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Stanford professor Fei Fei Li said, “visual data is truly the ‘dark matter’ of the internet”.  While mainstream mobile devices enable consumers to easily capture and upload video in a few clicks, other than limited metadata, developers and publishers have no way to analyze, or draw conclusions from this unstructured data.  Consumers watch over 6 billion hours of videos on YouTube per month – 100 hours of content is posted on YouTube alone per minute – and that volume will continue to increase.  Several companies (e.g. Ditto Labs, Image Vision) have developed impressive image recognition technology to provide advanced analytics on photos; however, due to its level of complexity, few technologists have applied computer vision to video analytics. While text-based contextual targeting has been widely accessible to publishers and marketers for years, the rich visual data contained within video has remained a locked box.

We are pleased to announce our investment in Dextro, a computer vision company whose technology enables businesses to search, filter, query, and capture actionable insights from their video and photo content.  This platform determines the presence, absence and prominence of any brand logo, object, and scenery in photos or long form video content.  Automated visual analysis allows for efficient categorization and online media targeting, addressing the lack of transparency surrounding competitive tracking, product placement, use cases, or campaign engagement.  Online video is growing faster than most other advertising formats, and is projected to reach $5B in 2016.  SSPs, DSPs, premium publishers, video ad networks and large media companies can leverage Dextro's technology to provide a much more intelligent video ad product through visual-based contextual targeting.

Today, awe.sm, a kbs+ Ventures portfolio company, released a major new product, their first product built for marketers. As awe.sm explains:

The focus of the new awe.sm for marketers is tracking the full funnel — from reach to revenue — of each social post by your marketing team. awe.sm for marketers takes all the attribution and ROI measurement capabilities of the awe.sm platform and packages them up in a way that enables social media marketers to quantify the success of their efforts in real business terms, like traffic, conversions, and even revenue.

As Techcrunch explains,

The new product focuses on attribution and conversion rates of various social networks — including Facebook and Twitter. It allows clients to see which channels have the greatest reach, which means counting all the likes, shares, tweets, and retweets. More importantly, though, it keeps track of various conversion and sales metrics based on social sharing.

Earlier today Darren Herman, President of kbs+ Ventures, shared his thoughts on the release of awe.sm for marketers:

Why I got excited about what...awe.sm is doing, is because it helps clients like BMW (our kbs+ client) and others measure the impact of social media marketing. If sharing means caring, then you might as well know who cares about you the most. awe.sm now does this.

(Read his full post here). 

More coverage on the launch of Awe.sm for Marketers:

awe.sm Blog

Pandodaily

Techcrunch

AllThingsD

Last week, kbs+ Ventures launched "Creative Entrepreneurship", a curated informational and inspirational aid for entrepreneurs. The book brings together 25 contributors from the world of venture capital and entrepreneurship around the topics of how to build a business, how to fundraise, how to hire, and a number of other strategic and tactical topics for entrepreneurs.

Download "Creative Entrepreneurship" to read for free.

We're hiring a Venture Associate Intern (Winter-Spring 2013). Here's the details.

Who we are

kbs+ Ventures is the early-stage investment arm of the marketing services agency kbs+. We invest in early-stage (Seed and Series A) entrepreneurs focusing on innovation in advertising and marketing technologies. More about kbs+ Ventures, our portfolio, our investment and acceleration philosophy, and our team is at http://kbsp.vc

Who we’re looking for

Venture Associate Intern to assist with identifying and assessing potential investments and creating and distributing external communications. 

Roles and Responsibilities

Assist in identifying and assessing potential investments

Assist in creating thoughtful, analytical research and case studies about innovation in advertising and marketing technology for distribution throughout kbs+, our clients, our portfolio entrepreneurs, and the broader industry.

Assist with Ventures external communications including research reports, newsletters, blogs and social media.

Skills and Requirements

Background in digital advertising preferred; at the minimum, a desire to develop a deep understanding of marketing and advertising technology is required.

Skills required include broad-based analytical skills, ability to understand and explain complex systems clearly through writing, and a passion for technology and entrepreneurship in general.

MBA-level internship.

This position is part-time (10 hours a week) from January 2013 to June 2013 and based in the office of the advertising agency kbs in Soho, New York, NY. Start ASAP.

Contact

Contact Taylor Davidson at tdavidson(at)kbsp.vc to discuss. Please send:

A summary of your background and interest

Links to your online presence (Twitter, LinkedIn, blog, etc.)