Aussies cash out in YouTube buy

An online video start-up launched by three Australian entrepreneurs (including, apparently, an old acquaintance of mine from university) has been bought by Google subsidiary YouTube for a reported US$15 million.

YouTube said on its website yesterday in the US that it had bought the California-based company, Omnisio, with US technology blog TechCrunch reporting the deal was worth about US$15 million.

Slated to benefit from the payout is US early stage venture capital firm Y Combinator, as well as Omnisio's three Australian founders, Ryan Junee, Julian Frumar and Simon Ratner.

Funnily enough, I am pretty sure Frumar was in my class at the University of New South Wales back around 2000, when we were both studying Business Information Technology. Perhaps I shouldn't have dropped out to follow a journalistic career; Frumar looks to have made a motza after staying the course.

Julian Frumar
(Credit: Omnisio)

Frumar has also been involved in Vquence, also an Australian start-up, while all three have been involved in another company, Sensory Networks.

The effort looks to have been fast work for Omnisio — it only launched publicly in March to provide a bunch of tools that sit on top of popular video sites such as YouTube and Google Video.

"We've been continually surprised by the creative and interesting stuff our users have built on the Omnisio platform — from hilarious video compilations, to witty (and yes, sometimes over the top) in-video comments, to informative presentations with slides synced with video," Omniso wrote on its blog about its short history leading up to the buy.

Bootstrappr will try to get in contact with Omnisio to obtain more details. Junee's twitter feed can be found here.