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Advertising - Monday, April 2, 2007

Ron Conway Invests in Online Video's ScanScout

Cambridge, MA-based ScanScout has raised $2M from a prestigious list of angel investors led by Ron Conway who said he normally invests $50K in technology but he anted up $150K. "It's clearly the highest growth market on the Internet to be investing in today," says Conway.

Other investors are First Round Capital, Mike Philips (founder of SpeechWorks), Chris Dixon (founder of (SiteAdvisor) and the William Morris Agency. The 11-person company is looking to raise $5M to $10M in venture capital after launch.

ScanScout which expects to launch within weeks is something like Adsense for video. It monitors video content's spoken text, audio and images in order to select related advertisements that run just below the video screen. The technology was developed by a couple of MIT dorm mates and its CEO, Doug McFarland, was GM at Eyeblaster.

ScanScout has plenty of competition from Google Video Ads, YuMe, Brightroll and several others, however, if its technology is superior it will certainly see uptake from the ad world which by now means has locked in on any one vendor.

Read - MIT grads to launch online video ad tech (MHT)