Rippol, a bootstrapped video discovery site, launched into private beta today; NewTeeVee readers can get access by following this link. The site aims to harness user activity and demographics to make recommendations as to what to watch from an aggregated library of free premium streaming content (plus Netflix, if you’re a member). The site needs to do a much better job of communicating what exactly it offers, however. It also needs to execute better — my sign-up process through Facebook Connect was way more complicated than it needed to be, and left me anxious that I’d given my credentials to someone who might let them slip.
But yes, Rippol’s a private beta, so let’s focus more on what it’s trying to do: introduce users to online video content they don’t know (or think) they’ll like. Rippol will compete with Clicker, SetJam, ffwd and all the big online TV aggregators like TV.com and Fancast.
San Diego, Calif.-based Rippol is 10 months old and has nearly 20 employees, most of them engineers working on something they’re calling “The Butterfly Effect Network.” It uses a combination of user action and feedback monitoring, friend relationships, and data mining from public sources like Twitter and blogs to make video recommendations. The system spits out impressive but vague statements like “This query cross-referenced 85780 vectors.” Founder Aaron Crayford recently sold his last startup, a competitor to Move Networks that was called Vusion (our coverage), to the non-profit Clarendon Foundation for an undisclosed amount.
{"source":"https:\/\/gigaom.com\/2009\/10\/23\/rippol-wants-to-affect-how-you-find-video\/wijax\/49e8740702c6da9341d50357217fb629","varname":"wijax_f82cac5f91529a64dfee383f1b4cee44","title_element":"header","title_class":"widget-title","title_before":"%3Cheader%20class%3D%22widget-title%22%3E","title_after":"%3C%2Fheader%3E"}