Oh dear oh dear oh dear...

Zango crapware is back: pushing somebody else’s popular software and bundling crap with it

Here’s something they don’t teach in marketing 101: If you’re pushing software that no one wants — like, say, annoying adware — and your downloads are going nowhere, what do you do?

Answer: you push somebody else’s popular software AND BUNDLE YOUR CRAP WITH IT!

Remember Zango? It was that irritating adware company that spent years and a million weasel words trying to make its operation seem legitimate. It was fined $3 million in 2006 by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and it unsuccessfully sued anti-virus vendor Kaspersky in Federal Court in 2007 for calling the Zango malcode “malcode?” After several years of sagging revenue amidst a larger collapse of the adware industry, the company finally folded and sold its assets at fire sale prices last April...

from Smokey's Security Weblog

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Comment: So when Blinkx floated nearly 3 years ago it was predicated on video search (ad hoc) and Transaction Hijacking as the big ideas that held the key to future profitability. Here we are nearly three years later and video search seems to be taking very much a back seat (yeah, I know they've done deals with MSN, ITN and Miniweb et al - hasn't taken them to break even or profitability or moved the share price though, has it?) and TH has been shelved for the foreseeable future.

All of which, in my view, is dangerously close to having launched on a false prospectus. Maybe investors who bought at the IPO don't want to be part of an adware/spyware company: and it's trite to say that if they're not happy they should just sell - why the hell should they take a loss on their investment because a useless, arrogant, smug management changes direction with no consultation of or approval by shareholders?

In fact, why the hell should shareholders accept for one minute longer the company being run by a CEO who clearly is unwilling or unable to communicate at all with shareholders, and who has never once put his hand in his pocket to buy shares in his own company?

This is now a totally moribund company. There is hardly any volume in the shares, the price is gradually slipping back, the company management seems to be secretive bordering on paranoid (what are they hiding? maybe they've got nothing to hide?) and even once-loyal shareholders are close to throwing in the towel if they haven't already.

What an absolutely useless shower the muppet crew running this company are. If Chandratillake delivers in spades tomorrow - and he won't, he doesn't have it in him - I will always think that this total blanket of secrecy has been TOTALLY unacceptable.

Once again I'll ask the obvious question: if Blinxk has a story of competent management and success to tell, why aren't they telling it?

Wall Street Gets It: It’s Way Too Early To Vote on the iPad

Wall Street had the right idea yesterday. At least when it came to the iPad: Investors watched the unveiling, shrugged their shoulders, and left Apple (AAPL) shares more or less unchanged.

That’s a pretty reasonable approach, since it’s impossible to gauge the gadget’s chances based on Steve Jobs’ demo yesterday. As Walt Mossberg notes, it really is all about the software. And a lot of the iPad’s software doesn’t exist yet...

from Media Memo

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Comment: Well I know one thing - it couldbn't do any harm at all to the iPad's chances if, in a month or two, when the initial hubbub caused by Jobs' presentation yesterday has died down, Apple announced that when the iPad goes on sale it will include software to search through and access 35milion hours + of professional longform video (to go with the YouTube content announced yesterday), and that that software will also work within the eReader to go get more content, video etc for ebooks bought through the device...

Dreaming? Almost certainly. Blinkx proved long ago that its senior mgmt team just isn't up to cutting deals like that - they lack the experience and the gravitas (Miva, anyone?). But again, I know one thing: every time a major deal like this is announced and Blinxk isn't involved, the shares get punished. The market has given Blinkx the benefit of the doubt by asuming their silence is because they're working on something mega - but every time a major deal rolls around and Blinxk aren't involved a few more people wake up to the fact that the reason they're saying nothing could just be because they have nothing to say. That situation will not, I suspect, be allowed to carry on for too long before there is a cull of senior management (I mean you, Chandratillake) and a new team is put in place who has a bloody clue...

Where's the Flash, Steve?

Apple iPad Does Not Support Adobe Flash

It appears that just like the iPhone, the newly-unveiled Apple iPad won’t support Adobe Flash. While Apple CEO Steve Jobs was showing the browsing capabilities of the device, Engadget was quick to take the picture above, which shows the blue icon that appears when a plugin — in this case Flash — is missing...

from Erictric

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Comment: How can it be the best browsing experience ever (as Jobs claimed at the iPad's launch) with no Flash? Like Flash or hate it, there sure are a lot of pages that use it, and hitting that 'plugin not found' icon every few pages sure is going to put a cramp into one's internet day, no?

The iPad is a Multimedia Device. So Where’s the Media? Be Patient.

