RTHM.L Regulatory News (RTHM)

7 May 2008 07:01

Blinkx Plc07 May 2008 blinkx Doubles Advertising Sales Headcount to Support Massive Online TV Opportunity Strategic New Hires Capitalize on Thriving Internet Video Market SAN FRANCISCO, CALIF. - May 7, 2008 - blinkx, the world's largest and mostadvanced video search engine, today announced that it has doubled itsadvertising sales team to support new business development, and plans tocontinue its aggressive growth in this area. New hires will join blinkx in SanFrancisco, London, Los Angeles and New York. "We're strengthening our team to help us take on a tremendous opportunity inonline video advertising," said Federico Grosso, senior vice president ofbusiness development, blinkx. "I am delighted that we have been able to attractseveral top advertising sales executives, all of whom have proven track recordsof success, and a wealth of contacts in the media industry." Kat Kashefi, formerly an account director for Euroclick, will join the Londonoffice as advertising sales manager. Erik Esfandiary, who worked for five yearsin TV sales for Sky Media, will also join the London team. Darrin Porter, who previously worked for Ziff Davis, will join the San Franciscooffice as director of advertising sales. Jason Whidby, who was with the advertising sales department for MTV, will be asales manager for blinkx based in Los Angeles. Finally, Maximiliano Ramirez, who has worked around the country for a number oftop online publishers and created the successful advertising networking event "Digital Wednesdays," will join blinkx as director of advertising sales. He willbe based out of New York. The online TV and video advertising market is growing exponentially: a recentreport from Forrester Research forecast that the market will reach $7.2 billionin the US by 2012. In 2007, blinkx launched the world's first truly contextualadvertising platform for Internet television and video, AdHoc, to capitalize onthis massive opportunity. AdHoc uses blinkx's unique processing technology tomatch video content and consumer profiles to relevant ads, and since has beenused in successful campaigns for leading brands, including Dell, Best Buy andNokia. As a pioneer in video search technology, blinkx has built a reputation as themost effective way to search new forms of online content such as video. Withmore than 220 partners and 18 million hours of indexed video and audio content,including favorite TV moments, news clips, short documentaries, music videos,video blogs and more, blinkx uses advanced speech recognition technology todeliver results that are more accurate and reliable than standard metadata-basedkeyword searches. About blinkx blinkx plc (LSE AIM: BLNX) is the world's largest and most advanced video searchengine. Today, blinkx has indexed more than 18 million hours of audio, video,viral and TV content, and made it fully searchable and available on demand.blinkx's founders set out to solve a significant challenge - as TV anduser-generated content on the Web explode, keyword-based search technologiesonly scratch the surface. blinkx's patented search technologies listen to - andeven see - the Web, helping users enjoy a breadth and accuracy of search resultsnot available elsewhere. In addition, blinkx powers the video search for many ofthe world's most frequented sites. blinkx is based in San Francisco and London.More information is available at www.blinkx.com. Press Contacts for blinkx: Tim TurpinSparkpr+1 (415) 321 1894tim.turpin@sparkpr.com Clare GaynerBite Communications+44 (0)20 8834 3454Clare.Gayner@bitepr.com This information is provided by RNS The company news service from the London Stock Exchange