Category Archives: Dabble Press

Dabble In Insidebayarea.com

Site helps fans play with videos.
By Janis Mara

A GUINEA PIG SPROUTS Romaine lettuce wings and soars aloft to a song by TMarie, a housewife shares her recipes for perfect chocolate chip cookies, and PresidentBush “sings” U2’s “Sunday Bloody Sunday” in the top 10 video playlists on Berkeley-based video Web site Dabble.com.
The site, launched just two months ago by Mary Hodder of Berkeley, makes it possible to search through 2.6 million high-resolution video films online, then tag and organize them

Dabble Mentioned In Forbes.com – Gives Mary An Honorary Professorship at CAL

So Forbes has a Mention of us in this strange “The Next YouTube” piece it ran.
Careful, when you launch the link, to look for the “stop” link right away, right above the “The Next YouTube” title, or it will start cycling through a bunch of other pages. I’m not sure what effect they’re trying for, but the one they’ve got is definitely as annoying as hell 🙂
But nevertheless, of course, nice to see Dabble mentioned in Forbes. And they seem to like us.
Oh yeah – they made Mary a Cal Professor too 🙂
From
the article:

Make Your Own Channel
With user-generated photos and videos pouring out of dozens of me-too sites, smart aggregation tools are an obvious next step: Someone needs to keep track of all this stuff. One such solution is Dabble, lauched by University of California-Berkeley professor Mary Hodder in July. Dabble retrieves videos from users

Dabble Featured In USA Today

Dabble was written up in USA Today!

Silicon Valley starts to party like it’s 1999

The eight employees of digital media start-up Dabble work out of a cheap office, decorated mainly with sticky notes, not far from San Francisco.
They work long hours for below-market rates. Their boss, CEO Mary Hodder, is a 39-year-old Internet expert who has never started or run a company before.
Dabble has received funding from angel investors. But it must fight dozens of other start-ups for attention. And when they finally get off work, the Dabble team grapples with heavy traffic, crowded restaurants and outrageous housing prices.
But it’s all OK, because Hodder and her crew are convinced that their company offers a compelling online service that will be a huge success – and will make their stock options pay off.
Sound a lot like 1999? Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area, the world’s technology hub, is starting to buzz again for the first time since the dot-com bust. The Valley’s infamous start-up community is coming back, thanks to Dabble and its contemporaries. New powerhouses such as Google, eBay and Yahoo are driving growth and hiring workers. Stalwarts such as Hewlett-Packard and Oracle are reporting stronger sales and posting higher stock prices.

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Dabble Called A “Cool 2.0 Website” In the SF Chronicle

The SF Chronicle did a roundup of cool web 2.0 sites, and we made it!
It’s by Dan Fost and Ellen Lee.

Dabble
Web address: www.dabble.com
Where they are: Berkeley
What they do: A TV Guide for Internet video, the site lets users tag and rate clips found throughout the Web. Viewers form communities based on their interests, helping sort the Web’s top videos on such topics as baking a dessert and Japanese animation.
The skinny: Even before the company’s premiere, Dabble Chief Executive Officer Mary Hodder was quoted in Newsweek and featured in a series of technology conferences. Now it must prove that it can easily help users find the gems without wading through all the junk on the Internet.
The competition: Though it counts YouTube and other online video sites as its partners, it also competes with them for attention in this crowded and popular space.

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Dabble Gets Mentioned In Businessweek Article


By for Abram Sauer for Brandchannel for Businessweek. (Yeah, I don’t the relationship between brandchannel and business week either.)

YouTube’s own challengers are advancing at a rapid rate. AOL is re-engineering its video site to mirror YouTube’s success, and CNN is launching CNN Exchange, which will house user-contributed video features. Then there are sites like Eefoof.com, Panjea.com, Revver and Blip.TV, which share up to 50 percent of ad page revenue with the creator of the videos. Others like Dabble.com (currently in beta) sort through all video hosting sites (like YouTube and its competition) for search content, while specialty video sites like Pornotube concentrate on one point of interest.

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SF Gate On The Video Scene – Dabble Gets A Nice Mention!

SF Gate did a little ditty on the video hosting scene (that we’re vigorously tracking at Dabble) and how it looks like some of the smaller hosts might start consolidating soon.
Dabble, of course, isn’t a hosting service, we’re a video searching/social networking site that can help you find video across all hosters.
Here are some quotes from Ellen Lee’s article. Funny how she first talks about companies “dabbling” in video, then goes on to actually talk about Dabble.

By one count, about 240 sites now dabble in online video. And chances are many won’t survive the next year. Some will simply shut down; others likely will be gobbled up by larger companies…
Dabble, a Berkeley startup, plans to start its online video search site this week. It lets users search for and collect video from other sites on a personal page; members can also join communities on topics such as cooking, where they help identify the best the Web has to offer on cooking-related videos.
For several months, as part of the database it’s building, Dabble has been tracking the growing number of online video sites, which by its count has reached nearly 240.
Not all will last, said Dabble founder Mary Hodder. But if cable and satellite television can have more than 200 channels, Hodder said, why can’t the Internet? And why can’t there be something like Dabble to act as a TV Guide for the Web? (Incidentally, TV Guide offers an editorial guide online on the latest, most entertaining video clips and shows on the Web, though it’s mainly focused on traditional Hollywood fare from Lifetime, Comedy Central, Disney and others.)
“When you turn on your TV, do you just go to NBC?” Hodder said. “If (the online video sites) are creative and provide different services, then they can end up thriving.”