In an article on TechConfidential, and re-posted on several other spots (and now here), founder Ben Campbell reports "raising capital from a loose affiliation of more than 100 angel investors through Naples, Fla., venture capital firm Signature Capital LLC" in the amount of $13M!

Chelmsford’s Ourstage.com, which came out of beta last September, recently announced a music distribution partnership with AOL. The site runs monthly contests to discover the best in new music from up-and-coming bands and has a 3,851 Compete ranking.

Chelmsford’s OurStage.com, the site that bills itself as the only 100% democratic competition for emerging music and film, announced today that has come out of beta (do web 2.0 companies ever come out of beta?) and launched a whole new section that will pair it’s top acts with professional artists.

The Ourstage premise is simple. Up-and-coming bands and filmmakers upload their content to the site for users to vote for their favorites. At the end of each month, the top 20 and the top 10 in each channel go head-to-head in special judging channels to determine the winner of that channel. Then a site-wide judging contest is held to determine our Grand Prize winner. The top act from music and file both win a $5K prize.

Traffic has grown steadily since the site launched in beta earlier this year. The site claims that visitors have judged over 1,000,000 “battles” - sorting over 12,000 submissions from best to worst across 24 channels of entertainment. Anyone that has been in a garage band will know that the monetary incentive combined with musician vanity is enough to build traffic from the bands alone. However, the founders of Ourstage hope that their patent-pending judging system that it is designed to almost eliminate cheating will help set the site them aside in a very crowded field.

In addition to coming out of beta the site also announced it’s all new section Artist Access. The new section will take the top-ten acts from both the music sections of the site and provide them with access to top artists including one-on-one meetings and live performance opportunities. These artist, including John Legend, will personally choose the final winner from the top 10 ranked acts in their channel of expertise. The small local start-up has pulled in some decent talent from music side of the house.

From the world of Music:

* John Legend, music entrepreneur and five-time Grammy-winning R&B musician
* Curt Smith of Tears for Fears (love the 80s)
* G. Love (Garrett Dutton) of G. Love and Special Sauce!

From Video & Film:

* David J. Burke, emmy-nominated Director, Writer, & Producer (Animal, Kidnapped andLaw & Order: SVU)
* John Cameron Mitchell, writer, director and star of Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001)
* Chris Gore, writer, filmmaker (recently named one of the 25 Most Influential People in Independent)
* Matt Dentler, producer of the South by Southwest Film Conference & Festival
* Sarah Diamond, director of programming for the Slamdance Film Festival
* Adam Roffman, IFFBoston’s Film Director.

The Artist Access section will also include advice and tips for all aspiring artists who visit OurStage.com. The site will capture the advice in a series of interviews, which will appear regularly on the site Initial interviews already posted include Blonde Redhead, Crystal Method and Kaki King.

Anyone into music or film should check out this interesting local offering.

Technorati tags: ourstage, boston web 2.0, chelmsford, music, videos, online video

If you are one the people who believe that the Boston area is not exactly the hot bed of Web 2.0 activity, there is one area that the hub has developed well - online video. Last year, everything was about YouTube and other consumer generated plays. At the same time, some New England area companies have been launching their own video offerings and rebuilding some old ones.

Here is a round up of some of the top local online video companies. Most of these are business focused but I have included a few consumer plays. If your favorite company is not listed here, please leave a comment and I will add them.

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Brightcove: Cambridge, MA: Online video publishing platform and video syndication network. Also operates a video portal of Brightcove publishers located at Brigthcove.com. The PR darling of 2006 award goes to Brightcove and CEO Jeremy Allaire where every publication was required to write about them at least 2 times per month.

PermissionTV: Waltham, MA: Online video publishing platform that is looking to use video as almost as direct marketing channel by enabling “one-to-one” interaction with users. They have customers including FHM and Bob Villa.

Maven Networks: Cambridge, MA: Online video publishing platform and early entrant that list customers including Hearst Magazines and Univision.

