Selling shovels to Web 2.0 gold miners

[mandy]

While popular video-sharing and social-networking sites try to strike it rich, a new crop of entrepreneurs is forging the tools for digging up those Web 2.0 gold mines.

Venture capitalists are spending big on start-ups that are peripheral to sites like MySpace, Facebook and YouTube. Companies such as Panjea, Vuvox, Mixpo and Share2Me give fans of Web video and photo-sharing the ability to easily reformat or repost multimedia content that's already floating around out on the Web. These little companies are taking a page from the old saying about the California gold rush: It wasn't the gold miners who got rich, it was the guys who sold them the shovels.

"Everybody keeps trying to get people to come to a new place, whether it's a new social network, new tool, whatever," said Mike Blackwell, CEO of Share2Me. "It's possible to do that, but generally that's really hard and takes lots of money and lots of time." ...

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