Chinese ‘YouTube’ gets $12 M

YoQoo, a Chinese video sharing and social network site founded by Victor Koo of Sohu fame, has received $12 million in private equity funding from a team of American and Chinese venture capital firms.

My initial reaction, based upon the screenshot below, was that YoQoo looks eerily similar to a certain site recently purchased by Google. But in Chinese. My second reaction was to subscribe to the RSS feed for China’s funniest home videos. The site launches ‘officially’ on the 21st.

Other interesting funding news involves two Israeli B2B-P2P application developers, Oversi and BeInSync, who were also given a few million bucks from VCs. While not strictly video-related, this trend shows that there’s legitimate business interest in advanced file sharing technology — hopefully deflating some of the anti-P2P rhetoric which often conflates file sharing with piracy.