One True Media is a new Silicon Valley start-up (Redwood City) that is offering video creation tools, and wants to be the next video-sharing company. There are dozens of competitors, so this is a long shot.

But it is going after a niche, and the co-founders say they have gotten 335,000 registered users since launching last year. The niche is to provide simple tools to create videos, and it has targeted the mother-baby community. Many mothers are posting these videos, typically three to six minutes in length, on BabyCenter.com.

One strategy for success on the Web these days is to target the "niche." A niche, if properly and obsessively targeted, might just turn out millions, if not tens of millions of users --which is still a niche on a planet of several billion people. Facebook went after a few ivy-league colleagues, and grew from there....

Few people have heard of this company, but now Silicon Valley heavy-weight venture firm Kleiner Perkins believes in it enough to invest $5 million.

"A lot of sites are sharing video," says chief executive Mark Moore, who co-founded the company with John Love. "Post a clip, and you can view it and rank it....We find those clips to be kind of America's funniest video material." But in One True Media's case, videos tend to be larger, and have more emotional value to the creator, says Moore.

There are several Silicon Valley competitors when it comes to giving you movie creation and editing tools, including Adobe Premiere, Apple's iMovie, and Avid's Pinnacle, of Mountain View.

But these tools are for full-on, longer length movies, not exactly easy to use for most people, Moore says. We agree with him, and One True Media has made things dead simple. One True Media set out to create a product that lets you make and edit a video in a few minutes; we tried it, and it works. Here are the steps: You click to start making a video. The site then prompts you to upload your photos, video and music files -- which it does by taking you to "browse" your desktop. Then you can create your video story with editing tools on the site (there is no software download). Once finished, you can share the video stories online via MySpace, Typepad, Xanga and other places.

The service is free for a limited amount of storage (up to one megabyte). You have sixty days. After that, it is $3.99 a month, or $39.99 a year. The company has had a couple of thousand upgrades, says Moore

Kleiner's Randy Komisar has taken a board seat on the company.

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