Divvio, a website that offers to organize online video and audio clips in what Red Herring likens to “TV Guide for the web,” begins beta testing today. By choosing preferences, users can form their own personal guide to online content. Divvio Chairman and CEO Hossein Eslambolchi, the former CTO at AT&T, has raised more than $3 million in angel money so far.
Divvio only points users toward content, it doesn’t store it, so copyright is not an issue. Eslambolchi believes advertisers will be attracted to Divvio because it tracks user preference and therefore steer marketers to appropriate sites. He also expects to form partnerships and licensing agreements with social networks, device manufacturers, and mobile carriers.
BusinessWeek: It’s an ambitious goal, backed by technology of mind-numbing complexity…with a technology he calls alip, for “adaptive learning intelligent process.” First, Divvio’s software trawls the Web, indexing content not just by subject or title, but by bandwidth, duration, and over a dozen other attributes. Then a “personalization engine” matches each consumer’s desires to this data base…finally Divvio servers will stitch the segments together in milliseconds, regardless of what media format they were coded in.
Divvio will crawl only 750,000 sites at first, a tiny fraction of the entire Web, and because alip needs time to learn. Divvio figures it will only hit the mark 10 percent of the time for its first customers; he says that will grow to 60 percent by yearend.