As predicted, Steve Jobs showed off a new multimedia device today. One thing he didn’t show off, though: Much in the way of new media.

Jobs and company clearly plan on incorporating new products from newspapers, magazine publishers, TV networks and Hollywood movie studios as the iPad rolls out. But there wasn’t much talk about any of those media products during the launch event...

from All Things Digital

This about sums up the frustrations of many shareholders...

from one of the ADVFN Blinkx bulletin boards:

------

jarvis4 - 26 Jan'10 - 10:56 - 16335 of 16335

And while I'm at it, Transaction Highjacking was an important plank in selling the potential of this company at the time of the IPO. It is therefore unacceptable to make no formal reference to it in nearly three years. Also, the company makes the statement with each set of figures that it's performance is "ahead of analyst's expectations". That's as maybe but I'll wager that there was no expectation on the part of the original shareholders that, nearly three years in, their investment would have declined in value by approx 66%!

So far as the purchase of the Zango assets is concerned I just about understood BLNX's position last year that they had paid buttons for a few bits and pieces which, collectively, made no material difference to the company therefore there was no need to update shareholders. Now that BLNX has, according to posters on this board whose posts I respect, some 50 people working within those assets (which include, inter alia, Smartshopper which may or may not dovetail with transaction highjacking)I take the view that shareholders do need to be formally updated. This time last year, from memory, there were only about 50 people working in BLNX as a whole. So, to buy assets, and double your workforce within those assets, without any formal updating of shareholders is unacceptable. Either those 50 people are working profitably - which is material to the sp - or they are loss-making -which again is material. They may be working towards a specifc end but, again, given their numbers what they are doing and why is, in my view, material.

Finally, in just over a week it will be three months since BLNX announced their unexpected share placing and raised £5m, ostensibly for expansionary purposes. Since then not so much as a batsqueek.

I am seriously annoyed, as a shareholder, at the manner in which, in a dynamic and fast moving industry, BLNX have chosen and, indeed continue to choose, to act. I am of the firm view that the company is operating in a deliberately opaque manner, that they are deliberately witholding facts material to the company shareprice and that, given it's current lowly state, they are failing in the duty they have to shareholders to support the shareprice. They have not even issued a statement to the effect that they know of no reason why this should be trading below the last placing price. Some form of interim management statement would go a long way to boosting the flagging confidence of investors, address the depressed shareprice and perhaps also arouse just the smallest bit of interest in the Market. Come on BLNX, get your head over the parapet and at least show us you're still alive. An RNS about information already spelled out in your Interims nearly three months ago is nothing short of insulting.

Yet another negative Glassdoor review...

Blinkx Anonymous: (Past Employee - 2009)

“If you're thinking of applying for a job here, you may want to think again.”

1 of 1 people found this helpful

Pros

Conceptually a great service, unfortunately not so great in reality.
Some (but not all) wonderful co-workers, who give, and give, and give.
Generally fair pay.

Cons

Paranoid, egotistical management, with poor people skills.
Disorganized, lots of balls being dropped, in generally all departments.
Low morale, many employees who would normally leave this company feel stuck because of the poor economy.

Advice to Senior Management

Needs an overhaul top down, especially at the top, but may be too late for that - doubtful if Blinkx could attract the right kind of management talent now.

from Glassdoor

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Comment: "Paranoid, egotistical management" - yep, I recognise that. I've been saying for a while that Chandratillake strikes me as being smug and arrogant, without having any reason that I can see for being either.

Of course, he's welcome to prove me wrong any time he likes...

1Cast: Hitting the Mobile Video Aggregation Trifecta

“Mobile”.

“Video.”

Usually, these are the rather dry one-world descriptions of What’s Next, items on to-do lists for anyone serious about building new digital businesses. Add “Social,” and you’ve got a trifecta.

Getting the words transformed from whiteboard to lively product is another undertaking entirely.

1Cast, a still-beta mobile video product, manages to do that...

from Seeking Alpha

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Comment: Oh dear oh dear oh dear. And Blinkx think that mobile (and Facebook and social networking, come to that) isn't important...

Probably time to ask once again just what the clowns running Blinxk think they're doing...?

Not delivering shareholder value (in the form of a strong and growing share price) or keeping shareholders informed of whatever it is the company is doing, that's for sure...

YouTube and Hulu dabble in for-pay vids

By Austin Modine in San Francisco • Get more from this author

Posted in Music and Media, 21st January 2010 19:28 GMT

Free whitepaper – Thermal design of Dell PowerEdge server

Two of the internet's most popular video websites are planning to charge users to watch certain movies and television shows online.

