Adactus is a Norwegian startup providing cross-platform content delivery systems. Adactus aims to enable broadcast television and other content providers to increase their market reach to mobile to get new customers and revenue.

Adactus enables broadcasters to offer controlled and optimized live video and video-on-demand services with best possible quality to a variety of different mobile terminals, also simultaneously on both web and mobile. The optimization of content can be done based on the delivery network environment, and end-user handset capabilities and preference, while the content provider can control and monitor the content consumption with DRM and other tools. Adactus’ products support live or on-demand streaming of, download of, and subscriptions to video content. The company’s technology also allows for personalized or location-based commercials in different forms like tickers, images, and movies.

Adactus has taken part in the standardization of MPEG-21 multimedia framework, which forms the core of the company’s products. The technology makes it possible to adapt content to specific environments and handsets, based on for example screen resolution, color depth, video- and audio codecs available. The adaptation can also be done based on network capabilities and user preferences.

The publicly-traded Norwegian company Vizrt has a minority stake in Adactus.

Toivo Tänavsuu has posted a blog post at The NextWeb site about a video telephoning solution being backed by Skype founders. The project is being run under the name of Inkspin1. The service itself is trying to bring free online telephony to the everyday life of people through television. Inkspin1 is currently being hatched in the Ambient Sound Investments incubator.

The goal of the project is to make the service as simple to use as possible. “Today, we have a solution for computer users. Yet, for an average home user, video calling is too difficult and thus they are not taking advantage of the opportunity. Our goal here is to make such calls equally easy for kids as well as parents. So that if people know how to turn on the TV and change channels, they would know how to make video calls,” Martin Villig, the leader of the project explains.

The product development is carried out in Estonia, but the software development is being worked on in Beijing, China.Villig says that the amount of coders needed for a job this wide are more plentiful in China than in Estonia. Also in China they are closer to the vendor manufacturers that are expected to partner with Inkspin1 to integrate the necessary devices to their televisions to enable Television Video Telephony. The unit in China is being run by a Finn, Jussi Nyfelt, who has been working for Nokia in China.

Inkspin1 is still very much at a design stage as Villig states that the service is expected to be up and running in one to two years. Inkspin1 is currently recruiting lots of different talents.

It’s interesting to see ASI working hard on bringing a consumer service to the masses through better usability. The idea itself is nothing new, but then again it’s all in the execution. I’m guessing there are tons of ideas like this waiting to be improved. Yet further proof that you don’t always have to come up with a new idea to become an entrepreneur.

RunToShop beta is live for public (Only in Finnish at this stage). Earlier on the site opened briefly for a group of about 200 alpha users that were able to play with the functionality, give feedback and help the team find bugs in the service. Now the public test beta is open to everybody. Below Taneli Tikka, RunToShop CEO, gives me a run down on the idea and their strategy on fast growth:

As you see in this video taken just before I wrote my previous post on the start-up, Taneli actually explaines that the site was only an early demo at the time and NOT an actual beta yet, which I failed to acknowle in my blog post. I hope to do more justice to the service and the guys working hard on it in the future. Moreover, we want to give big credit for everybody at RunToShop for taking the bold move of testing things out very publicly very early in the game.

Muxlim TV, a video sharing website of the Finnish based Muslim social media website that attracts visitors from over 190 countries, has produced a rather nifty commercial.

The video reminds me an awful lot about the commercials that Apple makes. I believe the guys at Muxlim tried to do exactly that, which is why it works so well. Great stuff!

I had a brief chat with Sorosh Tavakoli, the CEO of VideoPlaza - a Stockholm based Swedish startup, about how they are helping to monetize online video. YouTube, among many others, has proved that online video is definitely a big winner in the way people decide to spend their time online. However, as many media companies have shown - the single most important problem remains; how do you monetize this in a proper way?

VideoPlaza set off with this in mind when the company was founded in August 2007. They currently have a licensable platform for serving, managing and presenting ads in online video content. The technologies they use are either Adobe Flash or Microsoft Silverlight. They charge their clients with a single startup-fee and a scalable fee based on served ads and bandwidth. VideoPlaza states Kanal5, WarnerBros, Opel, H&M and Arla as their current clients as a proof of big clients approving their products.

Sorosh was in the UK during the European Summer holidays and networking with local agencies and companies working with and around online video. He writes in his latest blog entry that the UK and Swedish market are very much alike and “a lot will happen in the next two years”. He also states four dominant charasteristics that pretty much sum up the current immaturity of the market: 1) Pre-roll domination, 2) Confusion on monetization, 3) Lack of ad format standards and 4) Inadequate metrics and reporting.

He doesn’t want to reveal too much regarding his plans on UK, but he is currently in talks with several large publishers and I’m sure we’re going to hear some news from VideoPlaza during the autumn.