3Crowd Technologies, Inc.

We are moving full-steam ahead and are thrilled to introduce three new additions to the team!

Bill Shetti has come aboard to serve as the director of product. Bill has a wealth of experience in product management from positions with leading companies, including Cisco. His role will be to engineer and shape 3Crowd’s unique product offerings. Most recently, Bill was a senior associate at Storm Ventures. Not to mention, Bill’s gourmet cooking skills elevate 3Crowd’s already fantastic BBQ parties that one extra level.

In an effort to further streamline our upcoming product launches, Nathan Hickson has been named director of operations. We are confident that Nathan’s commitment to our mission will drive our operational success in terms of creativity, efficiency and execution. Nathan is a Google and YouTube veteran who was instrumental in the growth of scalable content delivery and network infrastructure. In addition to keeping operations running smoothly, Nathan can also act as the corporate pilot and HAM radio operator.

Steven Machado is also joining the team as vice president of finance. In this role, Steven will provide leadership and coordination of all company financial activities and functions. Steven is bringing more than 17 years of financial management experience to 3Crowd.

As a founding team member at Exodus Communications, Steven is joining up again with Chris Wallace, our vice president of business development and co-founder, to bring a new expertise to the team that will help drive the company’s growth initiatives.

Both Bill and Nathan bring online content expertise and an understanding of the “big picture” to the table. Adding Steven into the mix not only creates a strong, unified team, but one that will become a driving force in enhancing 3Crowd’s presence in the market. Be on the lookout for exciting things to come from our new newest team members!

In February we introduced the beta of our first product, CrowdDirector. Today we are excited to take that beta label off and launch the full production availability of CrowdDirector.

As if this wasn’t exciting enough, we are also announcing two customers that we have been working with through out this beta period – Break Media and Revision 3.

Break Media is using CrowdDirector across all of its sites, including Break.com to help the company make real-time decisions about how its broad content gets shared and delivered.

In addition to Break Media, we have been working closely with Revision3 for some time now. When talking about this launch, Jim Louderback, CEO of Revision3 said “3Crowd’s vision promises to enable an even more compelling experience beyond CrowdDirector today, and we’re looking forward to working closely with them to find new ways to deliver great video to our audience, while not breaking the bank.”

You can read about some of the specific features of CrowdDirector here on our new solutions page or in the press release that we distributed this morning.

We are excited that we continue to execute our vision and today’s announcement is more proof that content providers are looking to find a profitable balance between creating great content and the cost of delivering it to consumers.

If you are a content provider and are looking for new delivery methods, check out how the benefits of a building a multi-CDN strategy or contact us.

Congratulations to the 3Crowd team that worked hard to move this forward, but we aren’t done yet. Keep an eye out because there is more to come soon from all of us here.

Well that’s a pretty crazy question. Or is it?

YouTube made the world of online video go from highly pixilated vignettes of animation to full-blown native HD live streaming almost overnight. This video explosion also increased the innovation demands on companies that deliver bandwidth, the ability to move bits from one place to another, the “dump truck” behind the “pipes” if you will. However, with the video explosion there were no equal innovations on content providers’ side of the ledger and, as a result, a lot of the online video developers are now struggling to find a profitable balance between creating great content and their cost of delivering it to consumers.

For example, if you have a video with a fixed product placement fee of $1,000, and the video goes viral and costs $10,000 to deliver, the content creator just lost $9,000. Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) and carriers are all designed to allow this to happen and as a result the content creators put less video online, put lower quality video online, and are severely held back from creating their visions.

This begs the question, “what would the world look like if delivery bandwidth were near free and limitless?”

The first major change that comes to mind: more content would become instantly available. Great content would be even better and the creative people restrained by the price of delivering content would be unleashed. Everyone would be focused on how to create superior content, instead of the operating costs of delivering it.

At 3Crowd, we just received a $6.62 million venture investment from our partners at Storm Ventures and Canaan Partners. With that investment (and maybe some more later) and a lot of hard work, we plan to execute this vision: we think we can change the economics of the content delivery systems and make widespread distribution of video more financially feasible. And we think we can make a substantive and positive impact on Internet along the way. If we can help provide tools and subsystems that can enable “the crowd” to harness resources in a new way, we may be able one day to realize a content economy where bandwidth is no longer a restrictive line item on businesses’ operating budgets. If we do our job right, scalable and affordable data delivery will no longer be a pipe dream.

Welcome CrowdMonitor and CrowdDirector

We have been working furiously over the last month on the development of our first two services. The whole team has been dedicated to delivering on our mission of helping companies reduce costs, deliver, and scale their network applications through a healthy ecosystem for data delivery.

With our first services – CrowdMonitor and CrowdDirector, we’re giving the world just a tiny view of the foundation we’re building to enable a new type of Content Delivery System. We are using the idea of a crowd or crowd-sourcing to leverage multiple CDNs that can be monitored, managed and deployed as one single service.

CDNs have been an integral part of the vitality of video on the Net, but we think they are starving the next generation of innovation. The natural evolution of this marketplace has favored the content distributors but the market needs to continue its evolution into a more balanced relationship.

CrowdMonitor and CrowdDirector will give content owners the power to know what’s happening with their content and the tools to dynamically manage their assets. They will have significant implications on performance, vendor flexibility and costs and not only impact the business of current content providers, but also re-orient the economics and invite a new generation of providers to participate in the market.

We have been thoughtful about how we are creating this ecosystem and have been working on it for a while. If we do our job right, Internet streaming will be more affordable than traditional broadcast systems and together will have success.

We will continue to use this forum to announce updates – customers, general availability, etc – so we hope you keep watching.

As I have said before, the Internet is a life-changing technology for everyone and the driving force behind my past ideas and projects. I think that change is critical to moving the Internet closer to something that is stronger and better for everyone.

It is in this vein that I am starting a new business venture – 3Crowd Technologies. It’s in my blood. I can’t stop developing ideas that propel me toward these goals. I am more than excited to unveil this new project, but before I can fully do so, there needs to be some additional hard work and thinking put into it.

I will use this blog to keep everyone updated on 3Crowd Technologies developments. This will be the place where I reveal what is happening on a regular basis and where I unveil what 3Crowd is and how it is transforming the status quo.

Today, I am excited to announce that we have received financing from Storm Ventures, Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson and Greenwich Technology Associates to really give 3Crowd the shot in the arm it needs to take off. I am also joined by Chris Wallace who is helping me build on my past concepts to make this idea a reality – something that will improve people’s interaction with technology.

Stay tuned. It’s going to be a great ride and I can’t wait to tell everyone about it here on this blog.