Vzaar is a video hosting and delivery service designed for ecommerce, allowing online retailers and eBay sellers to showcase their products in video.

We first spotted Vzaar back in 2007, and since then it has come along nicely.

Who Needs the Vzaar Video Player?

Vzaar has big sellers like Toys R Us under its client list, as well as many individual eBay sellers. It has been designed with ecommerce in mind to use video to highlight products, although it can be used by a variety of businesses for things like tutorials, informative videos etc.

Compared to YouTube – Minimizes Visitor Leaks

When compared to the likes of YouTube, Vzaar prevents visitors leaking from your site. With YouTube videos:

• there are ads in the video
• if you click the video you are taken to the YouTube website with lots of distractions
• at the end of the video YouTube highlights related videos

If you are presenting a video of a product to potential buyers on your website, the last thing you want is for them to leak out of your sales funnel (i.e disappear off to YouTube or watch another video). To maximize the amount of people that buy the product you want to ensure they stay on your site and don’t get distracted. That’s one thing that the vZaar player is designed to do.

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It’s a known fact that adding a photo or photos to an eBay listing (or Craigslist, or any of the other options open to sellers) can massively increase the chance of a successful sale.

Another way to boost your chances of getting a good price is by using a photo of the actual item rather than a stock image of the product weaned from the manufacturer’s site.

Prospective buyers don’t just want to read a description, they want to see exactly what they would be spending their money on since some sellers can be very vague with their words.

Picture Managers

For this reason, several services such as Auctiva, MyEasyPics, BiggerBids, and even eBay’s own Picture Manager have become profitable in offering indispensable tools to eBay sellers.

Now, with the popularity of online video rapidly growing, vzaar is aiming to take eBay auctions to the next level by allowing sellers to include short video ads (2-3 minutes maximum) of their items within listings… YouTube-style. 

Last year saw YouTube integrated in to Google Earth, allowing surfers to watch videos tagged with the locations they are viewing on the Google application.

Now, YouTube has also been integrated in to Google Maps, and this has a much more commercial side to it, not on Google’s part, but for businesses in the US.

The feature was announced on the official Google Maps blog, and the example they used to showcase the new integration is a small bakery in San Francisco (as seen below).

You may have thought Internet marketers had every website and online niche cornered already, but now Procter and Gamble have created yet another way to catch you while you’re surfing.

The soap opera and soap moguls aim to wash Web 2.0 brains and clothes. The company is now going to offer Crescent Heights, an online sitcom/soap opera for your viewing pleasure.

The series is aimed at young surfers and ring-tone freaks and is about a recent college graduate (Ashley) who moves from Cheesehead country to LA. 

The 3 minute episodes are packed with drama with occasional and almost subliminal Tide appearances. I can just see a 4 car pileup in mid town with the drivers still catching these segments as the cop writes the ticket.

Still, we have to admire innovation even if it does come from dinosaur mentalities and methods I guess.

Remember when we told you all about how Listasaurus added the option to upload videos to its classified ads? We were slightly bemused by the fact that the likes of eBay hadn’t already made the same move and it looks like someone was listening (maybe).

A company called Vzaar launched a service yesterday that allows eBay users to upload videos to their listings for free. The company that is made up of ex-eBay employees is looking to leverage the existing user base that eBay has in order to help bolster its own service.

You can’t hold a good idea down so this was bound to happen eventually, though it is interesting that eBay are keeping it in the family so to speak. Will this put an end to misleading eBay ads? Probably not.

[Via NewTeeVee]

Cyprus, an island country in the Mediterranean, has launched a dedicated website focusing on promoting the country through online video.

The Cyprus government has unveiled cyprusonfilm.com, a site featuring videos in several languages which highlight the country’s attractions, history and way of life.

It’s another avenue for the already popular island country to drive tourism dollars to its fine shores.

A government spokesperson has suggested that in the future the site may hold televised interviews with the country’s President.

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, or Woz as his friends call him, has thrown investment dollars towards a new internet video company run by a bunch of twenty-something university graduates.

Hotswap.com is a three month old company - with a 21 year old chairman – that has developed a high-definition-like video technology. The technology allows everyday users to upload high quality video to the internet more quickly and easily than is currently possible.

The founders of Hotswap see e-commerce as the pinnacle application for their technology – already the company is cornering the online automobile sales market, where it has won several contracts. Car sellers can showcase cars for sale using the video technology.

The company predicts that high-definition quality video will allow e-commerce to further develop and become more established. It’s also confident about its future, predicting it will become a multi-billion dollar enterprise.

[Via InformationWeek]