Animoto will turn your home videos into a work of art

"I don't know about you, but I get shown so many boring slideshows of my friends' trips," says Hsiao. "It's like 20 minutes, and you're like, ‘Kill me now.'"

It was this boredom that inspired Hsiao and Stevie, who were working in TV and film production at the time, to envision much more. They identified the disparity between the low-quality videos online and the high quality of TV and film and knew they could do something about it. They also saw how digital photography is transforming the way people take photos. Once unthinkable, now it's not so unusual to snap hundreds of photos of a single event. "We kind of realized that if the ways people capture experiences are changing, then the way we share those experiences should also be evolving," says Hsiao.

The process that led from the conception of the idea to the birth of Animoto took a year and a half, and along the way, Jefferson and Tom joined in on the vision. Extensive research and development went into perfecting the Cinematic Artificial Intelligence technology that powers the video-creation process and ensures that no two videos are alike. "[The technology] takes a body of music, looks at all the nuances--like the beat, the tempo and the energy--and figures out how to juxtapose the imagery on top of that so the whole thing feels like one consolidated piece that evokes the intended emotional experience," explains Jefferson.

Since its launch in August 2007--and with funding from family, friends and Amazon.com reaching into the seven figures, as of press time--the web application hasn't disappointed. More than 300,000 users from more than 200 countries have already registered at Animoto.com, more than 2 million Facebook users have signed up since the application was introduced to the social networking site last March, and more than 4 million videos have been created. Although 30-second videos are free to users, longer videos cost $3 each.

Animoto might not have advanced if not for the perfect blending of each founder's skills and talents. "With Tom studying music, Stevie and I working in the TV and film industry here in New York, and Brad with his extensive business background, this was the only team that could do this," says Hsiao. "It perfectly leverages all our backgrounds and our relationship."

Friends since high school, they knew they were destined to do something together. And through the years, they have. While attending Dartmouth College, Jefferson, Hsiao and Stevie created the Dartmouth Interactive Directory, which was an innovative blend of Craigslist and Facebook--six years before Facebook even existed. But Animoto proved to be the ultimate venture, capturing their imaginations and bringing them together once more

via entrepreneur.com

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