Two years ago, a friend spotted John Bliss in a video of a bike race and sent him a link.
One problem: the clip was 45 minutes long.
“I didn’t dedicate the time to find that needle moment, however long that might’ve been, in that video haystack,” Bliss said. “And that was sort of the ‘a-ha’ moment.”
So he started BlipSnips in 2009 with the goal of making it easier for people to share and view videos online.
The Boulder-based company this month released an iPhone app that allows users to upload videos to Facebook and “tag” people at specific moments in the clips, similar to the way photos are tagged. Viewers can click on the tag to jump to and comment about that specific moment.
Bliss, 52, says 3 billion photos are uploaded per month to Facebook, compared with just 20 million videos. He believes a key reason is the inability to make videos “social.”
BlipSnips’ top investor is Chris Kelly, Facebook’s former privacy chief. Bliss, a lawyer by training, met Kelly while working as a privacy strategist for IBM a few years ago.
Bliss said the company, which graduated from the TechStars incubator program in August, will close an angel funding round of $500,000 this week, with much of it coming from Kelly.
