I just got an invitation to watch a video on YouTube from an old friend, Larry Larstead, which I am posting here.

Larry is one of the great short film makers I know. He directed some of the best Coke commercials in the 1970's in Australia, which is when I met him. And then I got him to direct the first video I made with AC/DC, which was what got the band really noticed by Phil Carson at Atlantic Records in the UK, who ended up signing the band....

And that in itself is a great story. Because the video of "High Voltage" was shot at a live concert in Melbourne, with a 5 camera shoot. But we used a monitor mix of the track for the video, which had a very 'live' feel. Trouble was that there was no audience sound on the track, so we needed to add that afterwards to create the semblance of reality. Larry ended up mixing audience applause and noise from the "Concert For Bangla Desh" album that George Harrison made to get a credible live feel for the audio. Also we shot the close ups of Bon Scott afterwards and Larry made Bon sing his arse off on the pick up shots so as to capture the muscles in his neck while he was singing....

As I said, Larry was - and still is - a great film maker!

He now runs a film making collective in Byron Bay. And this is his latest piece:

Silvia Pfeiffer, my business partner in Vquence, sings in a choir. She invited me to see her in a performance she was participating in at the Sydney Opera House. So last night Robyn and I saw her along with 750 other singers and a 60 piece orchestra perform Verdi's Requiem.

Wow, what a blast! Fantastic to hear that many voices - particularly after having recently seen the fantastic Swedish movie, "As it is in Heaven"!

My friend Wayne Young is the producer of the new movie from John Pilger, "The War On Democracy". Haven't see the movie yet, but have heard that it is getting good reviews in the UK.

Here is the trailer from YouTube:

Wow! Just discovered Chemical Romance.

What a totally kicking track!. No video below. Just the audio. But does it rock!

There has been a lot of coding work happening this week at the Vquence office. Beta of the website - still not ready to actually be launched - is upgraded tonight.  Still hoping for a launch last week of June....

On the business front what is becoming increasingly interesting for me is that a lot of the seeds for both biz dev and investment that I planted months ago are starting to take root. People are starting to get back to me from months ago - friends who have kept the faith and been talking to people about what we are doing.

In the last few days I have been getting calls from Singapore and Las Vegas (among other places). Friends telling me that they have people interested in investing in the company. And these are friends I haven't spoken to in months. Perhaps it is important to remember how important friends like that are in your life!

And so I feel that we are nearing a tipping point. On Monday when I was recovering from jet lag I was thinking that the company was (as we used to say in the music business), one song short of a hit album. But I think maybe the market just needed to start getting to know our material better. And its always infinitely better in music if you have an entire album that is your hit. (Thinking Pink Floyd here!).

I think Vquence is about to hit prime time. We are getting a much better focus on what companies' pain points are. And which partners we need to work with. The major media companies just need a lot more development work that the smaller companies. Smaller media companies have that urgency of growth that makes them both great customers and very demanding customers!

But I am really looking forward to closing some of the deals we have got cooking! Exciting times...

I got back from doing the rounds of VC's on Sunday. Took the day off on Monday and didn't check email once. Its great to do that now and again.

My last couple of days were really hectic. On Thursday evening I flew up to Portland to meet with Steve Marshall from New Group and his creative team early Friday morning. Great bunch of people! And they have a tremendous client list too.

Before I got on the plane I had to connect on the phone with the founder of one of the companies that I visited in SF though. He had not been able to get to the meeting on Thursday - got caught in a hurricane in the mid west that closed all the airports. Very interesting guy. Ex-hedge fund manager who had over $300M under management when he was in the game, who has moved into playing in the public company arena.

He told me that with a couple of acquisitions that he is about to make their company, across all its sites, will be just behind MySpace in terms of monthly discrete visitors!

For the last two days I have been doing meetings in Sandhill Road.

Met with some very smart (and successful) people. And they ask good questions too...

Sometimes I wonder though, how they really do make the decisions they do.... Yesterday I was in a meeting and dropped in passing the name of a company that has just been snapped up, reportedly for round $300M, and said I thought that the underlying technology seemed pretty trivial. The VC smiled, and said to me that he agreed. It had started out as something quite different, but they had made some changes, and then 6 million people started using it regularly and that is what commanded the value. Well, I get that. But I wonder how much luck is involved in the decision making process.

And that is because in almost the same breath we talked about another company that was sold recently for about $20M. The VC said that he had looked at about 75 companies doing almost exactly the same thing (video fx for user created content) and passed on all of them.

So when does a feature become a product?

On Monday I am going back to California. I have meetings planned with several VC's to talk about Vquence - and at their request too. And also want to try to close at least one potential customer and establish a working relationship with an agency that is a specialist in online campaigns that cross from the US into China. The agency I have in mind is The New Group who I worked with before when I was consulting to Dolby. They did the creative on the Dolby Headphone campaign in Japan. And it was very effective.

The key now is to start pulling together some of the disparate threads that enable a real understanding to evolve of the business ecosystem for online video.

As I meet people in the business development process I am coming to understand how many opportunities there are and also how totally different the needs are of the partners and clients that are emerging.

Seems sometimes like it is not so much about convergence as about divergence.

Seems like everyone I know is sending me links to the stories in the media in the last couple of days about News buying Photo Bucket and Flektor. For a combined $270M US.

Clearly News is trying to own a significant and strategic corner of the game, and who can blame them. If they can keep the audience involved from one place to another it makes total sense financially.

In the mean time over at Vquence we are running. Now that we have the alpha done, we need to get the beta bug free and out! Late June is the projected time line...