Revver: $1 Million In User Payouts In First 12 Months

Social video site Revver has paid $1 million to video producers and their affiliates over the past year, the company says (pdf). Today also marks the service’s one-year anniversary. Revver generates revenue from pre and post roll advertisements that play in video content in their embeddable player.

Revver splits revenue 50/50 with video creators after paying 20% off the top for video distributors (sites that embed the video become distributors). This implies total revenue of $2-2.5 million in the last year depending on if there are distributors to be paid. Of course, if they have sweatheart deals with some content providers, that revenue total could be lower, even significantly lower.

Revver was one of the first and currently is one of the few hosted video sites helping monetize social video for independent publishers. Metacafe currently has a producer rewards program where they pay $100 per 20,000 views. Dailymotion and Youtube are expected to pay their users through advertising revenue as well.

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TringMe: Phone Free Click To Call

Nearly every VOIP related startup has their own click-to-call widget, Jajah, Jangl, Jaxtr, and even GrandCentral. These widgets let you easily and sometimes anonymously set up a call with friends over the web. They’re very useful and come packed with features like voicemail and texting. However, each of these services connects phones to phones, which still eats away at your mobile minutes while you’re talking to that business contact or MySpace hottie.

TringMe offers a bit more flexibility. Callers can ditch their phone and call directly through their Flash widget to your mobile phone, landline, and GTalk (Yahoo and Skype coming soon). All they need is a microphone and one click. Although they’re still in private beta, you can try the demo widget to the right for an idea of the experience.

Similar to the other services, your phone number is kept private and the calls are free (now’s the time for that overseas call). You can also set the widget to just receive voicemails, which are emailed to you, saved on your standard mailbox, or recorded and played back in GTalk. There is one major drawback, though. Since there is no virtual phone number involved, callers have to be at a computer and can’t call you while they’re on the go.

Naturally such an easy and anonymous calling service is susceptible to abuse, and I don’t see any countermeasures in place to keep out prank calls and telemarketers. The other services have verified phone numbers and white/black lists to keep abuse to a minimum. I expect TringMe will have to incorporate similar controls to make people more comfortable with using the widget.

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It’s a Database. It’s a Spreadsheet. It’s Zoho DB.

Zoho is adding another weapon to its arsenal today - Zoho DB - raising its total number of online office applications to 13 (not including four additional “utilities”, or lightweight apps).

Zoho DB is meant to provide developers and database administrators with better ways to manage and digest their data. In a way, it’s like Microsoft Office Access but online and (purportedly) with more powerful features. It also combines aspects of two other Zoho products: Spreadsheets and Creator (although all three will exist as separate, soon interlinked, products intended for different purposes). Whereas Zoho Spreadsheets organizes data in Excel-like spreadsheets and Zoho Creator makes it easy to build database-driven applications, Zoho DB stores data in a database but displays that data as though they were in a spreadsheet. Still with me?

The best way to understand Zoho DB is to actually try it yourself. To start, you can create a new database or simply import an existing spreadsheet (from Zoho Spreadsheets or a desktop application like Excel). Zoho DB will convert that spreadsheet into a database. You can then interact with the data as if it were in a spreadsheet, or you can run queries on it as if it were a database. The application accepts queries in any SQL format (Oracle, SQL Server, DB2, Sybase, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Informix and ANSI SQL dialects).

Once you’re ready to analyze the data, you can take advantage of reporting and charting capabilities that the company claims are comparable to those found in high-end products like Cognos and Crystal Reports. The creation of reports and pivot tables is simplified with a drag-n-drop interface.

There’s a lot of functionality built into Zoho DB, much more than I can explain or even fully understand. Luckily, Zoho has helped us out by providing a nice video tutorial, which we have embedded below. An additional tip: if you are looking for a feature (like running SQL queries) but can’t find it, click on the arrow next to the “New” button in the application and you’ll likely find it there.

Zoho’s parent company is Adventnet, which has been around for 11 years and has never taken any outside funding. Over 150 programmers based in India develop Zoho’s products and were able to take advantage of Adventnet’s SwisSQL product line to gain database expertise (and SwisSQL’s engine to support all SQL formats within Zoho DB). Look for Zoho to add further functionality to Zoho DB, such as the ability to import and export database schemas into and out of Zoho DB.

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