Gawker: valleywag, blinkx

Why Google should hurry up and buy Blinkx

Nicholas Carlson — Fri, 09 May 2008 15:20:00 EDT

Blinkx founder Suranga Chandratillake has always wanted his video search engine to be to online video what Google is to the Web. Here comes his chance. On May 24, a clause in Blinkx's IPO filings that requires the company to pay its former parent, U.K. search engine Autonomy, $50 million in case of any acquisition will expire. Both Google as well as News Corp. are said to be bidding to acquire the company. Google would be smart to cinch the deal.

Blinkx's technology is good. (And really, when have you ever heard Valleywag praise someone's technology?) But Chandratillake has never been able to make Blinkx a destination site. Google already has YouTube, and CEO Eric Schmidt has put the heat on YouTube's management to start making money. Merely applying Google's text-search techniques hasn't cut it. Perhaps Blinkx's technology, which better matches video viewers' interests to ads, could prove YouTube's Holy Grail.

It's a bird! It's a plane! Oh, it's just a cloud.

Nick Douglas — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 23:23:40 EDT

NICK DOUGLAS — Press release titles are usually as boring as a webcam in Bill Gates's bedroom. But the headline "Quintura and blinkx to Visualize Video Search" sounded exciting. Could I search the actual visual content of videos? Navigate a pane-based grid of playable results instead of a stupid link list? Nope. "Visual search" means a tag cloud.

Tag clouds are to Web 2.0 what lasers are to rock concerts. OLD.

GoogTube aftermath: What is Blinkx, and do lawsuits have an economy of scale?

Nick Douglas — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 20:17:18 EDT

The copyright issue: The top question after Google buys YouTube is, "Will media companies sue over pirated content?" If they do, Google is ready, thanks to its experience defending Google Book Search against publishers, keeping Google Video out of its own copyright suits, and years of fighting for the right to host image thumbnails and cached web pages.
Add all that up, and you get "economies of scale," according to economist Stan Liebowitz in the Wall Street Journal. So in addition to content, advertising, and e-mail storage, Google commoditized lawsuits. [Wall Street Journal]
Me-too deals: Microsoft reaches an agreement with video search site Blinkx just as Google bought YouTube. What is Blinkx, other than a company named by the Borg? Well, it's about to become the engine for video search at MSN and Live.com. Blinkx uses sound recognition to scrape transcripts from video. Presumably, it's a killer move in the next step of Internet video. [Internet News]
The bubble: Several major news outlets asked, "Is this the sign of a bubble?" Today, Inc. asks it, then answers itself by pimping the founder of myYearbook.com. His site is growing faster than MySpace — not hard when all the kids are already on MySpace. So it's not Google blowing up the bubble here — it's the starry-eyed journalists depicting small businesses like this as the next Internet giants. [Inc.com]
Google's next buy: Despite rumors, an analyst says it's probably not Level 3, the fiber-optic network that just agreed to serve YouTube. Level 3 is currently worth $5.99 billion on the stock market. That's within Google's buying power, but it would be a big step toward a vertical monopoly for Google, as Level 3 currently serves all the top telecoms and Internet service providers. [Rocky Mountain News]