vtap Syncs Video Search from Mobile to Web

vtap, a video search service for mobile phone, is doing something a little crazy. It’s taking an app it designed for mobile phones to the web — usually things go the other direction. The company, which first launched for the iPhone and Windows Mobile last fall, then formatted itself for a WAP version in December, is now launching an improved web site that syncs personalized video feeds across all its versions.

vtap, which is made by an Andover, Mass.-based company called Veveo, has gotten modest traction, along with deals with Verizon and Motorola. It has registered 750,000 users and has notched 14 million page views.

Three-year-old Veveo isn’t a lightweight operation — it has $28 million in funding and pays 60 employees — so it has to hope that hordes of people start having a hankering for place-shifting their web video pretty soon.

The company is focusing all those resources on crawling and semantically classifying all the web’s video. vtap has some 150 million videos in its index. But the company isn’t monetizing its service yet, and doesn’t plan to do so until the third quarter of this year, according to vtap general manager Daren Gill. The last time Veveo took money was in May of 2007, and Gill said the company is not currently fundraising.

vtap’s interface is pretty simple: users search for as they would on any other video search engine, though this one has handy predictive text. That lands them on an algorithmically organized page. If they find a topic they like, they can subscribe. If they find a video they like, they can save it and access it from another device.