Oversi, which provides peer-to-peer caching and content delivery for video, has raised $8-million in a private financing led by Cisco Systems. It's interesting to see P2P being embraced by "mainstream" telecom equipment suppliers given so many people equate P2P with free downloads. Oversi CEO Joav Avtalion said:

"We see Cisco's investment as an exciting milestone for our company, helping us to grow our business in line with the fast-evolving world of online video and P2P content distribution. With so much video and TV on the Internet, bandwidth is becoming the key issue. Using our P2P solutions, service providers can deliver up to 20 times more bandwidth using their existing infrastructures, instead of investing billions of dollars in expensive upgrades. We look forward to a fruitful and continued collaboration with our investment partners."

Technorati Tags: Cisco

If you're an entrepreneur who needs/wants to know more about raising money, the Toronto Venture Group is putting on an event on Jan. 10 unofficially called "The Process Land Mine Avoidance Breakfast" where you can hear from a VC, a lawyer and a financier about everything from term sheets to subscription agreements. For more, check out Rick Segal's post. If you're interested in learning more about running a start-up now versus the go-go days of the dot-com boom, the TVG is running a breakfast on Dec. 13 featuring a freshly-minted blog executive who works for b5media...otherwise known as yours truly. If you're lucky, you may even get to meet my dad and brother, who plays a key role within Canadian Tire's e-commerce operations, who I have conscipted to attend. Tags: venture capital, Rick Segal, Mark Evans, Canadian Tire

Nothing like a fluffy New York Times story about the success of low-cost Web start-ups such as Meebo to stoke the entrepreneurial fires. Apparently, all it takes is a couple thousand dollars and you're off to the races. If it was only that easy! Addendum: Just to be clear, getting a start-up off the ground can be done fairly inexpensively if you've got an idea and a pretty good programmer or two to develop the service. Then, you put the cool service/widget/product on some cheap servers, issue a standard 'hey, we just launched our beta' press release, and pray to the Web 2.0 gods that TechCrunch somehow deems you worthy of coverage. Sometimes, you win the lottery with this formula (Flickr, YouTube, Digg) works but it's not so easy or so cheap for the rest of us. Truth be told, getting a service created is only half the battle; selling and marketing it continues to be huge challenge even in this low-cost Web 2.0 environment. Why? Well, gaining attention and convincing customers to actually purchase your product/service/widget is difficult and expensive because competition is intensive. The ability to create a cool Web service for next is nothing is fine - except there are dozens of other entrepreneurs who can follow the same recipe as well. So what's the bottom line? It's relatively cheap and easy to get in the race but winning can be an expensive proposition.

Just like the VCs adored e-commerce start-ups during the dot-com boom, they've got a big, bad thing for mobile start-ups these days. Case in point is MobiTV, which just raised another $30-million from a group of investors that includes Hearst Corp. and Adobe Systems. So far, MobiTV has raised $125-million, and it's far from a slam dunk whether there's a huge demand among mobile device users to watch video on little screens. That said, the VCs seems to more than happy to finance mobile services and technology. It will be interesting to see how well Toronto-based Ambient Vector does in its pursuit of private equity. If anything, the company seems to be in the right place at the right time.

Twenty months after raising $5-million of venture capital and several strategic mistakes later, Odeo's founder has decided to buy back the company from investors, and rename itself Obvious Corp. What's particularly interesting about Odeo's move is whether this is just the beginning of a trend in which Web 2.0 entrepreneurs will take control of their companies again after interest from investors disappears due to a lack of progress. The silver lining within the Web 2.0 environment is start-ups can be fairly low-cost operations if you eliminate the frills (marketing, traveling, major application upgrades, etc.). This makes it easier for a start-up to survive when its VCs bail on the idea - rather than having to shut down. Odeo's founder, Evan Williams, obviously believes there is lots of potential in the podcasting market and the company's prospects can improve with some strategic tweaks. Don't be surprised to more entrepreneurs refuse to walk away from their creations even when "the money" disappears. The unwillingness to concede defeat is another thing that separates today's Web landscape from the dot-com days when many companies had little choice but to close their doors when the investors checked out. For more, check out GigaOm and Ben Metcalfe.