As mentioned earlier, Vquence took part in the Australian Startup Carnival and winners are now announced.

The feedback we got from the judges is encouraging. It’s great to see that Vquence is indeed providing a useful tool. But we are also aware that the service offering is not complete and needs a lot more tech development.

I’d like to address the concern of one judge that we are dependent on YouTube’s goodwill to keep their access open. This is not the case. Not only has YouTube just in the last days opened up their API even further, so I don’t think there’s a risk there. But in general: closing access to content is not what the Web is about – on the contrary – Yahoo is just opening up their search platform and Tim Berners-Lee’s Semantic Web will enable an even more open exchange of data between different sites. However, Vquence does not rely solely on the availability of such data interfaces. That would be dumb. Where we cannot use APIs or RSS feeds or other data interfaces, we can always parse plain video Web pages, just like Google’s search engine parses Web pages. In short: our life would be harder without open interfaces, but not impossible.

As for the position that Vquence achieved in the Australian Startup Carnival: Vquence came in 5th position out of 28 participants, which is great, in particular since we are currently in a transition phase towards video metrics.