PowerTools was a look at a handful of startups providing cutting-edge tools and analystics to help video producers, marketing and advertising agencies, social and video networking sites gain insights into the behaviors of and overall success of a video with their user-base.  In this session, judges wanted to understand defensibility against entrenched bigger players like Google, YouTube and Omniture and how quickly these startups could expand.  Do these startups have key strategic partnerships in place within the advertising agency-side to be able to improve CPMs and be in a stronger position to close deals.  Each of these companies must overcome the reluctance large companieswill inherently have, especially around an analytics-focused component, to invest in these offerings due to the long-term viability of startups in general.

Moderator:
Jeremy Toeman, Livedigitally.com
Judges:
Chris Carvalho, LucasFilm
Simon Hayhurst, Adobe
Steve Li, Webex

Crazy Egg
Lets customers see what its users are seeing, doing and where they are going on your website by capturing and associating visitor-specific data with one-page click patterns. Crazy Egg helps customers improve how they convert users based on demographics, behavior, etc. to help people monetize their websites.  While judges liked many aspects of Crazy Egg, especially is visual appeal, they also felt the company needed to shore up its defensibility.

Cruxy
Provides content creators with a set of social promotion and monetization tools for their digital work.  Using an open format approach that support cross platforms and devices, Cruxy is used by the long-tail media producers and its sweet spot is within the various virtual worlds.  It platform provides distributing, vending and tracking of players and widgets for digital goods services. Judges felt while there is a huge opportunity that Cruxy is pursuing, they need to be swift as bigger players can be a real threat.

Vidmetrix
Provides online video viewership analytics.  Its Vidmeter 100 is like the BillBoard 100 and aggregates top videos across Youtube, Myspace to generate a most viewed video list across the internet. Tracks and reports views, comments, feedback and blog links and then icenses findings to online publishing sites, videomakers. Vidmetrix sees itself as a  services firm to support customers for tracking social media. Judges wanted to see Vidmetrix improve its video upload automation and give users the ability to do something after they see a video. 

Visible Measures
Provides independent 3rd party metrics of video viewership. The company is looking to create a new set of metrics among the various constituents such as publishers and advertisers.  They have partnered with leading video platform providers and advertising agencies.  By measuring and comparing who's watching what and when.