| Founded | 2005 |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Office location | San Francisco, CA & Beijing, China |
| Website | http://www.veeker.com/, |
Veeker was a mobile-to-Internet video communication service and social networking site.
Veeker was founded in September 2005, and was an early innovator in the evolution of mobile communication from audio and text to video. Veeker was headquartered in San Francisco, CA, and operated a wholly owned subsidiary in Beijing, China, headed by Daniel Raynaud. Veeker was co-founded by Rodger Raderman (a founder of iFilm, a user-video upload site long preceding YouTube, now CEO of NukoToys), Alex Kelly, Marcus Yoder, Raj Singh (founder of ToneThis, one of the earliest ringtone creation software as of 2004).
Veeker's first fully operational demo was co-designed by an art team led by Ali Ebtakar of Blurred Whisper, and the technical team initially led by Arthur Sulit (founder of MuSeeks.com, and inventor of potentially the first Ringtone-Creation-in-browser plugin, Snip-n-Send, patent-pending as of 2004) and his developmental entity Prime Meridian Consulting in partnership with Clint Mario's Bogex, LLC. On the strength of this demo, by Mid 2006, Veeker raised approximately $1.5m first round, in addition to private investments prior, totalling over $2m. One of its platform clients throughout 2007 and 2008 was NBC news, for uploading local citizen-journalism content from cell phones. Veeker closed its doors around 2009.
During its early inception phase in late 2005, MySpace was the rage, and YouTube was brand new, had not been acquired by Google yet. Veeker founders initially wanted to explore innovating in similar spaces as YouTube and MySpace, or in mobile video games, an area of expertise brought in later with Daniel Raynaud's ThumbJive (later acquired by Veeker). However internal discussions, including rationales written up by Rodger Raderman, Arthur Sulit, and Raj Singh, identified mobile video as yet unclaimed territory and strongly differentiating factors. Veeker then tasked Arthur's team to focus upon mobile video, plus a platform for social networking among users. By May 2006, the first demo was ready, and aggressive fundraising commenced.
Among its early contributions prior to the advent of smart phones, was one of the first platforms supporting near-real-time upload of cellphone photos, social network-enabled mobile-video sharing, back in 2006, just prior to the arrival of the iPhone. For instance, one of its platform features, enabled citizens to upload mobile videos to their profile page from wherever they were at, such as at a sports event, or news location, and post the video for public viewing within seconds from their cell phone, entirely through specially encoded SMS texting to Veeker's servers from wherever the user is at, without needing to log into any internet browser. More advanced demos developed by Arthur's team, included MMS modem stations attached directly to Veeker servers, allowing users to effectively bypass their local Carrier's SMS and MMS gateways (and the steep fees associated with each send), to upload media content directly, to Veeker servers.
According to IDC, during the period between 2005 and 2009, 2.4 billion mobile phones equipped with video cameras were projected to enter the global marketplace. Veeker believed that mobile video communication will become pervasive, and was indeed one of a handful which were among the earliest adapters in that space. However, during May 2006, when Veeker's first demo was rolled out, difficulties in rapid-market adaption included potentially, that Internet-enabled smartphones and subscription plans were still highly expensive, small-screened, not user-friendly and unpopular, the primary modes of cellphone messaging being SMS, with few customers paying for MMS enabled plans. However, the website itself, with its Profile pages, and friends-of-friends ability to share selected videos or pictures, on a scrolling window, were considered innovative for its time. Many advanced features of Flash, integrated with then-emergent JavaScript libraries (before the popularity of JQuery today), were used, allowing users to interact intuitively with and organize their uploads or shares.
Veeker's platform supported both SMS and MMS methods pioneered by Arthur's technical team, somewhat guided by fresh experience from Arthur's and Raj's respective Ringtone Software ventures (both of whom met by being former competitors in the ringtone space), which also exploited SMS methods to link audio media from users onto web servers. These types of features, and drastically lowered price of smartphone plans, became commonplace only a year or two later, after the iPhone was released in June 29, 2007. By then, Veeker was unable to secure second-round funding, and was unable to capitalize on the early advantage they had, prior to YouTube and many other sites offering similar mobile-video-upload and share features. One Patent was filed, regarding another feature, but it remains speculative if there were indeed other then-patentable features which might have formed a defensible IP base.