blinkx Has a New Home Page — Stop the Presses
February 6, 2009
Blinkx, http://www.blinkx.com, self-touted as the world’s largest video search engine, released a news alert that it has “re-launched” its home page with a couple “new” options: an inform me button that sends you news (this concept isn’t new) and an entertain me button that sends entertaining videos (that’s not a new idea either). They’re also promoting searching for videos visually (what a concept) and using speech tags in video (it’s been done). If companies like blinkx want to be in the spotlight, somewhat more steroid charged news might calm the Beyond Search goslings.
Jessica W. Bratcher, February 6, 2009
Google: Stomping Blinkx, Microsoft, Yahoo–Everybody
December 23, 2008
I am not a video centric person. But I have examined data that suggest in two or three years, rich media will be an increasingly big chunk of an organization’s data. I like to read; 15 year olds watch videos. The TechCrunch article here should make the blood run cold in quite a few search companies. Erick Schonfeld’s “YouTube Now 25 Percent of All Google Searches” means one thing–the Google is extending its lead in search. For me, the point of these data is not that the numbers are necessarily spot on. Stats never are when someone is tracking Internet traffic. The point is that users are becoming habituated to Googzilla. Well meaning but uninformed people who don’t look beyond the baloney generated by azure chip consultants miss the delayed impact of habits in online access. Once these habits are formed, competitors have to work overtime to change them. With Google’s dominance in search, why is it so difficult for folks to consider the implications of Google centric behavior in organizations? I figured it out a couple of years ago. The YouTube search data underscore the pay forward advantage the GOOG has in place.
Stephen Arnold, December 22, 2008
Blinkx Actions and Rumors
July 17, 2008
Blinkx is in the news again. As you may know, Blinkx is a video search service. Beta News reported on July 16, 2008, that the company is taking offensive and defensive action. You can read Jacqueline Emigh’s story “Rumored Google Target Blinkx Teams with Microsoft, Others” here.
Ms. Emigh cites another Web log. The paragraph of interest to me was:
“Speculation is rising around a potential acquisition of Blinkx, a video search engine, by either Google or News Corp. (and possibly Yahoo),” noted a blog posting in May by Heather Dougherty, director of research at the Hitwise market research firm.
Blinkx reports that it you can search over 26 million hours of video from Google Video, YouTube, MetaCafe, and others.
Among Blinkx’ new deals are tie ups with:
You can learn more about Blinkx here. The Register offers a different angle here.
I am not sure what to make of this story. In 2005, Blinkx was an independent company according to this posting in Search Engine Watch. I have heard that the company is linked to Autonomy, but I need to look into this alleged tie up more closely.
The phrase “sharpened its defense and offense” continues to puzzle me. Does Blinkx want to be purchased by Google or Yahoo? Does Blinkx want to remain independent? More information is needed.
Working Hypotheses
My working hypotheses are:
- This is a PR play, designed to increase visibility of Blinkx and focus attention on what are partnering deals, probably not big money makers yet.
- Blinkx is a hot property, and the company’s management is aggressively positioning the search engine for acquisition
- Video search is a money pit, and the company is pursuing tie ups in hopes of finding a formula to boost revenues and get the stock moving upwards.
The honking goose will fly over its available information and update this Blinkx coverage. My earlier essay about Blinkx is here.
Stephen Arnold, July 17, 2008
Video Search Bragging Rights: Blinkx Says It Is Bigger Than Google Video
May 16, 2008
For those stuck in northbound traffic on the slow moving river of traffic that is Highway 101, a quite large billboard that told me that Blinkx is the world’s largest video search engine.” In mid-May 2008, a rumor swirled across the Internet that News Corp. was kicking Blinkx’s tires. Was an acquisition in the wind? Was this billboard part of an acquisition campaign? Was it a reminder to Silicon Valley that Google’s span of control did not include video search?
I was sensitive to digitized video for two reasons. The Auto Channel told me that it has thousands of hours of automotive-related video. One interesting aspect of this is that when a video gets “hot”, it gets a great deal of traffic. What’s mystifying, if I understood what The Auto Channel told me, is that it’s very hard to predict what will strike the user’s fancy.
The other reason is that I spoke with a programmer who once did a bit of work for a couple of the large European video services. I can’t reveal the name of the project this person worked on, but it rhymes with “goosed”. The point was that video is flooding the Internet, and it is difficult to generate enough revenue to keep up with the research, development, programming, and bandwidth charges. Video on a metered line is important to many users, but, if I understood his comments, those users don’t pay. Advertisers want “tight” demographics, and the usage data aren’t compelling enough to allow some video sites to generate enough cash to stay alive at this time.
