Kreiz, formerly the CEO of TV production studio Endemol, joined Maker as an investor and its chairman last year.

Asked to explain the change, Kreiz described it as standard operating procedure for a startup that needed more professional help as it matured; Zappin will become a “special adviser” to Kreiz, and will stay on the company’s board. COO Courtney Holt will continue in his position.

“I’m not the first professional help that’s coming on board,” Kreiz said. “It became more obvious that we had to run Maker in sync with the potential in terms of where it can go.”

Maker is one of YouTube’s biggest content hubs, and boasts more than three billion views a month. The majority of those come from video makers the startup represents via its distribution network, but it is increasingly focused on creating stuff for itself.

Late last year, as Maker was closing a $36 million round led by Time Warner, the company got involved in an ugly spat with Ray William Johnson, one of its former stars, who has since left the channel for a deal with Blip. Johnson and Zappin engaged in a weird public back-and-forth, which eventually prompted Zappin to write a companywide memo acknowledging a former conviction for felony drug possession.

I’m told the spat did worry both Maker and its investors, but not enough to scotch the deal. But Kreiz says Zappin’s move isn’t related to the incident.

Here’s the memo Zappin is sending to Maker employees today:

Hey Everyone,
I have some important and exciting news I want to share with all of you.
First off, I would like to thank everyone for being part of this amazing journey of building Maker Studios. It’s been quite a ride and I feel very proud of what we’ve all accomplished together!
I founded Maker with Lisa and Ben because we were passionate about creating content and making things verses pitching and auditioning. Youtube gave us a platform as content creators to do just that. We were able to reach a world wide audience and actually make a living doing what we loved, being creative.
The vision for Maker was to create a company that would provide resources, knowledge, and monetization opportunities for content creators around the world so they too could make a living doing what they love.
We have now grown from a small production studio with offices above a Campos Tacos in Venice to being a global media company with a Network of more than 50,000 individual partners in less than 2 years. The rapid evolution of this organization has been an incredible thing to witness.
Being the CEO of Maker Studios has been the single most challenging and rewarding experience of my life. I’ve learned more and accomplished more than I could have ever imagined. The amazing people I’ve shared this journey with will always be loved. Despite all odds Lisa, Ben and I have successfully led and navigated a rapidly growing company that has become the market leader in the space, despite having very little or no business background. No one thought it was possible. I know I could not have done it alone.
It is the very unique partnership between the 3 of us that made it work. While challenging and full of complexity there is no doubt that what we have is special and rare. The success is unquestionable. I feel honored to work along side my cofounders Lisa and Ben. I’m happy to be sharing this journey with them and with all of you at Maker Studios.
As we’ve grown, we’ve added many other remarkably talented people who I also feel privileged to work alongside. From Shay, Kassem, Alex, Christina, Matt, Glasgow and Paul in the early days to our current executives Courtney, Chris, Ryan, Karen, Amy and Sam. It’s a privilege to work with all of you. To all my friends and family, thank you for joining me in this unique opportunity and journey. Working along side so many people that you love has been a rewarding and unique experience that I am extremely grateful for. Mike.D. Without you none of this would be possible. Thank you.
So back to the exciting news!
A little over a year ago I had the privilege of meeting Ynon Kreiz. We both shared a great passion for Youtube and the new media space. He was very excited about what were doing at Maker and believed in our vision of what it could become. We connected immediately and developed a friendship over the next few months. About a year ago I asked Ynon to join Maker’s board of directors as the Chairman.
Since then Ynon has been an advisor, mentor, and sounding board for me. We have spoken almost daily for the past year. We could not have navigated the company through the past year without his help and support. Not only has he helped advise me, he has also learned a lot from his relationship with, Lisa, Ben and I. We have all grown close and have a lot of trust and mutual respect.
As we now prepare to move into the next phase of growth for Maker Studios, I felt it was the right time to make a significant transition. As the former CEO and Chairman of Endemol, the worlds largest independent production company, and as the co-founder and CEO of Fox kids, Ynon has the specific media exec experience that we need to take Maker to the next level. After much thought and discussion with Ynon, my co-founders and the board, I am happy to announce that I will be stepping down as the Maker Studios CEO. Ynon, our Executive Chairman will now be taking over my responsibilities and operational oversight of Maker.
While I won’t be responsible for day to day operations, I will remain on the board of directors and will serve in an advisor role to Ynon and the company. I will work very closely with Ynon during this transition phase to make sure everything goes smoothly.
I love this company and all of you. I’ve always been committed to do what I feel is best for the company and that will never change. This transition is what is best for the company right now. I am confident in my decision. I’m very fortunate to have had the experience of being the CEO of Maker Studios. I also feel lucky to now have the opportunity to hand over the keys to Ynon after a proper amount of time to build a solid relationship, trust, and mutual respect. I feel fortunate to have Ynon join the team. I’m very excited about the future of Maker Studios.
Thank you all,

Danny

But Panna is a little bit different from most cooking apps, blending text-based recipes with famous chefs with professionally-produced video content.

