The idea of a “Google killer” has lost most of its meaning – challenger after challenger came along, assumed that title, and proceeded to fail miserably. Google Video may face a real threat in the form of Blinkx, however – the Autonomy corporation has announced plans to demerge that video search engine.
“Blinkx will then be combined with Autonomy’s consumer arm and will float on AIM [England’s Alternative Investment Market] in May, with analysts tipping a market value of anywhere between $150 million and $500 million,” reported the Times Online’s Joe Bolger. From a business perspective, I’d say that’s not a bad start.
One analyst, Derek Brown of Seymour Pierce (an investment bank and stockbroker), seemed to agree. “We expect it to be a highly sought after offering, given the explosion of unstructured video content on the web,” he told The Guardian.
(Brown’s prediction is probably less impressive – and yet all the more accurate – due to market movements that have already occurred; Bolger concluded his article with the update that “Autonomy shares were trading up 59.5p at 758p at 9am” due to the Blinkx news).
Blinkx is also looking pretty good from a user’s perspective. Even as Google and YouTube face lawsuits on every front, Blinkx boasts of “partnerships with 200 leading content and media companies,” and the service has also “indexed over 7 million hours of video content and made it fully searchable using speech-to-text transcription and visual analysis.”
Expect big headlines, then, when the Blinkx IPO occurs. And expect the phrase “Google killer” to be used a lot.
