TVTrip raises another €7 million. Total raised now almost $14mm

Hotel video review site TVTrip.com has just finalised their Series B round raising €7 million (first saw the story over at TechCrunch). Brings total raised so far to just shy of $14mm (depending on how you convert Euros to Dollars and not including initial angle rounds). Investors included Balderton Capital (portfolio includes Bebo) , Partech International (portfolio includes Dailymotion) and AGF Private Equity (portfolio also includes Dailymotion). The latter new to this round.

I get the video review space. I can see clearly how consumer conversion will increase based on better hotel descriptions and videos. What is not settled in my mind is how to do the perfect Video. Clearly consumers have short attention spans. We know that the length of the average video viewed online is less than a few minutes. We also know that consumers are looking mroe and more for content from actual guests/users/

There is thus a huge challenge in getting the right balance between supplying video but making it short, sharp, relevant and real.

At PhoCusWright in LA a Video back-end provider/production company TripTelevision (CEO Kulin Strimbu) waxed lyrically about their auto clip technology that takes short sections from a long vidoe and auto-compiles it into a 30 sec spot. So that in 30 seconds you can see a bit of the lobby, room, pool, restaurant etc. A click on the video at any time will take you to the longer version video devoted to that particular part of the hotel. TVTrip has approached with a sliding channel approach where options on which part of the hotel you want to look at are provided as different channels to select from.

Video is here to stay but these layout options need further work. TVTrip now have millions of dollars to spend on working it out (and keeping up with increasing broadband costs). Congratulations to CEO Marc Ruff and team.

Red Herring is still alive and thinks Trivago is the next big thing

I thought Red Herring was Dead Herring. Back in the day (the boom) Red Herring was The online industry magazine and news source. Pre- TechCrunch, paidContent, GigaOm etc, Red Herring was a must read. Then it missed the online boat (who'd have thought) and the a-list blogs took over as the must reads. Valleywag has put the whole of Red Herring on Death watch.

But it seems that Red Herring is still (irregularly) putting out the magazine and (a little more regularly) continuing to host events. Last month in Malta Red Herring hosted a conference to announce/promote the Red Herring Top 100 Tech Startups in Europe. Among the winners - the Dusseldorf based trivago. Nice looking site with social networking, user generated content and a meta-search engine. I cannot see in my initial review what brings it ahead for the pack that includes the power houses TripAdvisor, Kayak, Virtualtourist, WAYN, Cheapflights etc. It may be enough that Howzat (investment vehicle for David Soskin and Hugo Burge) have invested in the trivago.

Les Explorers blog has an interview with trivago's head of PR Ulrike Pithan that has some good background on the company.

TVTrip (hotel video guides) also had a mentioned as a finalist.