Mary Hodder is the CEO and founder of Dabble. She is an entrepreneur that sets the tone for all future women entrepreneurs with her attitude, personality, and character. She can be a role-model for the next generation of female entrepreneurs. To read more about this lady's contribution to entrepreneurship, read their blog here.

How did Dabble get started?

In December of ’04, I was doing consultant work in this area of live web search/media discovery for several text companies, a photo company and an open source company. I identified a problem with the current state of online video and the idea of Dabble was born to address that problem. And so I was planning Dabble on the side, trying to raise money. We launched last July.

We see that to a large extent, people want to get a reasonable chunk of discoverable, memorable video. Statistically speaking, there are about 200,000 videos that are uploaded daily. We see that every person has a different media experience. So it was all about enabling people to find video that is meaningful more easily. For example, filmmakers want to have an easy way to find a crucial piece of video when they need it. And users don't like feeling like they are overwhelmed by the number of video out there, so getting them just the good stuff is helpful.

Dabble gets people involved, interested, and passionate about the media. What makes us valuable is not just our ability to search, but in essence, it gives our users a user-centric media experience through automation, customization, and importance.

With all the technologies Web 2.0 has brought us, such as bookmarking, social communities, podcasting, and blogs, just to name a few, why online video? Why Dabble?

We identified a problem with online video where the process of “discovering media” is complicated by metadata. The basic requirement of “good discovery” is that in order to have good search results, you must know exactly what title you are looking for. In reality, we understand that is not always the case and so we started Dabble to answer that problem. How do you discover meaningful video with all the different places that video exists?

Dabble solves that problem by providing a comprehensive solution where we give people the ability to search across hundreds of sources (eg. Youtube, Google video, Revver, Blip.tv, etc) and then give users the ability to bookmark that video in their own customizable video collection. Dabble automates that process so you don’t have to deal with all the ugly meta-data. And you can program sets of video into playlists.

Dabble solves that problem by providing a comprehensive solution where we give people the ability to pull a feed from multiple sources (eg. Youtube, Google video) and then give users the ability to bookmark that video in their own customizable video collection. Dabble automates that process so you don’t have to deal with all the ugly meta-data.

What makes for a good company culture?

What I found really important is the way everyone communicates with each other. Here at Dabble, we believe in sharing information that others do not want to share for some reason or another. I believe in sharing as much information as possible to make people feel involved with what we are doing. On this note, we make it a point to have lunch together on a regular-basis, to try to get everyone involved. We were able to identify something the people believed in, that they believed in, and so we developed our culture around it.

What will it take to encourage more women to start companies?

You will have to be at a place in your life where the important people in your life do not mind that you are doing this and are willing to give you emotional support. For a female to do a startup in a male dominated tech world can be a hard task and risky, but there are also a lot of good things about it. You must have a lot of confidence, self-esteem, and a certain level of awareness to take risks and have the strength to go out and do it. It's nice to have the security of a partner who can so I would recommend finding a partner to go into this business venture with, and planning a lot.