Kaltura
Kaltura is a software company based in New York which was founded in 2006. Its development team is based in Israel.
Kaltura’s technology allows users to interact and collaborate in rich-media, for example, their video platform supports group-video making and peer production of rich-media. The main components of Kaltura’s online video platform are based on open-source software, enabling any site to add advanced video and rich-media capabilities, and share content across the Kaltura Network of remixable content based on creative commons licensing.
Concept
The concept is built on the collaborative Wiki model but uses media rather than text. Sites can add video capabilities using Kaltura’s hosted services, download the open source community edition, or install self-serve video packages for web-platforms such as MediaWiki, WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, etc. Using Kaltura’s technology, users can create videos by combining existing uploaded media from sharing sites such as MySpace or YouTube with CreativeCommons or public domain sources such as Flickr, ccMixter, Jamendo, and The New York Public Library. Media that can then be embedded and played elsewhere on the Internet.
History
Kaltura was founded in the fall of 2006 by Ron Yekutiel (CEO as of 2008), Dr. Shay David (VP of Community and Business Development as of 2008), Dr. Michal Tsur (a co-founder of Cyota, President and COO as of 2008) and Eran Etam (a co-founder of ICQ, Kaltura’s CTO as of 2008).
Kaltura was launched at the TechCrunch40 industry event in San Francisco on September 18, 2007, and won the People’s Choice award based on a vote of the conference’s attendees. At that time, the company had 20 employees, and had received 2.1 million dollars in funding from business angels and Californian VC fund Avalon Ventures.
On December 21, 2007, Kaltura won the People’s Choice award (over 250,000 users participated in voting) in the Video Sharing category for the Mashable Open Web Awards. In 2008, Kaltura was selected as one of “10 of the most exciting Israeli start ups” by the.co.ils, and as one of the “Global 250 Winners” by AlwaysOn. Kaltura CEO and cofounder Ron Yekutiel was photographed for the article “The Suit, Vers. 3.0″ in Esquire Magazine’s July 2008 edition.
In January 2008, the Wikimedia Foundation and Kaltura announced that they had begun a collaboration aimed at bringing rich-media collaboration to Wikipedia and other wiki websites. The technology behind this project is a form of video-wiki software (open source and still in beta) that is integrated into the Mediawiki platform as an extension, allowing users to add collaborative video players that enable all users to add and edit images, sounds, diagrams, animations and movies in the same manner as they do today with text.
Kaltura was a sponsor of the Wikimania 2008 event, where it announced that it is sponsoring Michael Dale, an open source video developer, to support the further development of a 100% open source video editing solution integrated into MediaWiki.
In addition to support of MediaWiki, Kaltura enables interactive videos integrated within popular CMS and blogging platforms such as WordPress. Kaltura also has several Facebook applications.
Products
Kaltura products include video players, video editors (including a collaborative video editor), a content management system, a WordPress plugin, a Drupal module, a Mediawiki extension, and Ruby and PHP frameworks.
(Quelle: Wikipedia)