Business Weekly - Cambridge, UK

The hat-trick of announcements precipitated a 7.69 per cent increase in the company's shares, which rose to 42p in early trading.

The rise checks something of a downward trend in the company's share price since the over-subscribed placing last month. Its shares have been as high as 65p shortly after the placing but rose from a base of 39p following these announcements.

Effective video search is a technical challenge still to be cracked by any of the big names in the search engine space. blinkx has managed to engineer a head start through its speech-to-text transcription and visual analysis technology.

InfoSpace will be using blinkx's technology to offer video search on its Dogpile search engine which returns top results from Google, Yahoo!, Windows Live and Ask.com.

"Video search has become increasingly popular among today’s web searchers and this addition allows us to offer Dogpile users a more visual and interactive search experience,” said Brian McManus, executive vice president of the online business unit at InfoSpace. “blinkx is a leader in the video search space and we chose them to power our offering because of their extensive video content library and advanced video search technology. blinkx also provides results from a variety of video aggregators such as Brightcove, which makes this partnership a great fit for Dogpile, as the leading metasearch site in the U.S.”

Obviously not one for eking out the positive news flow, blinkx also broke cover on a similarly high-profile agreement with RealNetworks, developer of the widely used RealPlayer.

A video search box powered by blinkx will be embedded in the next version of the RealPlayer, giving its millions of users direct access from within the Player to a fully-searchable index of over 12 million hours of online video.

“The new RealPlayer will give people the ability to easily download non-DRM protected videos from thousands of sites, so giving our users access to a best-in-class video search experience is critical,” said Jeff Chasen, vice president of RealPlayer for

Derek J. Brown, research analyst at Seymour Pierce commented in a research note: “This looks to us to be a major step toward establishing Blinkx as the

standard for Web video search.”

Rounding out the trio of announcements is news that the company has launched the world's first contextually relevant video advertising platform.

Founder and CEO Suranga Chandratillake believes it is a significant development for the industry: “Until now, online video advertising was a kind of Frankenstein’s monster – an attempt to cobble together technology that was built for text web banner advertising and apply it to an entirely new medium – the video web,” he said.

“The AdHoc platform is revolutionary because it was built from the ground up to address rich media, resulting in higher monetization for media companies, more effective marketing for advertisers and, most importantly, a useful, non-disruptive experience for users.”