YouTube and Hulu both have schemes to erect paywalls around a limited amount of content in order to drum up revenues that online advertising has failed to provide, according to recent announcements and reports...

from The Register

Who’s Joining Steve Jobs for the Tablet Launch Next Week?

by Peter Kafka
Posted on January 19, 2010 at 3:00 AM PT

Now that Apple’s tablet debut date is officially, officially confirmed (old news for All Things Digital readers), we can move on to the next round of speculation. For instance: Which media partners will Steve Jobs be working with when this thing launches?

There are lots of media companies anticipating the tablet–the entire magazine industry, for instance–and Apple (AAPL) will eventually want all of them on board. The wondertablet is supposed to be a showcase for media, after all...

from MediaMemo

The War Between Apple and Google Has Just Begun

Consumers are witnessing the beginning of a new war between computer companies. Instead of the Apple-Microsoft conflict of the early 1980s, this fight is taking place between Apple and Google.

The latest skirmish: BusinessWeek reported Wednesday that Apple was in talks with Microsoft to make Bing the default search engine on the iPhone’s Safari Web browser. The article said the two companies had been negotiating for weeks over a possible partnership on the iPhone...

from The New York Times

Hoodless Brennan

Blinkx (BLNX, 16.5p, £50.7m) the world's largest video search engine announced that it has been ranked a top online brand by Nielsen joins the likes of YouTube, Hulu, and Yahoo as a top online video site in its recent report on video streams. Nielsen reported that overall online video usage is on the rise not a surprise to us with the total number of video streams having gone up 11.8% in the last year and the amount of time logged watching online video per viewer increasing 13.2%. This announcement is further evidence of Blinkx becoming increasingly attractive as an internet brand which may bodes well for a future cooperate action. SPECULATIVE BUY

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Comment: Hmm, speculative buy at 16.5p. I wonder how those who bought into the IPO at 45p feel about that? If I'd bought at that price I wouldn't be happy. I wouldn't be happy at all. I'd think that maybe I'd been done up like a kipper by Blinkx management with their delusional predictions for a golden future (which, curiously, they haven't bought into themselves). And as for Dr Lynch with his 'water into gold' nonsense - I think he's been drinking to much of Chandratillake's kool aid...

Apple, Microsoft Discuss Giving Bing Top iPhone Billing

Amid an accelerating rivalry with Google, Apple is discussing ways to make Bing the default search engine on the iPhone

By Peter Burrows and Cliff Edwards

In 2003, when Apple said its iTunes music software would work on PCs using the Windows software of its age-old rival, Microsoft, Apple made up posters that read "Hell Froze Over." Hell may be getting frosty again.

Apple (AAPL) is in talks with Microsoft (MSFT) to replace Google (GOOG) as the default search engine on its iPhone, according to two people familiar with the matter. The talks have been under way for weeks, say the people, who asked not to be named because the details have not been made public...

from Business Week

Interesting to see...

...that Democracy Live has (at the moment) a permanent section on the BBC news landing page. Should be driving nice amounts of traffic through to the DL microsite - and that should grow as the General Election approaches...

blinx ranked topline brand by Nielsen

Video search engine blinkx has been ranked a top online brand by the Nielsen Company.

blinkx joins the ranks of YouTube, Hulu, and Yahoo as a top online video site in a report based on video streams for December 2009.

In addition to its ranking of top online brands, Nielsen reports that overall online video usage is on the rise.

In the past year, the total number of video streams has gone up 11.8%, while the amount of time logged watching online video per viewer has increased 13.2%...

from The Telegraph

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Comment: this flurry of coverage is all very welcome, of course, but for the markets and large investors to sit up and start takling notice Blinkx need coverage like this constantly - every month if not every week. They have (in my view) shamefully neglected PR and newsflow management, and they have a hell of a lot of making up to do.

They have to mention themselves in the same breath as Hulu and YouTube, because of course nobody else is...

And a few blockbuster deals wouldn't go amiss, either...

"...Video search engine blinkx is described by Nielsen as now being a top online brand, joining the likes of YouTube, Hulu and Yahoo as a top online video site. blinkx currently has over 650 partners and 35mn hours of indexed video and audio content, including favourite TV moments, news clips, short documentaries, music videos, video blogs and more..."

from ipTV News

Follow-up letter to Charles Lytle at Citigroup

19^th January 2010

Mr Charles Lytle,

Citigroup Global Markets Limited,

Citigroup Centre,

33 Canada Sq.,

Canary Wharf,

London E14 5LB,

United Kingdom

Dear Mr Lytle

Thank you for your letter of 5^th January, and your confirmation that the Blinkx roadshow did indeed take place last May.

