Share videos, in private

At least once every month, my brother sends me (via text message) a video of my niece or nephew doing some adorable thing that an aunt would love to see. I love these visual, impromptu updates because they aren't staged. I get a chance to share in a moment.

Now, suppose you as a small-business owner could share video in an equally spontaneous or casual manner, without clogging up email, blowing a smartphone data plan allocation, or exposing the contents of the message to the general public.

That's the general premise behind a new service called Givit, which is pitched as a simple way for people to share videos privately. It is positioned as a freemium consumer-focused service, but a simple matter of positioning has never stood in the way of technology that could be useful for a business.

Here's how it works:

Say you'd like to send a brief update to your entire company about your priorities, which is a task that Givit Greg Kostello President and CEO said he sets out to complete every week. "They get to see my face, my emotion, nothing is lost in translation," he said.

You simply use the camera on your computer or smartphone to capture a quick "videogram", and then upload that file to the Givit storage area. Once it is there, you choose who can view it and those people are alerted that they should visit their video library to watch something. Only people who authenticate through a log-in can view the video, which helps reduce the chances that a competitor might see something he or she shouldn't. At the same time, the viewer's email isn't all clogged up with a big video file, which may or may not be rejected by their email service provider because of the size.

You might also use Givit to send a videogram to a business partner or potential client as a unique post-meeting follow-up message, Kostello said.

The service is hosted on the Amazon cloud platform, but there are Givit mobile applications for the Apple iPhone and iPad, and (more recently) for the Android platform.

Kostello said the number of Givit registered users is doubling every three to four weeks. At its launch back in November, the service provider has about 25 million unique videos stored, and it was processing more than 1 million new videos each month.