$10 Million for EveryZing (nee PodZinger)

Multimedia search company EveryZing, known till yesterday as PodZinger, has raised $10 million in Series B funding from Fairhaven Capital, Accel Partners, and General Catalyst, the company announced today.

Along with “dropping the pod” from its name, which is interesting in and of itself, EveryZing is taking strategy of providing media indexing tools to content owners rather than global media search to consumers. Or as new CEO Tom Wilde put it in a phone interview last week, “We are positioning ourselves more towards delivering a media merchandising platform with less emphasis on being a consumer destination.”

That’s the opposite tact of competitors like blinkx, AOL’s Truveo, Pixsy, and CastTV, though a large part of those companies’ business plans is licensing their (global) video search tools to other portals. Among this crowd are a variety of strategies including crawling the web, indexing feeds and public APIs, using speech recognition technology, and using contextual metadata, with no front-runner approach.

While EveryZing has “hundreds of thousands of clips driving seven-figure page views per month on its destination site,” according to Wilde, the company is betting on a different, and it hopes more lucrative, direction. “The consumer portal play is a very tough game,” Wilde said, considering Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask are all trying to have comprehensive search across categories. “Crawling the web is non-trivial and the willingness to pay is pretty low.”

EveryZing’s previous funding of $5 million came from parent BBN Technologies, which it spun off from last year. The company has publicly announced Factiva as a customer and says it has more in the works. EveryZing uses BBN’s speech-to-text technology to help searchers pinpoint where exactly in an audio or video track exists the information they are looking for.

“Our accuracy is less than 100 percent, but the output of the text for search and navigation is extremely useful,” said Wilde.