I am not sure how much video Blinkx has indexed. I heard from one of my sources that Google receives more than 1.2 million video uploads per month. I recall reading that the GOOG accounts for more than 60 percent of video search traffic, but since the ComScore traffic flap, it’s tough to know just how much traffic Google has. Could be 70 percent, maybe more. A few days ago, ComScore said Google was the number one Web site on earth. Maybe? Maybe not? Google knows because it does not have to estimate its traffic. My sources tell me that Google just counts traffic, no sampling necessary, to skew the data.
The Blinkx tag line is “Over 26 million hours of video. Search it all.” Their system appears to have a slather of patent documents in place. I tallied more than 100 when I stopped counting. Its conceptual search that includes speech recognition, neural networks, and machine learning to create text transcripts. That text is then searched.
Video: The Top Info Dog
April 4, 2016
I love the capitalist tool. The founder rode a motorcycle. When I was in Manhattan, I had the pleasure of listening to the Malcolm-cycle burble and grunt when talking with a couple of pals. Wonderful that noise and odor.
I read “The Content Pyramid: And Why Video Must Be at the Top.” I am not sure the founder of the capitalist tool was into video. Well, the capitalist tool is an an article with a parental “must” makes this point:
Video is the Matryoshka doll of content.
I did not know that. I know that some folks who shoot videos write scripts, sell them and then other people (who know better than the author) rewrite them.
The write up points out that a video has a script. But the video has pictures and audio.
I need to take a couple of deep breaths. My heart is racing with the impact of these comments.
I learned:
As more and more content consumption goes mobile, it’s usually a necessity to create multiple lengths and optimized formats of video content, so you should always have tiered, multi-channel thinking built in to your editorial process.
So how much video does the capitalist tool have on YouTube? 4,900 videos. But that’s not too many. I ran the query “Forbes” on Google Video and learned that there are 16,900 videos available. I checked Vimeo and learned there were 521 videos. I checked Blinkx and found quite a few false drops.
The problem is that I have never seen a reference to a Forbes video. I do receive mail addressed to my deceased father enjoining him to re-subscribe to the print edition of Forbes Magazine. But the video thing with the podcast, the clips, and the use of video in marketing. Not on my radar.
Remember the “must.” How about adding the concept of “effective”?
Video by itself is a bit of an ego play in my opinion. When no one watches the video or knows a video exists, what’s the point? Right, right. I forget. Some ad agencies love to do video shoots in Half Moon Bay. It is fun. How bright the video shines depends on more the height of the pyramid in my opinion.
Stephen E Arnold, April 4, 2016
Multimedia Data Mining
February 3, 2016
I read “Knowledge Discovery using Various Multimedia Data Mining Technique.” The write up is an Encyclopedia Britannica type summary of the components required to make sense of audio and video.
I noted this passage:
In this paper, we addressed data mining for multimedia data such as text, image, video and audio. In particular, we have reviewed and analyzed the multimedia data mining process with different tasks. This paper also described the clustering models using video for multimedia mining.
The methods used by the systems the author considered use the same numerical recipes which most search vendors know, love, rely upon, and ignore the known biases of the methods: Regression, time series, etc.
My take away is that talk about making sense of the flood of rich media is a heck of a lot easier than processing the video uploaded to Facebook and YouTube in a single hour.
The write up does not mention companies working in this farm yard. There are some nifty case studies to reference as well; for example, Exalead’s video search and my touchstone, Google YouTube and Google Video Search. Blinkx (spun out of Autonomy, a semi famous search outfit) is a juicy tale as well.
In short, if you want to locate videos, one has to use multiple tools, ask people where a video may be found, or code your own solution.
Stephen E Arnold, February 3, 2016
Funding Granted for American Archive Search Project
September 23, 2015
Here’s an interesting project: we received an announcement about funding for Pop Up Archive: Search Your Sound. A joint effort of the WGBH Educational Foundation and the American Archive of Public Broadcasting, the venture’s goal is nothing less than to make almost 40,000 hours of Public Broadcasting media content easily accessible. The American Archive, now under the care of WGBH and the Library of Congress, has digitized that wealth of sound and video. Now, the details are in the metadata. The announcement reveals:
“As we’ve written before, metadata creation for media at scale benefits from both machine analysis and human correction. Pop Up Archive and WGBH are combining forces to do just that. Innovative features of the project include:
*Speech-to-text and audio analysis tools to transcribe and analyze almost 40,000 hours of digital audio from the American Archive of Public Broadcasting
*Open source web-based tools to improve transcripts and descriptive data by engaging the public in a crowdsourced, participatory cataloging project
*Creating and distributing data sets to provide a public database of audiovisual metadata for use by other projects.
