Vote for Kyte!

Greetings Kyte community!

Thanks to you all for helping Kyte get nominated for the best mobile application category of VentureBeat’s MobileBeat 2008 awards!  We’re very honored by this nomination and grateful for your continued use of the Kyte platform.

To win the award, we need you to vote for Kyte in the Application Companies category.

Please note that you will need to register in order to vote.

You are allowed to make up to five votes — once every 24 hours. 

So vote today and let’s show the world why Kyte rocks!

Thank you.

Kyte comScore stats

Most people familiar with Kyte understand that we’re not a destination, but an enabling technology. We have no interest in driving traffic to kyte.tv. Instead, our platform is designed to encourage deep user engagement of our partner’s content through the Kyte Player, both on our partner’s destination sites and everywhere else the player spreads virally. So, it was very refreshing to see the TechCrunch post today about Justin.TV’s Birthday Stats. The post included comScore stats, which, unlike Alexa ratings, actually take into account our Player embeds, which for us is a key measurement of the value we bring to our partners. Check out the graphic below (we’re in yellow):

So what’s behind the steep increase in Kyte uniques and why does it show no sign of slowing down? There are two things this validates for us: 1) our strategy around branded content distribution is working; and 2) although we now offer live streaming, we still believe the key to deep user engagement and viral content distribution is offering short, compelling “behind the scenes” reality-based content, or “super UGC” as some in the media have started calling it. These stats are proof of this and the trend shows no sign of slowing down. Live streaming is neat and we have a lot of fun playing with it, but a twenty minute live stream video clip just doesn’t have the long term value, both in terms of viral potential and monetization, as a killer 2 minute recorded video created by someone the public really cares about.

New funding / strategic partnerships

This morning we announced new funding from Telefónica, Nokia Growth Partners and DoCoMo Capital, among others. You can download the press release here if you’re so inclined. For us, the most exciting thing about this announcement is the massive distribution potential of partnering with world leaders in communications and mobility. Daniel explains it best in this conversation with Robert Scoble below:

Here’s another Kyte show I produced from my Nokia N95 while Scoble produced an instant Kyte webcam show, which he posted to his blog.