Gotuit: Woburn, MA: Online video publishing platform that uses a patented metadata technology to drive better search, navigation and advertising capabilities. Customers include SI.com, Major League Soccer and the National Hockey League

The company also operates 2 consumer sites as well. GotuitMusic.com, a free streaming music video service, and SceneMaker.net, a social network for sharing viral videos - both covered on 93south and, to give the proper disclaimer, 2 of my recent projects. You should also check out the video mixer I produced for Gotuit featuring Fergie.

Choicestream: Cambridge, MA: Provides a personalization and recommendation service for online and mobile content publishers ala the Amazon book recommendation service model. Think ” if you like this drama prairie dog video, you will like the Kill Bill Remix. Choicestream picked up a good round of funding in 2006.

ExtendMedia: Newton, MA: Provides a multi-platform video distribution service for media companies covering direct content sales, content syndication, DRM and billing in one hosted or enterprise service. ExtendMedia announced a 12 Million round of financing in April, 2007.

Akamai: Cambridge, MA: Wins the web 1.0 survivalist award of the group with a rebirth of sorts in the broadband video era. The CDN (Content Deliver Network) has benefited heavily from handling much of the streamed video on the web today and, outside of just video, Akamai estimates that 10 -25% of all Internet traffic comes through their 25,000+ global servers.

Mediasilo: Boston, MA: Launched in beta in 2006, Mediasilo is digital asset management software that allows teams to work together on large video files through the web. It also has a video publishing platform. Very slick design on the site including the over-used talking head video on the homepage.

Participatory Culture Foundation: Worcester, MA: Produces the open source desktop video aggregator, player and podcasting application Miro ( coverd by 93south recently ) and also the social video bookmarking site VideoBomb.

ScanScout: Boston, MA: Online video advertising play using metadata to facilitate the placement of in-video contextually based advertising. Check out the OMMA article with CEO Doug McFarland formerly of Eyeblaster and Advertising.com.

Visible Measures: Boston, MA: Out of MIT and funded by General Catalyst, Visible Measures is a video analytics solution that is promoted as the industry’s first comprehensive Video Experience Measurement solution. They have partnered with PermissionTV and Brightcove to roll out the service.

EveryZing.com: Boston, MA: The recently renamed PodZinger is another metadata play that was originally focused on deep audio search within podcasts but has branched out into the broadband video space with the launch of their consumer portal, EveryZing.

Pulver Media: Beverly, MA & Melville, NY: Anyone from the VOIP space should already know Pulver Media who produces the VON events. They have branched out to add a “Video on the Net” section to the existing shows (the “V” is for voice and video now). They also launched Network2 a long tail video aggregator combining content from around the web.

imoondo.com: Boston, MA: Think Craigslist meets YouTube, imoondo.com is an online video classified site. Launched this May, the site is not the biggest but is gaining traction within the Boston area. It also announced today that it is looking for partner community sites to beta test a co-branded classified platform

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Banddigs.com: Windham, NH: I discovered BandDigs at the last Webinno group and was impressed by their video group chat feature. The main product offering is building a community around live video streaming for band and musicians. Could be a good partnership for the Middle East or TT’s?

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OurStage.com: Chelmsford, MA: Think Hot-or-Not meets the MySpace music section. An online space for emerging bands and budding film talent to post their videos and have the users decide who is the best. At the end of each month the site hands out a $5,000 cash prize to the winners in each category.

Of course no video round up for the area would be complete without at least mentioning Tewksbury-based video production software Avid and Acton-based VOD / Streaming Video provider SeaChange International.

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 Update, 7.23.07 ::  I added both Choicestream and ExtendMedia.

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Technorati tags: Akamai, brightcove, banddigs, imoondo, ourstage, gotuit, video, online video, maven, permissiontv, mediasilo, navic, scanscout, visible measures, broadband video, web 2.0, boston web 2.0, miro, video player, blog, everyzing, choicestream

Not exactly web but still good news for the area, Comcast announced it will add more than 400 new employees to its local workforce over the next 90 days to keep pace with robust customer demand for its cable television, high- speed Internet and voice products.

The jobs will be primarily be in installation and customer support.