“In addition to Pop Up Archive’s machine transcripts and automatic entity extraction (tagging), we’ll be conducting research in partnership with the HiPSTAS center at University of Texas at Austin to identify characteristics in audio beyond the words themselves. That could include emotional reactions like laughter and crying, speaker identities, and transitions between moods or segments.”
The project just received almost $900,000 in funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. This loot is on top of the grant received in 2013, from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, that got the project started. But will it be enough money to develop a system that delivers on-point results? If not, we may be stuck with something clunky, something that resembles the old Autonomy Virage, Blinkxx, Exalead video search, or Google YouTube search. Let us hope this worthy endeavor continues to attract funding so that, someday, anyone can reliably (and intuitively) find valuable Public Broadcasting content.
Cynthia Murrell, September 23, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Googley Predictions A La 2005
August 6, 2013
Today I revisit a blast from the past. In the autumn of 2005, blogger Mike Falick made some predictions in, “How Intelligent Searching Will Change the World.” We now know Falick was largely correct, and that Google is the survivor who gets to run the island. The post begins:
“The current edition of eSchool News has a great article that describes ‘intelligent searching’ through new technology for searching and navigating the internet. I found this article interesting because I have been bookmarking the websites referred to in the article as well as several others that I find very useful. As more and more information becomes accessible to anyone with a computer and an internet connection, Thomas Friedman‘s flattening of the planet will only accelerate. (See my prior posts on Thomas Friedman here and here.)
“Here are some of the websites I think are part of the rapid dissemination of information that are world-changers:”
Of the 12 entries, nine are Googley projects. Some, like Google Scholar, Google Earth, still exist under the original names. Others, like Google Suggest (now known as Autocomplete), have been wrapped into the ruling web-search engine. His other inclusions are still around, though decidedly in Google’s shadow: Gnooks, a listing of new books; video search site blinkx; and science resource site Scirus.
I like it when a futurist gets it right. Of course, predictions that fell flat could be even more entertaining. . . .
Cynthia Murrell, August 06, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Will Video Inject New Revenue Into Venerable Kiplinger
August 17, 2012
Why just read advice when you can watch it? According to MSN Money’s article “blinkx Partners with Kiplinger for Personal Finance Wisdom” Kiplinger wants to go viral with their well-respected advice.
Most people think YouTube when they hear video, but blinkx has more than 35 million hours of audio and video content available with a customized search platform. Now they are combining with a company that holds the prestige of a well preserved antique in the world of finance wisdom.
Kiplinger is broadening blinkx’s financial horizon in hopes of expanding their viewer range:
“Kiplinger’s is one of the most trusted and well-respected sources for consumers seeking financial advice. Whether you’re a recent graduate coping with student loans or a parent looking for tips on tax breaks, our video library has helpful personal finance advice for you. We’re pleased to partner with blinkx to increase our exposure to new audiences and to make our video reports easily searchable for consumers around the world.”
Will video inject new revenue into the venerable Kiplinger? This noble company publishes the longest running newsletter in the US and is only one decade from the century mark. The print newsletters are not what they use to be and more presses collect dust every year.
This gosling does not think Kiplinger will receive any monumental renown via blinkx, but we’ll have to wait and see. In the meantime, Kiplinger does deserve a 12 Honk salute for reaching antique status.
Jennifer Shockley, August 17, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Yidio: Video Search
March 6, 2009
A happy quack to the reader who alerted me to Yidio, a video search system that indexes 200 million videos. The search system is powered by Truveo. Here’s what Yidio said about itself:
Yidio is owned and operated by 2ten Media LLC, based in San Diego, California which also owns Sportsnipe.com, a sports news aggregator that combines sports news from thousands of sources around the world. It is 2ten Media’s mission to provide an Internet experience to users that is not only simple and efficient, but employs the highest technology available while adding value to every user. We are constantly expanding our Internet properties, so be on the look out for good thing’s in the near future from 2ten Media.
Here’s what Truveo said about itself:
Today, Truveo is one of the largest video search engines on the Web. Truveo is the search engine that powers many of the Web’s most popular video destinations. Truveo currently powers video search for AOL, Microsoft Corporation, CNET’s Search.com, Brightcove, Qwest, Kosmix, CSTV, Infospace, Excite, and hundreds of other applications worldwide. Across the network of websites it powers, Truveo reaches an audience of over 40 million users every month. The Truveo video search engine is widely recognized as being the most comprehensive and up-to-date video search service on the Web.
I am not a video consumer. If you can help me understand these two services, let me know. I am also trying to map these services to Blinkx, which bills itself as a big video search system. And YouTube.com? Check out Yidio.
Stephen Arnold, March 6, 2009
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