Now the app, which launched on iPad late last year, is available on iPhone.

This food-porn app includes a library of recipes that can be sorted by cuisine or by chef, with a one-tap button for adding recipe ingredients to a shopping list. And it includes how-to videos from name-brand chefs like Rick Bayless and Anita Lo, as well as food writer Melissa Clark.

Panna, which was created by former music industry exec David Ellner, is free to download, but to get full access to the app users will have to shell out as they would for a magazine: Individual “issues,” which come out every couple of months, are $5 each. For a full-year subscription, it’s $15.

To start, though, there is some free content (like an appetizing cauliflower-and-hazelnut recipe by Ms. Lo).

The app is pretty good-looking on the iPad, and sticky-fingered at-home chefs might still find the extra screen real estate preferable to that of the iPhone. But for those who pinch and squeeze their iPhone screens while cooking in the kitchen, Panna will likely be a welcome addition.

So no surprise you spend lots of time using them to do the same thing you do on a regular computer: Watch YouTube.

Here, via broadband service company Sandvine, is a breakdown of mobile Web traffic in North America. By Sandvine’s count, Google’s video site accounts for nearly a third of the data piped into your phone from wireless networks.

Bear in mind that Sandvine is tracking data usage, not time spent, so this isn’t an exact mirror of your phone habits. But it is revealing. Also interesting: We spend more data pushing updates, photos, etc., to Facebook than any place else.

If anything, Sandvine’s data likely undercounts the amount of use these sites get from your phone, because a lot of your phone’s use, particularly for stuff like streaming video, is probably happening at home, on a Wi-Fi network.

But it certainly syncs up nicely with the emphasis YouTube has put on overhauling its mobile apps — the company says it gets a billion mobile views a day — and why it was important for the company to reclaim its app on Apple’s iOS devices.

More likely story: Google bears a good chunk of the responsibility for this one, because Google wants its own YouTube app on the iPhone.

Neither company has been willing to talk publicly about what happened, but here’s another clue about Google’s strategy: The new YouTube app for Sony’s PS3.

The app, built by YouTube, comes with new bells and whistles, like the ability to play clips using your phone as a remote control.

But the most crucial difference is that the app will give PS3 users full access to YouTube’s catalog — and will also play ads. It replaces a cruder, browser-based version of a YouTube app that didn’t feature the full catalog — or ads.

Sound familiar?

The parallels here aren’t exact. For instance, the original PS3 app was also built by YouTube; in the case of the iPhone, it was an Apple-built app created with YouTube’s blessing. But the gist is the same: YouTube, which is spending a lot of time and money to make its videos more advertiser-friendly, wants to make sure it gets full advertiser credit for all of its video views, no matter what device people use to watch them.

And in theory, that’s what will happen when Google gets its own YouTube app up and running on the iPhone. Now, about that app-approval process …

It’s a pretty slick overhaul, or at least it seemed to be when I took a preview spin. But it’s up now, so you can see for yourself, which also means I don’t need to spend much time describing it.

I do want to point out one feature. Like every other Web site in the world, Vevo wants to make itself more social, by making it easier to tell your pals what you’re watching, and easier to see what your friends are watching. No surprise there. What’s interesting to me is that when you log in to the site using your Facebook credentials, Vevo will have already “socialized” you — even if you’ve never used the site and none of your friends have, either.

Vevo can do that by tapping into the music data that Facebook has already compiled about you, based on songs and bands you’ve “Liked,” and any music you’ve played via Facebook-connected services like Spotify.

I know that Facebook’s “frictionless sharing” mechanics — where every action you take on the site is broadcast/spammed out to all your friends — built up an important data warehouse for Mark Zuckerberg.

But I hadn’t quite processed that he was willing to share it with outside developers. Who will, of course, be that much more interested in working with Facebook, for that very reason.

Speaking of Facebook: One reason it’s so important for Caraeff to make his site stickier is that his joint venture, which is co-owned by Sony, Universal Music, and other investors, is dependent on Google’s YouTube for the majority of its traffic. In the U.S., YouTube generates about two-thirds of Vevo’s views.

Caraeff is starting to renegotiate a deal with YouTube that expires at the end of the year, and it makes sense for both sides to make it work. But Caraeff also wants options, which is why he is talking to Facebook, among other suitors.

Those would-be partners would have to offer Caraeff traffic and revenue guarantees to make a deal work. But even with those in place, it would be even more crucial for Vevo to have a standalone site that users really cared about.

