3Crowd Technologies raises $6.6 million

Canaan Partners and Storm Ventures investing in co-founder of BitGravity's new startup

3Crowd Technologies, a provider of management tools for cloud-based services, announced on Tuesday it has secured $6.62 million in Series A financing from Canaan Partners and Storm Ventures.  The San Mateo, Calif.- based startup previously raised an undisclosed amount of angel funding from Storm Ventures, Kevin Rose, Jay Adelson and Greenwhich Technology Associates.

The company develops a product called CrowdDirector which is a set of management tools that gives enterprises more control over content delivery and cloud services.  It lets its users control multiple services at once.  The benefit of this is the enterprise can manage certain factors, like which CDN should deliver content to a user, based on location or what they may be trying to access.  The goal is to ultimately improve the economics of delivering large amounts of data across the Web, like videos and audio.  

The founder has a bit of history in this space.  It's the latest startup from Barret Lyon, who was co-founder at BitGravity.  BitGravity is a video delivery network which can deliver SD, HD videos and live streams.  
    
Lyon commented in a press release, “We have launched a product targeted at cloud resource management and are now, with this funding, embarking a journey which will disrupt and define a new era of Internet data delivery.”

Quite simply put, it's hard to make money producing, hosting and delivering video on the Web.  Costs for hosting and delivering video are high.  3Crowd hopes to provide the industry with tools to help them save money by managing multiple CDN's as opposed to simply relying on one, which can prove to be cost ineffective.