Featured Startup Pitch: Creaza—making video production social

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By Editor July 15, 2011

Creaza logo 

Company: Creaza

Website: www.creaza.com

Founding CEO: Jostein Svendsen

Year Founded: 2011

Employees: 6

Investors: Founders

Brief Company Description: Everybody has a story to tell, and Creaza enables the world’s stories to come to life via video with its intuitive, socially engaging and affordable cloud-based video production platform.

Jostein Svendsen, CreazaBy Jostein Svendsen, CEO

Product Overview: Creaza is the cloud-based online video production platform designed to enable users to collaboratively produce, share and store user-generated video. By combining the power of broadcast-quality HD and the vast reach of social media, Creaza is in an unrivaled position to “make video social.”

Creaza is about to become the cloud’s video production platform of choice for consumers, businesses and professionals who want to produce and collaborate on self-generated, broadcast-quality video content. Creaza is affordable and easy to use, yet it gives video content producers creative freedom.

Founders’ Story: Creaza’s founding team is Norwegian and has known each other for a number of years. This year, they have come together to launch Creaza, which has roots in a video editing platform with more than 160,000 users in the educational market in Europe.

I’m a serial entrepreneur in Europe and North America, having founded and grown several successful companies in digital media, digital financial services and digital commerce. Creaza was a natural next step for me. I founded two of Norway’s leading digital media and Internet companies, both of which went on to become successful publicly traded issuers in Sweden. One of them grew to become one of the largest Internet development agencies, with 2,000 employees worldwide.

Apart from digital media, online financial services have also been a focus for me. In London, I founded Sharepeople, one of the world’s first multi-market online stockbrokers. With investment from Goldman Sachs, Soros, GE Capital and others, Sharepeople grew to become the second best-known financial services brand in the UK after Barclays Bank. The company was acquired by American Express and renamed American Express Financial Services Europe, as a part of Amex expansion into new financial products in Europe.

I also helped launch a new credit card and savings bank in Norway, the first bank in the cloud and with no physical branches. It was later acquired by the third largest bank in the world, Banco Santander, when they wanted to expand into Scandinavia.

Marketing/Promotion Strategy: All you have to know about the market potential for Creaza is that 48 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. The vast majority of that video is unedited, primarily because there has not been a user-friendly and affordable editing tool widely available. Creaza is at the vanguard of a rapidly emerging market in which millions of users in thousands of communities are beginning to continually interact via user-generated online video.

Our cloud-based platform helps consumers, groups and enterprises make video social. We foresee it being adopted by literally millions of users in the next 12 months. When we launch more formally in the next few months, we will make Creaza available for very low cost in order to attract users.

How We Differentiate from the Competition: Creaza is the only cloud-based video editing platform that enables you to easily and affordably shoot, individually or collaboratively shape, share and store broadcast-quality video. Users can generate, edit and store video on mobile phones, tablets, laptops, and PCs. Creaza enables users to upload video and playback video-mixes on mobile phones and tablets, as well as on PCs and laptops.

Most video editing tools are desktop-bound and designed for professional videographers. Creaza actually has superior functionality even while it is immediately accessible, inexpensive and easy to use. Even beginners can shoot raw footage with a mobile phone, quickly produce a broadcast-quality video and share it with their friends on their favorite social networks.

Business Model: We will divulge this more completely when we launch. However, we will offer a combination of free usage and tiered subscriptions.

Current Needs: We are always looking for excellent people.

Creaza – www.creaza.com