media visionaries, they started work under the code name of The Venice Project™ – and now, after much fretting and polishing, that work is ready for public viewing.

Source: Joost

Co-founded by Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, Joost fills a critical gap in the online video entertainment arena. Joost is powered by a secure, efficient, piracy-proof Internet platform that enables premium interactive video experiences while guaranteeing copyright protection for content owners and creators.

“People are looking for increased choice and flexibility in their TV experience, while the entertainment industry needs to retain control over their content,” said Fredrik de Wahl, chief executive officer of Joost. “With Joost, we’ve married that consumer desire with theindustry’s interests.”

Joost is the first global TV distribution platform, bringing together advertisers, content owners and viewers in an interactive, community-driven environment. Joost can be accessed with a broadband Internet connection and offers broadcast-quality content to viewers for free.

“We’ve received positive and constructive feedback from our early beta-testers and are now at a stage where we’re ready to reveal our true brand,” said de Wahl. “The Joost name has global appeal, embodies fun and energy, and will come to define the ‘best of TV and the best of the Internet’”.

Joost™ provides a new way of watching TV that combines the best of full-screen television entertainment with online interactive and community benefits to bring an unprecedented selection of video content to viewers anytime, anywhere. Joost is based on a state-of-the-art, secure, peer-to-peer streaming technology.

Source: Joost Press Release

The figure tells you something about what the Internet generation wants to consume online.

It’s not so much the aggregated or licensed content, or even the original content that’s king anymore. User-generated content is king.

In the Internet era, it’s not about getting millions to read articles from a few paid experts. It’s about making millions of people volunteer experts. It’s not about getting millions to watch one program with a few stars. It’s about getting a few people to watch millions of programs with millions of stars.

Moreover, it’s not just about getting users to express themselves, but providing the means to let users connect with each other.

This is exactly what we’re seeing at YouTube, News Corp’s (NWS) MySpace and Facebook. The people are the providers or entertainers and the marketers of their own content.

This is exactly what we’re not seeing at Yahoo (YHOO), which, for all intents and purposes was the first company to really take a stab at being the next-generation media company.

Source:  Click to Read More

“Certainly there are a large amount of people spending a large amount of time on this site,” said Nate Elliot, an analyst for Jupiter Research. “When you look at the huge numbers they throw out there — 50 [million], 60 million registered users — those are a mirage.”

Elliot admits that the site generates a lot of activity, and that it may indeed have tens of millions of registered users, but those numbers can be deceptive and only tell part of the story.

“They’re promoting the number that is most advantageous for them to promote, but the simple fact is that only a fraction of the registered users ever go back,” said Elliot. “And only a fraction of them use the site on any kind of regular basis, and then another fraction of them are responsible for the traffic.”

Source:  ABCNews.com

The website maintains a directory of online video content, including short films, interesting commercials, and user generated content.  While the site currently doesn’t include any of its own content AtomShockwave intends to host user generated short videos.

At launch the site is believed to contain more than 1,000 links and appears to be closely modeled after AtomShockwave’s recent acquisition online game aggregator AddictingGames.com.  At the time of the acquisition, AtomShockwave announced that:

SAN FRANCISCO, CA—Nov. 2, 2005—AtomShockwave Corp., the online entertainment pioneer announced today it has acquired AddictingGames™ (www.addictinggames.com), a heavily trafficked and rapidly growing directory of the most popular casual games online. With the acquisition, AtomShockwave has a monthly audience of more than 30 million consumers who flock to the site for casual games and short films, making it the largest privately owned entertainment company on the web.

“This acquisition is the first step in an aggressive plan to extend our media footprint, and continue to attract millions of consumers,” said Mika Salmi, AtomShockwave CEO. “Our mission is to provide entertainment that feeds an exploding interest among consumers for bite size entertainment they can easily access and consume in short bursts.”

MediaPost.com’s Shankar Gupta covers the story today and includes quotes from Scott Roesch, general manager and vice president of Atom Films, who described the site as “the world’s greatest repository” of the online short videos.

The site appears to have entered into an exclusive two month online advertising agreement with Unilever’s Axe body spray.  MediaPost.com reports:

The Axe sponsorship closes in early January, after which a regular cycle of advertisers begins. A spokeswoman for AtomShockwave said that the brands that have expressed early interest largely target the youth market–clients from the entertainment, soft drink, and snack food industries–many of whom already advertise on AtomFilms.

The company–whose flagship properties are AtomFilms and Shockwave, an online games site–is considering selling video ad inventory against the content, but no decision has been finalized. “We’re going to look long and hard for the right way to do that,” he said. “Those ads are a fantastic element of our businesses on AtomFilms and Shockwave, but part of the appeal of viral and consumer-generated [media] sites is the immediacy–you click and it’s right there.”

About AtomShockwave Corporation

A marketer and distributor of on-demand entertainment, AtomShockwave, Corp. was formed by the 2001 merger of Internet pioneers Shockwave.com and AtomFilms. These powerful brands remain the company’s consumer flagships today. Shockwave.com is the world’s leading destination for interactive entertainment, offering a broad selection of games that attract players of all ages. AtomFilms is where the Web goes to watch movies, providing on-demand viewing of over 1,000 world-class film and animation titles ranging from 1 to 30 minutes in length. The company operates on an innovative, multi-tiered business model featuring advertising, sponsorship, e-commerce, subscription, and distribution revenue streams. Collectively, more than 30 million entertainment fans visit the AtomShockwave sites each month. Based in San Francisco, the company has satellite offices in New York, LA and Chicago as well as a joint venture in Japan.

Joshua Schachter is surrounded by lawyers and his phone is ringing off the hook.  He just sold his two-year old company, del.icio.us, to Yahoo today for an undisclosed sum (estimated to be in the $15 million to $30 $20 million range).  “All I want is to go home and sleep right now,”  says the 31-year-old founder, who started the site as a hobby before quitting his job at Morgan Stanley to build the company.  His nine-person startup has 300,000 registered users, and in the past month or so traffic to del.icio.us has tripled, as more and more people get hooked on posting, tagging, and sharing Web bookmarks with each other.

Social bookmarking site del.icio.us has announced that it has been purchased by Yahoo!

We’re proud to announce that del.icio.us has joined the Yahoo! family.  Together we’ll continue to improve how people discover, remember and share on the Internet, with a big emphasis on the power of community.  We’re excited to be working with the Yahoo! Search team – they definitely get social systems and their potential to change the web. (We’re also excited to be joining our fraternal twin Flickr!)

The deal was also confirmed in a post on the Yahoo! Search blog although terms of the deal were not disclosed.  The acquisition adds another component to Yahoo!’s Web 2.0 and social media strategy.