Notes about summer deals

I thought conventional wisdom was that deals simply do not get done in the seed and venture capital world between July 4 and Labor Day. After being on the road this early summer, I can tell you that while the deals I'm seeing might not get finalized, many certainly are on the cusp of being completed.

For example:

* Swarmcast, where I was retained for business development and marketing, has its technology in beta with Major League Baseball and should go live by the post-season. The technology improves MLBs video quality by more than 4x and will help MLB to cost contain its projected surge in bandwidth expenses with the higher quality video and increasing number of subscribers to its online services. In addtion, Swarmcast, now backed by major Japanese financial and media companies, has signed a deal to embed the technology in next generation consumer electronics devices from a major brand.

* Magnify Media, where I am an advisor, is off the races with its user shared/generated video platform with dozens of small Web communities and will be launching with several major media brands this summer. This spring the Missouri Journalism School used Magnify to launch user video services for local high schools. Also, I expect the company to announce a new venture capital round with one of the leading VCs in the video space. I looked at all of these deals, including YouTube, at Best Buy, and I like Magnify the best because it is so simple for an existing Web community to implement. Most importantly, a Web community invites its viewers to search for and rate relevant videos at YouTube, Google Video, Yahoo, etc. and the Magnify platform then shares these videos hosted by the other sites within its clients' Web communities, while compiling the deepest database of user meta data on special interest communities on the Web.