Pasadena-based Gemstar-TV Guide International Inc. launched its own search engine of popular TV clips last week.
“It’s for the guy who Googles ‘The Office’ and gets, instead of the popular show, hundreds and thousands of results and a video clip on Terry Tate: The Office Linebacker,” said Paul Greenberg, general manager of TV Guide Online.
The new site, at http://video.tvguide.com, offers a specialized search engine with an index of 110,000 searchable video clips. This includes shows like “Grey’s Anatomy” and “Heroes,” along with late night and reality shows and music videos.
The index is comprised of mostly recent shows, but also classics, such as full episodes of “Gilligan’s Island.” Unlike the clips found on YouTube.com, hardly any of the content is user-generated.
Greenberg said the company found that about 70 percent of searches for videos on major search engines were for professional content. But popular viral videos, such as Chris Crocker’s “Leave Britney Alone” video, have made the list.
This is thanks to TV Guide Online editors who roam social networking sites Facebook and MySpace to find out what’s hot in online videos, said Greenberg.
“We’re not the bull horn telling everyone what they should watch, but we’ve really got our finger on the pulse of what people are looking for,” he said.
The site is the company’s way of creating a formidable presence online, comparable to the one offline. Traffic on the online version of the TV magazine is ballooning, unlike the print publication, which has seen a steady decline in circulation in recent years.
In August, 4.9 million users visited TVGuide.com, up 70 percent from last year, according to Nielsen/NetRatings.
Picture Perfecting
Tarzana-based iPhotoMeasure, which has developed computer software called V3 that can calculate the dimensions through photography, has landed a major marketing partner.
The California Space Authority is so impressed with the technology that at no cost to iPhotoMeasure it is marketing the software through consulting firm Partners in Excellence.
“The software essentially provides three-dimensional measurements of any picture,” said Paul Minor, the founder and chief executive of iPhotoMeasure. “If you want to get new drapes or shutters for the house, for example, you just take a picture of the window sill and our software provides the width, length and the depth of the object.”
The software, downloaded onto a computer, can be applied to photos on the computer uploaded from a digital camera.
The product launched last year with about $400,000 in private investments and the company is rolling out the latest version of the software this month. Early next year, the company is releasing V4, which will calculate square-footage, volume and circumference in addition to depth, width and length.
Minor, who runs the company with two part-time employees, said he brings in about $5,000 a month selling the fledgling technology.
Going to School
The Los Angeles Unified School District will use Sherman Oaks-based NTI Group technology to notify parents of emergencies or district news by phone and e-mail.
The second-largest school district in the nation is the six-year-old company’s newest major client, but the NTI Group’s technology is already widely used.
One in six students enrolled in public schools across the country and 1.2 million people in colleges and universities use the system, said Natasha Rabe, the company’s chief business officer.
The company collects e-mail addresses and phone numbers of school districts and, when school officials call into the company’s hotline and record messages, they are distributed to recipients in the form of a voicemail or text message.
NTI Group sends up to 25 million time-sensitive messages each month on behalf of municipalities and schools.
Luxury Linked
Drew Marich, a former eBay executive, is the new chief executive of L.A.-based Luxury Link, a high-end travel Web site.
Marich was most recently the general manager of Rent.com and has held positions at McKinsey & Co., Del Monte Foods and Citigroup’s Smith Barney.
Luxury Link, founded in 1997, operates an online travel site that auctions and sells travel packages through direct marketing agreements with nearly 1,000 resorts, hotels and cruises across the world. The company is backed by El Dorado Ventures and San Francisco Equity Partners.
Staff reporter Booyeon Lee can be reached at (323) 549-5225, ext. 230, or at [email protected].
