What drove our thinking was pretty simple. One it was clear to us that the blogospere of 20 million blogs, 1.2 million posts and 100,000 new blogs launched every day is a real trend that is only going to accelerate. Two it seemed clear that the web of text and links was ready to be extended to support video as a core part of the online experience. Finally, as the concept of an online "space" was stretching beyond the PC to blogs, mobile devices and iPods, it seemed natural to us that a video clip sharing community which provides tools that actually enable you to "do something" with video across these domains could be really successful. That is what we have built.

Where do you see vSocial's market?

The video clip sharing market sits at the intersection of where the MySpace and Video iPod generations meet. These are huge, multi-billion markets that disrupt the way we watch video programs, how like minds find one another, how products are advertised and how big media tends to its historically walled garden so we think the market is rich, ripe and ready.

Tell me about the team behind vSocial.

The core team behind vSocial consists of: Brent Oesterblad, our COO, who has done a number of different consumer oriented startups, including ForSaleByOwner.com and MyPersonalVideos.com, a predecessor to vSocial; Brad Webb, our CTO, who comes out of the service provider space, most notably, Global Crossing, and is a recognized video encoding and AJAX expert, as well as an accomplished blogger; and Mark Sigal (me), who has done seven startups to date as founder, CEO and angel investor, including Whistle (acquired by IBM), Rapid Logic (acquired by Wind River), me.com (active) and UXComm (active). My role is to drive marketing and product strategy for the company, and I also have a pretty popular blog on digital media, ideation and active investing. Our culture is very much 1+1=3 oriented.

With the internet heading down an entirely social path, do you foresee growth issues as this site really begins to catch on?

I think there are several fundamental issues that must be navigated. One is to keep astounding and engaging your user base. We have all seen many a service that was compelling at a given point in time that failed to keep innovating and keep their service interesting. There is always a balance between doing more and not overbuilding/underbuilding the runway. Like any community, there are challenges of "what" and "how much" in the way of creating rules and mores, and how to enable self expression in a manner that cultivates cooperative co-existence. Plus there are digital rights management and business model challenges that must constantly be evaluated.

Any future plans you want to share with us?

We plan on launching a premium service called Veeclip early next year that we believe is heavily disruptive to some of the segments referenced earlier, and a big win for our target consumer. Beyond that, if you spend 10-15 minutes on our site, it becomes clear that there is a lot of "there" there but plenty of room to improve.