3VR Lands Major New Round of Funding
Congratulations to our client, 3VR, who last week announced $12 million in new funding from Menlo Ventures — a testament to the growing market for searchable surveillance solutions and incredible momentum the company has established in the security industry.
Started five years ago, 3VR makes searchable surveillance technology that is used by big banks, cities, hotels and retailers to more effectively solve fraud, theft and other crimes. 3VR essentially does for video what Google did for the Web and what TiVo does for television — organizing unstructured data to drive smarter, more effective applications. In this case, the application is video surveillance.
Today, the company has more than 600 customers, a who’s who in retail and banking (including the governments of Chiapas and Korea), and is the video surveillance platform of choice for leading security channels including Diebold, Ingersoll Rand and others. 3VR also leads the market with the largest private facial recognition deployment in the world, the most accurate facial surveillance recognition technology and the industry’s most sophisticated integrated video management solution overall.
Please see our previous blog post, “3VR: The New Wave of Crimefighting“, for more information on the company, or click through to In Hard Focus, the founder’s blog, for further insight into surveillance and security industry trends.
Fair Syndication Consortium: A New Path to Online Content Syndication
The news and online publishing industry is in the midst of a period of radical change as content moves toward an increasingly more digital distribution. One of the biggest questions circulating in the media industry is how to adapt to these new realities, and a key area that needs to be addressed to that end involves how content is syndicated.
Late last month, LaunchSquad client Attributor announced that the Fair Syndication Consortium, a group of publishers devoted to keeping content available online while ensuring fair compensation through ad network participation, has reached over more than 1,000 publishers and secured support from ad network AdBrite.
These publishers comprise of a diverse group: over 50 percent of the top U.S. newspaper publishers have joined along with bloggers, news wires, and magazines to rally around a new syndication model based on Attributor’s FairShare service. For members such as Thomson Reuters, Huffington Post, Deutsche Presse-Agentur (DPA), The New York Times and hundreds of other online producers, the Fair Syndication Consortium is a big step in the right direction.
The issue of monetizing content online can only be shoved to the background for so long before it becomes a pressing issue. Feedback from various publications such as The New York Times,The Washington Post, NPR, PaidContent, The Guardian and the AP would seem to indicate that the time for ignoring the problem has passed, and it is now crucial to resolve this dilemma.
Meanwhile, Attributor is blazing the path and revolutionizing the way content will be digested in the future. As media changes, Attributor is helping to ensure that news and information will still be widely available for everyone to read and use in the future.