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Great blog post by Loic Le Meur, Founder of Seesmic, explaining how he formed the company and raised his intial investment. what’s that old adage? - Oh yes - ‘ its not what you know, it is who you know’.

I closed the initial funding of Seesmic in September 2007. The main investment came from Atomico’s Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis (they invested $5.5 million on the $6 million). Talking to bloggers all the time, I have not been very good at keeping the secret as Om Malik was the first to talk about it on October 8, 2007. On November 28, Liz Gannes got almost the entire list of investors right. We have never really hidden the funding as a partial investor list was even on our company backgrounder at the last Demo conference (by the way see our DEMO video if you want to learn about Seesmic in 6 minutes). So the only real news today is the full list of investors.

We should have made it “officially” public for a while but I did not want to do it until all the paperwork was done and signed. That happened last week. Getting 14 investors on board – most of whom are individuals and not through funds - takes time.

Niklas Zennstrom and I have been friends for years and we have been wanting to launch a project together for a while. We both know that the media that has not really changed since the growth of the Internet is TV. Most of our friends do not watch TV anymore or watch it only with a laptop on their knees. TV will totally change in the future, we all know that. While Niklas and Janus are focusing on the high end video content with Joost, I have always been fascinated by the conversations.

I explained to Niklas that for me, the quality of conversations that I have enjoyed on blogs and social software since 2003 had to happen in video and that simply isn’t happening yet. I said I wanted to make this happen and make it my next company and Niklas immediately [Read more]

Tags: AOL, Goldman Sachs, Google, IPRO, Joost, LinkedIn, Pulver, Seesmic, Skype, SofTech VC, SupportSoft, TechCrunch, Topica

Joost just lost its CTO, Dirk-Willem van Gulik is to join the BBC next month to become their Chief Technical Architect.

vanGulik will join fellow Dutchman Erik Huggers, BBC Future Media and Technology Controller and will be tasked with developing a new-look infrastructure which Huggers described will “.. embrace … audio and video all the way up to HD quality”. It will encompass web, interactive TV and mobile.

In another moove Joost is hiring Matt Zelesko as SVP of engineering.

Zelesko has a history with Joost CEO Mike Volpi, sharing some years at Cisco. Zelesko will manage engineers on both sides of the Atlantic and himself joins Joost’s management board.

Tags: BBC, Cisco, Joost

I don’t know about you but with 200 TV channels to go at I can’t find anything to watch most nights. It the usual story - soaps, reality TV (is there such a thing?), quiz shows, depress-u-dramas and third rate made-for-tv movies. So I increasingly turn to the web for my entertainment. As more and more deals are done I find I can watch some pretty interesting stuff, usually music or comedy centric shows or video clips. It is with a warm (well- tepid) heart that I report that MTV Networks has cut several online syndication deals with web sites.

MTV will supply short-form content to Veoh, GoFish, imeem, MeeVee and Dailymotion. These deals augment existing arrangements with AOL, Joost, MSN, Bebo and Comcat’s Fancast.

Tags: AOL, Bebo, Comcast, Dailymotion, Fancast, GoFish, imeem, Joost, MeeVee, MSN, MTV, Veoh

The National Basketball Association (NBA) and Joost have announced the launch of the NBA Channel on Joost. The new channel will provide fans around the world with viewing access to “Instant Classic” NBA games and video highlight packages for the remainder of the 2007-08 NBA season.

As part of the new relationship, the NBA Channel will feature complete replays of memorable NBA games, including the Los Angeles Lakers’ Kobe Bryant’s 81-point game against the Toronto Raptors on January 22, 2006, and the Cleveland Cavaliers’ LeBron James’ sensational performance in Game 5 of the 2007 Eastern Conference Finals against the Detroit Pistons, in which he scored the Cavaliers’ final 25 points to lead his team to a 109-107 double-overtime victory.

www.joost.com

Tags: Joost, NBA

Bodog Entertainment is to bring its stable of programme offerings to the Joost internet tv platform. Bodog Entertainment will provide a variety of episodes of Bodog Fight, such as Bodog Fight: Costa Rica Combat, which was filmed on the beaches and in the jungles of Costa Rica with some of today’s top mixed martial arts talent. There will also be shows from Bodog Fight: Paradise Lost and music videos from Bodog Music artists Bif Naked, Neurosonic, The Vincent Black Shadow and others.

As Bodog and Joost develop the Bodog channel, more programming will be added, including the $1 million band search competition Bodog Music Battle of the Bands, poker shows, more music videos, great behind-the-scenes and making-of footage, Internet-only exclusives and more.

www.joost.com, www.bodoglife.net

Tags: Bodog Entertainment, Joost