Meet Zia Syed, founder and CEO of ClipMine, a Mountain View startup. Syed is an ex-Googler, who spent 10 years at Google and then decided to peel off and do his own thing. Videos are what interests Syed and the focus of his startup is to index YouTube videos. “We want to personalize the video watching experience,” says Syed. He got the idea for his startup from his own experience on YouTube, which he often found frustrating and time consuming. All he wanted to do is go to that part of the video that was of interest to him. And, that was often not possible because of the lack of useful tagging and annotations on those video clips.

So, how is Clipmine indexing and personalizing the video watching experience?  Clipmine does this by annotating the videos manually or automatically through their platform. Watch, search and tag videos is their goal he spoints out. “Videos are basically blobs or blackboxes, and what we are doing is allowing people to annotate videos,” says Syed. Whey you tag videos what it does is help the end-user with a table of contents and help them scrub and go to that part of the video that interests them. Discovery of content becomes a lot easier points out Syed.  YouTube does allow for tagging and annotationing videos for those who have YouTube accounts. And what ClipMine does is allow anyone to tag YouTube videos he points out.

ClipMine raised $2.6 million as seed money an unveiled its product in the first week of July. So, what keeps Syed awake at nights? Tune in to find out what he has to say.

This interview was aired on TV in the San Francisco Bay area.