(version fran se) Eyeka is a young (April 2007) French startup by proven entrepreneur Gille Babinet. Gille created MusiWave, a mobile music delivery platform sold to OpenWave.
Mobility remains the future for Gille and he created Eyeka. Eyeka's goal is to take photos and video's and give the creator a platform and a chance to sell and distribute and deliver that content (also) to mobile phones.
The site you see when you visit Eyeka is but one part of Eyeka's infrastructure. It's the part where you create your user profile, upload your content, edit it if needed. The other parts consist of mobile access via WAP and a Java client.
The site is quite beautiful and is available in both French and English. The language links are unique but serve no other purpose than to toggle the language. This way links to any part of the site always lead to the same page. Good for the user, who is most likely served in the right language, and a solid SEO decision with no link-love being split up.
The Flash-driven presentation interface of Eyeka is really quite nice.
Quality is a key factor at Eyeka and remains high. There are two teams dedicated to quality control. One team acts as a spam guard. Illegal content and content that otherwise violates the terms of service gets deleted. Repeat offenders get banned.
Another team looks for quality content. They combine this content into channels. Those channels or indeed individual content gets syndicated to partners in traditional and new media. Eyeka, as they say themselves, makes a point of getting market-rate income for the distributed work.
Finally, the user page can also be leveraged by the user itself to participate in syndication requests.
Fully compliant with the Web 2.0 wave, all content can be reviews, rated and commented upon.
Eyeka's weak point might be that unless you do some digging around, and try to wrap your mind around it, it isn't painfully clear from the start just what they do. Therefore it is not always clear to everyone how they are different from YouTube or Flickr.
SEM-wise Eyeka might be a good fit for upscale-ish, classy, eclectic sites.
About the Author: Ruud Hein
