Nokia invests in Web video start-up

NEW YORK: Kyte.tv, a start-up Web site for sharing pictures and video, said on Tuesday it received funding from the investment arm of Nokia.

Kyte.tv, which aims to extend video sharing to cell phones, did not disclose the size of the investment, but its co-founder hoped the deal would lead to a distribution agreement with the world's biggest mobile phone maker.

"With Kyte being on Nokia phones, can you imagine the distribution?" said Daniel Graf, chief executive of Kyte.tv.

The huge popularity of sites such as Google Inc.'s YouTube has spawned interest in services that let users create and share media, which tend to be viewed on desktop computers.

Nokia Growth Partners partner Rob Trice did not say if Nokia would put Kyte.tv's application on its phones, though he said the investment ties in with Nokia's efforts to have more consumers use its phones to consume, create and share media.

San Francisco-based Kyte also lists as investors Swisscom and Niklas Zannstrom, who started Web phone service Skype. The company plans to use the latest round of funding to build its operations in Europe, according to Graf.

Since www.kyte.tv launched five weeks ago, about 4,500 collections of video and photos, or channels, have been posted. Users can keep updating channels to, say, chronicle a holiday.

The channels can be embedded on social network sites such as MySpace.com, and viewers looking at the same channel can hold text chats using an instant messaging feature.

Slide.com runs a similar service that lets consumers create slideshows that can also be embedded on social network sites. Content created through slide.com's service is viewed by tens of millions of people every day, according to Slide Inc.