Caraeff would be overhauling Vevo, in any case. But if the new look makes his site that much more attractive to partners, even better.

Now, Kik Interactive, the company that introduced super-simple mobile messaging (and became the target of a lawsuit filed by RIM), is joining the multiscreen video party.

Kik’s new app, called Clik, allows you to view video that’s on your smartphone on a bigger connected screen.

Unlike Apple’s AirPlay, which requires users to be on a Wi-Fi network, or Movl’s apps for Samsung TVs, which in some cases require Wi-Fi, Clik uses the 3G capabilities of your phone and doesn’t require access to a special device on the receiving end — just any screen that is connected to the Internet and can run a browser.

For users concerned about the app burning up your phone data, Clik explains this by saying the app doesn’t stream the content to your TV or computer; it just instructs the browser to play video.

Once a user has downloaded the free Clik app to an iOS or Android device, he or she can navigate to ClikThis.com through a Web browser and scan the giant QR code that appears on the home page. The Web page then becomes a video viewing platform for the videos that appear on the smartphone. The interactivity between the two is pretty seamless, with the videos starting, stopping and switching as soon as a command is received from the smartphone.

One of the initially apparent drawbacks is that ClikThis.com is just a bare-bones host page of the video, with no command buttons on it, so you can’t start and stop the video from the browser — it has to be done through the phone.

In terms of video quality, it’s determined by the quality of the Web video and not the video as it appears on the phone.

Kik is launching Clik today, along with a software kit for developers to get cracking on different applications for the Clik platform. For now, it’s rolling out with a YouTube app. Creator Ted Livingston sees the potential for multi-user, multiscreen sharing: You’re at a party, say, and everyone’s using Clik on their phones, so they can all share and control the game, video or music playlists.

Kik’s battle with RIM over the messaging app is still continuing, though last fall Kik said it was working on a new version of its messenger that would work on RIM BlackBerry devices. Despite the legal fracas, Kik managed to nab $8 million in Series A funding last year from RRE Ventures, Spark Capital and Fred Wilson’s Union Square Ventures. Wilson and Adam Ludwin from RRE also joined Kik’s board.

What is new, though, is that start-up cloud service SugarSync is now available on Samsung’s new “smart” TVs.

For Samsung TV owners, having SugarSync as part of AllShare Play means that they can upload media from any device — not just a Samsung PC or Samsung smartphone — and then wirelessly access it through the TV. And they can access uncompressed media, so if they’re storing high-resolution or HD media through SugarSync, that’s what they’ll get on the TV. It’s not clear which specific models of Samsung’s smart TVs will have SugarSync as part of AllShare, but Samsung has stated before that the service will be available on TVs, PCs, smartphones, tablets and digital cameras.

For SugarSync, it’s a first step into the TV market, as well as a leg up on its direct competitor, Dropbox, which currently doesn’t have a presence in TVs. Dropbox, which claims 50 million users, declined to comment on whether it is working with manufacturers to get its app on smart TVs. The Dropbox app can be accessed through browsers on smart TVs, but it seems like some Dropbox fans have been itching for a dedicated app on television sets.

One of the features that sets SugarSync apart from Dropbox is the five gigabytes of free storage space offered to new customers (though Dropbox does offer 5GB of free storage to HTC mobile phone owners). Keep in mind that a single two-hour HD movie can take up approximately 10GB. But SugarSync CEO Laura Yecies says its cloud-sharing service on TVs is meant more for short home movies and photos, rather than feature-length movies or other file types, like work documents.

Still, if you’re storing lots of home movies in your account — think of all those videos you shoot on your smartphone — that 5GB of space will fill up pretty quickly, which means you’ll be prompted to upgrade to a premium SugarSync account.

It’s not the first partnership SugarSync has forged with hardware makers, and Yecies said the company is exploring more. Last year, Lenovo said its Think-branded laptops would ship with SugarSync on them, and Fujitsu began including SugarSync on its ScanSnap scanners. SanDisk has also created an app for Android smartphones that automatically dumps media from the phone’s memory card to SugarSync, in order to free up space on the device.

Overseas, the company has also partnered with carriers Korea Telecom and France Telecom Orange, as a cloud service offered with mobile or broadband Internet service.

SugarSync launched under Yecies in 2008, after having previously operated under the name Sharpcast. While the start-up says its customer base grew sixfold last year, it declined to say how many total users it has, except to say it’s in the millions.

“TVs are a big step for us, in terms of convergence,” Yecies said. “All the devices are coming together, people are starting to understand the cloud, and the reality is it’s really becoming mainstream.”

In case you’ve missed the sky-high predictions for the cloud market, research firm IDC sized the cloud sharing and sync market at $724 million in 2009, and projects that it will grow at a compound annual rate of 28.2 percent, to over $2.5 billion in 2014.