Blinkx launches not-quite-ready music jukebox

Blinkx launches not-quite-ready music jukebox

Blinkx Music, a newly launched website at www.music.blinkx.com, supposedly has 33,000 hours of music videos from 10,000-plus artists. The search tool, which is indexed by artist, album, song and genre, makes it easy to dig up old U2 videos … no, actually it doesn’t. Type in “U2 Boy” and you get “Sorry, there are no results matching your query.” On YouTube, by contrast the band’s impossibly naive-and-innocent-not-yet-superstars video for “I Will Follow” arrives at the… Continue Reading

Roundup: Wright sticks with Spore, Zango folds, Texas gives solar a boost and more

Roundup: Wright sticks with Spore, Zango folds, Texas gives solar a boost and more

Wright still on board with Spore — Despite his departure from Electronic Arts, the Sims creator says he will still pitch in on Spore’s sequels.

Game runs apocalypse drills — A report on crisis response has been released based on the game Superstruct, a program that crowdsources people’s reactions to disaster scenarios. CNet has more.

Cybersecurity no easy fix — A study conducted on cybersecurity for president Barack Obama suggests that U.S. networks are vulnerable to external threats, but that… Continue Reading

OVGuide beefs up video search and discovery portal with $5M

OVGuide, a comprehensive video search portal that draws results from sites including Fancast, Hulu, ESPN and Funny or Die, announced today that it raised $5 million in capital all from Baroda Ventures. Based in Beverly Hills, Calif., the company was founded in 2006 and says it attracts 150 million page views and 36 million searches per month.

OVGuide claims to deliver the most relevant search results of any video engine because it has a team of… Continue Reading

How big an opportunity is the external memory?

How big an opportunity is the external memory?

Before the advent of the written word, the story goes, humans had to either store all their memories in their own heads, or by oral tradition passed down through designated members of their tribes. With trade came notation of facts and figures, and later alphabets, books and libraries. With them came the modern brain, which treats recorded knowledge as an extension of itself.

Throughout these developments, previous generations have grumbled that each new advance leaves us… Continue Reading

YuMe, Blinkx latest video ad companies to make splash

YuMe, Blinkx latest video ad companies to make splash

With all the video content online, the video advertising market is booming. Investors are still placing bets on new companies, and existing companies are getting more aggressive with ad techniques.

The latest company to raise money is YuMe, a Silicon Valley company offering a video-centric ad network. It has just raised $9 million more from prominent firms DAG Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Accel Partners, and BV Capital.

A second company, Blinkx, is already public, but its latest video… Continue Reading

Video search company, Blinkx, blows bubble with IPO

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… Continue Reading

Roundup: Scribd hype, Stockpickr, Red Herring, Cozmo and lots more

Roundup: Scribd hype, Stockpickr, Red Herring, Cozmo and lots more

Here’s the latest action:

Scribd hype — Maybe because it calls itself the “YouTube for documents,” the young Scribd is getting a lot of interest from Silicon Valley’s venture capitalists. We’ve talked to some eager to invest. Rumors are leaking out, including at Gigaom and Techcrunch that the round is almost done, with GigaOm saying it is done and citing a large $10 million valuation. We talked with Scribd’s Trip Adler today, and he didn’t want to say… Continue Reading