RTHM.L Regulatory News (RTHM)

8 Aug 2007 07:01

Blinkx Plc08 August 2007 BLINKX ANNOUNCES STRATEGIC HIRES TO SUPPORT GROWTH AND NEW INITIATIVES New employees include recruits from Babelgum, Google and Miva SAN FRANCISCO, CALIF. - August 8, 2007 - blinkx, the world's largest videosearch engine, today announced that it has grown its headcount to 40 employees,including key strategic hires to support new engineering initiatives and drivebusiness development. Among the seasoned executives joining blinkx are two directors of contentacquisition: a 20 year veteran of the media industry, John Bryan was previouslyat MediaZone.com and will be pursuing large content acquisition deals in theUnited States. Based in London, Marco Nadotti joins blinkx from Babelgum andwill be responsible for signing media partnerships across Europe. blinkx is also announcing the appointment of Gavin Morgan to drive itssyndication strategy in Europe. Gavin joins blinkx from Miva and was previouslygroup head of media at JCDecaux. In addition, blinkx has appointed Onil Gunawardana to direct strategy anddevelopment for its new contextual video advertising platform, AdHoc. Mostrecently, Onil was COO and VP of products at Searchforce, a Search EngineMarketing platform for centralizing and optimizing pay-per-click advertisingcampaigns. Previously, he also managed marketing and analytics products atSiebel. "Following a successful IPO on the London Stock Exchange AIM in May, we'restrengthening our team by attracting top engineers and specialists in contentacquisition and distribution, who have proven track records of success, and awealth of contacts in the media industry," said Suranga Chandratillake, founderand CEO, blinkx. 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 200 partners and 14 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 (London AIM: BLNX) is the world's most comprehensive video search engine.Today, blinkx has indexed more than 14,000,000 hours of audio, video, viral andTV content, and made it fully searchable and available on demand. blinkx'sfounders set out to solve a significant challenge - as TV and user-generatedcontent on the Web explode, keyword-based search technologies only scratch thesurface. blinkx's patented search technologies listen to - and even see - theWeb, helping users enjoy a breadth and accuracy of search results not availableelsewhere. In addition, blinkx powers the video search for many of the world'smost frequented sites. blinkx is based in San Francisco and London. Moreinformation is available at www.blinkx.com. Media Contact:Rachel PetersenOutCast Communications415-392-8282Rachel@outcastpr.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