Video startup Eatlime raises the bar on upload speeds

Eatlime, a video uploading and sharing service, says its application delivers video uploading speeds one hundred times faster than its competitors, including Yousendit, which just raised another round of funding.Eatlime has raised more than $400,000 in its first round of funding, with $300,000 from Tim Draper at Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and the rest from Amidzad, Rajeev Motwani, and a trio of ex-googlers: Aydin Senkut, XG ventures, and Georges Harik.

Don’t confuse video uploading technology with YouTube: YouTube caps video uploads at 100MB and doesn’t allow video downloading, while Yousendit and Eatlime allow 1GB videos.

Eatlime accomplishes these speeds by letting users download video while it’s still being uploaded. Users can then publish and share their videos on their social networking profiles, blogs and personal web sites.

While a song, a picture, or a document would normally take less than a minute to upload using most any web service, videos on the web (specifically videos between 100MB and 1GB in size) were seeing upload times of ten minutes — sometimes even an hour — says cofounder Adil Lalani.

The company, incubated at Amidzad in Sunnyvale, Calif., built the patent-pending technology platform in about four months, and Lalani says the company has essentially created a new type of streaming for video on the client side, while the video being uploaded is converted to flash and syncs with the playback experience.

This means that as soon as you begin uploading a video, and say, 5 percent of that video has been uploaded, you can share the link with a friend who can watch the video as its simultaneously uploading. Compare that to popular video-sharing site YouTube, which usually has a 10-20 minute lag time between video upload, and video playback.

The cofounders demoed the technology for me via web conference, and it’s just as fast as they say it is.

The startup is not going unnoticed. Several video sites have approached the young team to consider licensing the technology, although Lalani and cofounder Mohammad Al Adham have had their hands full closing the investment and bringing in the company’s first hire, an engineer from Canada, while still in search for more talent to help build out their product.

Lalani, 21-years-old, founded his first web service when he was 16 years old, and later sold it for a cool $1.25 million while a freshman university student in Canada, where he also met Adham.

David Adewumi, a contributing writer with VentureBeat, is the founder & CEO of http://heekya.com a social storytelling platform billed “The Wikipedia of Stories.”