5min is hitting the online video market hard. They already have $5 million in VC funding and have a catalog of 40k how to videos. They are cutting deals with many big web sites to serve their content in the 5min player on their page. The key is that they have all the videos tagged and automatically scans the text of the web page to see which videos are the best fit. Thanks to their partnership deals they are clearing over 110 million unique visitors per month. They also have their own ad serving network and sales staff in addition to using third party networks.

The geolocation market has been exploding as new, inexpensive tools and services are introduced. The company to watch in this area has been Google and its Google Maps products.

But this brings up another questions. What will become of the personal navigation devices (PND) like those from Garmin and TomTom? The question has been answered by ABI Research. The use of PND with their only or main function of helping users navigate is popular with the over 45 year old crowd. These users want a simple, easy-to-use device. The under 45 and especially the under 35 set is turning to their mobile devices to provide this functionality, among many others that it supplies.

The manufacturers of the one-trick pony devices like Garmin and TomTom will need to evolve to challenge the iPhones and Blackberries smartphones, their new competition. To survive, they will need to evolve quickly, before the under 35 crowd teaches the over 45 crowd how to use their new iPhones.

One point that came up at the Android Developer meetup that is a little unusual is that the majority of the developers there were unaware that there are other electronic markets from which they can distribute their Android apps. The most famous one is the Google Android Market, but I was the only one that knew that Handango has their own Android store. This store is good fro developers because it allows them to sell their apps now as opposed to the Google store which is giving everything away for free.

New Android app stores are popping up. I just read about a new store from PocketGear. I am sure that many more will be created, but I have to wonder if there is enough info given to Android developers to find and use all of these stores. And of course, if it is hard for the developers to find, it will be even harder to find for the end customers, who may not be as Internet aware as the developers.

The people who owned Google Phones and a few that did not but were planning to buy one thought that there was one killer app that made the purchase of an additional phone not only compelling but also a way to save money. This killer app is Compare Everywhere. It lets you take a photo of a bar code on an item that you want to buy. It then checks the bar code in its database against your location. It returns a list of prices of the same item in nearby shops. Basically, it is every bargain shopper’s dream and every retailers worst nightmare.

If this app catches on, I would not be surprised to see some stores investigate if it would be possible to block certain Internet signals. If they thought that competing online against Amazon was hard, wait until all their competition is digitally laid out at their customers’ feet while in the store.

Last night, I attended my first Google Android Developer Meetup. The month before, I attended my first iPhone Developer Meetup. With this tiny sample, I am more than qualified to start issuing unproven generalities.

The iPhone meetups have been going on for several months and have a large number of developers. The Android meetup is only two months old and had about 2 dozen developers. The iPhone crowd was mainly people looking to make money on the iPhone, either for themselves or for their company. The Android meetup was primarily attended by people programming Android as a hobby and out of curiosity. But the biggest difference of all: just about everyone at the iPhone meetup owned an iPhone or iTouch while only three people at the Android meetup owned a Google phone.

One of the more interesting statements for why the developers had not bought a Google phone yet was that the Android programming test tools included an excellent simulator while the iPhone simulator almost required a developer to buy a real iPhone to test their applications. But the other reason that the Google phones were not purchased yet is that developers have already bought the iPhone, in addition to the phone that they already owned, and just did not see any big reason to buy another phone.