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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.
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