[Paleopsych] Guardian: All eyes on Blinkx

[Premise Checker]

All eyes on Blinkx
http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,3605,1260983,00.html

    Victor Keegan spoke to the woman taking on Google
    Thursday July 15, 2004

    Less than a month ago, Kathy Rittweger went to the office of the
    technology magazine Business 2.0 in San Francisco to demonstrate
    Blinkx, a late entrant to the search engine market. The editor she was
    meeting brought two other people as he didn't know much about the
    subject himself.

    She left the office at noon, saddened that it had not gone very well.
    "I thought I did a lousy job. I've never really done this whole PR
    thing." She retired round the corner to Starbucks with her public
    relations adviser for a debriefing. He told her to be more provocative
    in future, not so humble and more proud of what she had accomplished.
    "He was also convinced we didn't stand a good chance".

    But by the time she had got back to her hotel, there was an email from
    one of the people at the meeting, Om Malik, whom she had never heard
    of. He said he had "blogged" the item on his website at 12.40pm while
    she was still commiserating over coffee.

    Malik wrote that he had the same tingling sensation watching Blinkx
    being demonstrated as he had had almost five years ago when two
    fresh-faced boys called Larry and Sergey had stopped by the offices of
    Forbes.com to demonstrate something called Google.

    Malik's comments were soon picked up by other bloggers and Rittweger
    started getting a wave of emails and calls, including some from
    venture capitalists, a breed thought to be in hibernation after the
    dotcom excesses.

    The blog was posted on a Friday, and by the Monday there were 5,000
    links to it and people were discussing it all over the world. Since
    then, there have been 130,000 direct downloads, and many more through
    users swapping files. This week, the site - which is only launched
    today - has been recording 6m links or hits a day solely from
    word-of-mouth publicity.

    You would be forgiven for thinking that Rittweger and her British
    business partner, Suranga Chanratillake, who used to work for the UK
    search engine company Autonomy, ought to be locked up for even
    thinking of trying to take on the almighty Google, especially at a
    time when it and the likes of Microsoft and Yahoo - not to mention
    dozens of smaller companies - are teeing up for the next battle in the
    search engine wars.

    [39]Blinkx has two selling points. First, it doesn't only search the
    web but simultaneously scours news sites, emails, attachments and your
    own hard disk. It does all this unobtrusively in the background until
    you pass your cursor over icons at the top or bottom of the page, when
    it reveals a digest of related sites as well as material from Word,
    Excel or PDF files. If you are working in a word processing document,
    it provides the same service.

    It also searches blogs. This function has just been added because
    Malik suggested it would be a good thing to do. "I didn't appreciate
    the significance until he wrote the article and then I thought,
    'Right, I get it'," she said disarmingly. Blinkx can also search
    digital TV on the internet, which, in practice, means video output
    from the BBC. Why? "Because the BBC posts its digital TV free on the
    internet."

    Both Google and Microsoft are working on unified engines that search
    your desktop as well as the web, and some others already do it. But
    Rittweger believes Blinkx is the only one that offers all these
    facilities including video search now. So the company has a window of
    opportunity in a market where consumers can switch allegiance with two
    blinkx of an eyelid.

    The second selling point is that, unlike Google, it uses artificial
    intelligence to rate stories, not page rankings. "What it is trying to
    say," she explains, "is that all words are not equal in a sentence...
    Quite critically, if you are looking at a document and trying to
    figure out what it means, Blinkx reads everything you are reading and
    sorts out what are the key ideas."

    Blinkx's planned business model involves getting advertising revenue
    from contextual adverts, product channels and white labelling, but she
    emphasises that the search is independent: it is mathematically based
    and just looks at words and their context. She adds: "It is clean, but
    users don't know that so we show our advertisements in a different
    colour".

    Her moment of truth came when doing a project on Japanese tourism a
    few years ago and found that when she put a page into a search engine,
    nothing happened because search was limited to 10 words. Later, she
    met Suranga Chanratillake, who shared her ideas and had the
    technological expertise to develop them.

    Whether they succeed is an open question. It is a tough market to
    crack because for many users, Google is as good as it gets - and, like
    Yahoo and Microsoft, it has immense resources. But people are also
    starting to realise that search engines are mining only a tiny
    proportion of available knowledge. And loyalty is only as deep as the
    click of a mouse.

   39. http://www.blinkx.com/