I have to say, though, that from where I’m standing it doesn’t appear to have had much positive impact: there does not appear to have been a rush of institutional buying in the open market, and I note that Autonomy – the company from which Blinkx was spun-out – was left with a significant amount of the shares from the recent placing they underwrote. The placing wasn’t exactly oversubscribed by non-Autonomy investors, was it Mr Lytle? Clearly the institutional investors presented to on the roadshow either weren’t convinced by the Blinkx story and/or weren’t convinced by the telling of it.

As for the company’s share price being ‘volatile’, I’m afraid I disagree – it has been remarkably stable for most of the past year: but unfortunately within the 16-20p price range, somewhere between a third and less than half the IPO price of more than two years ago now, and this despite good apparent growth since then.

Of course the economic situation has been extremely challenging over the past few years, but I’m sure that I don’t need to tell you that we are currently in the middle of a massive market rally (biggest for 300 years on some measures) and especially a tech stock rally – both of which have passed Blinkx by completely. Only to be expected, I suppose, from a company so consistently incompetent at news management and PR: if Blinkx has a good story to tell, Mr Lytle, why are they so utterly woeful at telling it? With Apple, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo squaring up for a full-scale war online, I don’t think that RNSs about deals with the likes of BobVila.com quite cuts it. Do you?*

Find enclosed a copy of a recent letter to Michael Lynch of Autonomy which might give some reasons for this ‘volatility’ (I’m afraid I’ve long since given up addressing any points to Chandratillake – it seems as though he’ll talk to anyone except those unfortunate enough to have invested in his company, who might ask awkward questions about company strategy and non-delivery of shareholder value). It may be true, as you say, that the company is delivering ‘to plan’, but then that was a plan created before floatation in a very different world. Just to give two examples; three years ago there was no iPhone and apps economy, and Facebook was still a walled garden for US students. Blinkx may be delivering ‘to plan’, but online video is exploding massively, so large and so fast as to make Blinkx’s growth rate seem positively conservative and unambitious. The apps economy, for example, is estimated (in the latest edition of Wired UK) to be worth billions of dollars a year in app sales alone, let alone associated service/advertising revenues – and Blinkx are managing to miss out on every cent of that.

Since I wrote to Dr Lynch, I have seen an announcement that TVCatchup, another video-streaming service, has submitted an iPhone app to Apple for approval. Why can they manage it and not the self-proclaimed “world’s largest and most advanced video search engine”? Not to release a Blinkx-branded iPhone app and/or Facebook widget strikes me as negligence bordering on incompetence given the potential cost/benefit ratio of such an effort.

Unless the share price starts to recover – and very soon – I shall be writing to the large institutional investors agitating for a change of management at Blinkx and the installation of a new management team: one which understands and can react to the realities of the current digital media market, and which is prepared to invest in the company’s shares as a vote of confidence in its future. It will be interesting to discover whether institutional investors (those that bought at the IPO, not those that didn’t buy off the back of the failed roadshow) are as sick to death of waiting for this company to deliver on its many promises as smaller investors.

Chandratillake was right about one thing – there is a perfect storm of opportunity out there. Unfortunately he seems to me incapable of getting more than barely damp in it...

Yours sincerely,

____________

xxxxx xxxxxxx

*This letter was drafted before Tuesday’s RNS about Blinkx moving up the Nielsen rankings, but that RNS – of information already in the public domain, which completely failed to set the share price alight – only proves my point rather than otherwise. It is crystal clear by now – to everyone except, apparently, Blinkx management – that the markets aren’t remotely interested in how much traffic Blinkx is doing. What the markets – and investors – care about is how that traffic is being monetised and Blinkx’s costs in acquiring and servicing that traffic. Following the Zango/Pinball deal, why no full trading statement to update the markets and shareholders, Mr Lytle?

Blinkx climbs the Nielsen rankings...

RNS Number : 7397F

Blinkx Plc

19 January 2010



blinkx Continues to Climb The Nielsen Company's List of Top Online Video Brands

Users turn to www.blinkx.com as online video usage continues to rise

SAN FRANCISCO, CALIF. - January 19, 2010 - blinkx, the world's largest and most advanced video search engine, today announced that it has been ranked a top online brand by the Nielsen Company. blinkx joins the ranks of YouTube, Hulu, and Yahoo as a top online video site in a recent report based on video streams for December 2009.

In addition to its ranking of top online brands, Nielsen reports that overall online video usage is on the rise. In the past year, the total number of video streams has gone up 11.8%, while the amount of time logged watching online video per viewer has increased 13.2%.

