Intel Capital, in its own typical manner of announcing investments in bulk, has said that it has invested 23 companies, of which $77 million are in 18 new investments. Of these investments, at least three have operations in India: Shufflr.tv, BuzzInTown and Verismo:
– Shufflr.tv: As we’d reported in July, Bangalore based Althea Systems has raised $3 million. Althea runs the social video browser Shufflr.tv, and has a content distribution and recommendation platform called Shufflefeed. Shufflr.tv has content agreements with NDTV, Reuters, CNBC-TV18, BigFlix in India, the BBC and MSNBC in the UK, and with Brightcove which aggregates a large number of content providers. They’re also aggregating content from YouTube, DailyMotion, Metacafe and Yahoo Videos. Shufflr.tv is an Adobe Air application, and they intend to use the funding for rolling out video distribution on smartphones, tablets and TVs, as well as trying out business models – affiliate, device based (Boxee) model, a featured search content and premium content model. More here.
– BuzzInTown: not one of the new investments, but Intel Capital has also made an undisclosed follow-on investment in Wortal, which owns and operates the India based events listing site BuzzInTown. BuzzInTown has recently rolled out a daily deals service (one of many in India to do so), in beta.
– Verismo Networks: is among the new investments from Intel Capital. Verismo, enables OEMs and MSO’s to offer Internet content browsing to TV. In Bangalore, Verismo powers the VuNow Internet content service for IPTV service provider ACT (Atria Convergence Technologies), which is among the first MSO’s in the country to launch IPTV services. Frankly, there appears to be an overlap between what Verismo and Shufflr are doing. More in Verismo’s rollout in Bangalore.
Apart from these three, possibly the most interesting investment is in the Netherlands based Layar, which is an augmented reality platform for mobile phones, which allows viewing of local business information and location based games in a completely new way, with layers of content. Layar has nearly 1,500 layers for users to view information for Android, iPhone and Bada. It’s difficult to explain how it works, so take a look at the video:
