Video search company, Blinkx, blows bubble with IPO

May 22, 2007 | Matt Marshall | Comments | |

Updated

blinkx.jpgBlinkx 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.

blinkximage.jpgIts 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.

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  • Video guy
    The crazy thing is that the technology Blinkx uses is not proprietary. It's Virage which is owned by autonomy. Anybody can buy it! The value in blinkx is that they took the time to index a bunch of content nothing more.
  • Maybe this will start a new trend and bring some much needed attention back to the IPO and stock market. Whereas going public was the realistic exit for most startups back in the late 90's, now it seems to be dismissed fairly quickly as compared to the option of getting gobbled up by a bigger fish. I hope to see the IPO make a comeback. It'll add a very interesting dynamic to an already exciting marketplace.

    Boris
    Fouinder of BINC
  • Kevin Bealy
    Pixsy would be crazy not to go public. They are so positioned to consume this market, else, be acquired, to benefit a pre-IPO price. Very true, this is 1992, and Yahoo (Blinkx)just went public. Next Pixsy, then.... ??
  • Dr G. Welhengama
    I have never seen any vedio search engine like that of Blinkx over the last five years. It stands above any competitors in the field owing to its superior technology. This small company will be one of the biggest starts in the coming decade.
  • Dr G. Welhengama
    I have never seen any vedio search engine like that of Blinkx over the last five years. It stands above any competitors in the field owing to its superior technology. This small company will be one of the biggest stars in the coming decade.
  • Blinkx does seem to have a decent search product but their management team is horrible. I've tried to do business with them in the past and they are a bunch of pricks especially Suranga and Matt.

    I don't know what Michael Lynch (the CEO of autonomy) was thinking when he put these 30-year-old kids at the helm.

    I also heard that 10% of their workforce actually left the company within the first few months of employment because they couldn't deal with such unprofessional & poor leadership. One guy only lasted two days before he decided to leave! That's got to tell you something about the direction this company is heading. Their stock is completely overvalued as well.

    It's also funny that their website is straight out of the 80's yet they try to position themselves as a Web 2.0 company. Get lost Blinkx....good people make up good companies and you don't fall into that category.
  • ellen thomas
    Blinkx is just brilliant the quality of the search is
    way way way ahead of anything else this is definately the
    best company, in the next generation of online search technology
    i visit Blinkx.com every day its nearly addictive
    many thanks Ellen.