I spent last Monday and Tuesday at the TechCrunch 50 conference – a collection of fifty companies that took the stage to launch in front of 2,000 attendees and 1,000s more of online viewers. I was also at last year’s conference and one of the companies to launch was Videosurf – a video search engine with a unique way to index, sort and search content. Also relevant, a good friend from eBay and InGameNow was part of the team, Danny Leffel. They have launched a new product aimed at bloggers and web publishers called the Video Link Enhancer. Danny gives an overview below and I am going to trial it on the blog for the next week or so. Feedback is welcome and I have another trial / demo going live once this completes.

There is great innovation occurring in the widget, plug-in and publisher worlds – creating rich, contextual experiences that are good for the publisher (engagement, virality) and the consumer (context, visuals, etc). More to come!

We’re announcing the release of the Videosurf Video Link Enhancer. When you add the code to your blog or web application, regular hyperlinks to video content become in-line video players. For example, hover over these links to sites like YouTube, Hulu, Vimeo and many more.

The look and feel of the in-line players is customizable using CSS. Developers can also exert fine-grained control as to which links on the page are transformed.

We built this product based our belief that whenever a video is mentioned on a site (whether that’s in a Tweet, a comment, etc) the optimal experience is one that allows the user to watch the video referenced without ever having to leave the page.

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