Video search company, Blinkx, blows bubble with IPO
Updated
Blinkx the San Francisco video search engine, has taken us into new bubble territory, going public on the London Alternative Investment Market (AIM) and being valued at $355 million.
It raised about $50 million.
Its IPO is perfectly timed, because it hits all the hype buttons: Blinkx is search, it is video, and best of all, it is online advertising — an industry where the merger activity is at its most frantic levels since Cisco, Nortel and Lucent binged on billion-dollar infrastructure companies at the height of the last bubble.
Should we bother reminding people?: Blinkx does not expect to earn a profit this year. Oh, and there are plenty of competitors, namely Pixsy (which says it has more distribution deals with independent sites than Blinkx), Truveo, Google/YouTube, Yahoo, Microsoft, and the long-tail of other video sites. More more are coming.
(Corrected 
Blinkx’s technology takes a video’s content — the spoken words within them – and translates it into searchable text, which is something different from what most sites do. Pluggd and others translation services are making headway in this area. It is powering video search for a Lycos, Looksmart and a division AOL.
Blinkx, meanwhile, tell us they’re in this for the long haul, and they think they can make money by serving targeted advertisements.
Next Story: Google, Genentech fund personal-genetics startup 23andMe
Previous Story: World Golf Tour launches, worth a round
About the Author, Matt Marshall
Matt launched VentureBeat in September of 2006, with the realization that no one else was covering the entrepreneurial and tech innovation scene with the velocity or depth that he was. Prior to founding VentureBeat, he covered venture capital for the San Jose Mercury News from 2001 to 2006. In 2002, Matt was awarded "Journalist of the Year" by the Northern California Society of Professional Journalists. Prior to working at the Merc, he was a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Bonn, Germany from 1995 to 1998, and a writer for the Washington Post in 1994. Matt holds a PhD in Government and an MA in German and European Studies from Georgetown University. In addition to VentureBeat, Matt is also the Executive Producer of DEMO, the leading launchpad event for emerging technologies.