"blinkx is thrilled to be named a top online video brand by a company with the credibility and commitment to excellence of Nielsen," said Suranga Chandratillake, founder and CEO, blinkx. "We're excited to remain at the forefront of this burgeoning industry and plan to continue expanding the breadth of our index and quality of our partnerships."

As a pioneer in video search technology, blinkx has built a reputation as the most effective way to search new forms of online content such as video. With more than 650 partners and 35 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 to deliver results that are more accurate and reliable than standard metadata-based keyword searches.

About blinkx

blinkx plc (LSE AIM: BLNX) is the world's largest and most advanced video search engine. Today, blinkx has indexed more than 35 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 and user-generated content on the Web explode, keyword-based search technologies only scratch the surface. blinkx's patented search technologies listen to - and even see - the Web, helping users enjoy a breadth and accuracy of search results not available elsewhere. In addition, blinkx powers the video search for many of the 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:

Nicole Love

Marlin PR

+44 207 869 8328

Nicole.love@marlinpr.com

Tim Turpin

Sparkpr

+1 (415) 321 1894

tturpin@sparkpr.com

NOMAD for blinkx

Charles Lytle

Citi

This information is provided by RNS

The company news service from the London Stock Exchange

END

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Comment: very welcome news, of course, but largely meaningless without some indication of how well - or otherwise - Blinkx is monetising that traffic and what it means for the company's bottom line and its march towards profitability.

Today's RNS has, I notice, completely failed to ignite the share price (so far, at least) - and nothing will, until the markets have much geater visibility around costs...

Online video explodes

Online video is already a tried-and-true tool for marketers, and its growth is projected to explode over the next several years. According to a report last month from eMarketer, spending on online video advertising will reach $5.2 billion by 2014, up from $1.0 billion last year. This year, online video ad spending will total $1.4 billion, eMarketer predicted. “Video ad spending growth will far outpace any other online format, running in the 34%-to-45% range from 2009 through 2014,” said David Hallerman, senior analyst at eMarketer and author of the report. “These extremely high growth rates are the result of video ads moving from the sidelines to center stage, becoming the main form of brand advertising in the digital space.”

from B2B

Analyst: Apple may dump Google off iPhone for Microsoft’s Bing

"Some analysts believe the Apple-Google battle is likely to get much rougher in the months ahead," Peter Burrows reports for BusinessWeek. "Jonathan Yarmis, research fellow with the consulting firm Ovum, thinks Apple may soon decide to dump Google as the default search engine on its devices, primarily to cut Google off from mobile data that could be used to improve its advertising and Android technology. Jobs might cut a deal with—gasp!—Microsoft to make Bing Apple's engine of choice, or even launch its own search engine, says Yarmis. 'I fully expect [Apple] to do something in search,' he adds. 'If there's all these advertising dollars to be won, why would it want Google on its iPhones?'"...

from MacDailyNews

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Comment: "...or even launch its own search engine" Hmmm - you want video search with that, sir?

Microsoft has a plan to improve Bing's poor indexing

Recently a user on the Bing community forums asked why his new site was taking so long to be indexed by Redmond's search engine, to which a Microsoft employee replied that the slowness was an unfortunately expected behavior.

User prathaban1 wanted to know why www.kidandparent.in, which he submitted to the Webmaster Console using a sitemap.xml almost six weeks ago (and Bing calculates has about 14 backlinks) was not getting any love from Microsoft. He said he managed to get the homepage indexed with the help of a Brett Yount, Program Manager of the Bing Webmaster Center, but that was nothing compared to what Google and Yahoo had done: they indexed almost 400 and 200 pages, respectively...

from Ars Technica

Google's rivals tipped to grow in 2010

The biggest tech industry news story of the 2000s was undoubtedly the dramatic rise of Google. But will the search and online advertising juggernaut continue its dominance over the internet economy in 2010? Time will tell.

Until now, Google's biggest frenemies were the traditional media. ("Frenemy" is a term used to describe someone who looks and acts like a friend but is actually an enemy). But as Google's portfolio has grown to encompass more than 150 products — including free, hosted versions of popular software applications — it has attracted an array of tech industry competitors...

from ComputerWorld

An exercise in self-delusion...

I'm spending much less time than previously on financial bulletin board sites, and especially on ADVFN. Especially when it comes to Blinkx, I've had more than enough of the endless bullshit that is spouted about this stock, and in particular the endless ramping of the stock and excuses for management failings.

This seems to be the mindset of many on those threads who have, in my view, been drinking way too much Blinkx kool aid: they look at the share price, stubbornly stuck at about a third of the IPO price around the 16p mark, and they wonder why it isn't moving, despite the apparent fact that Blinkx is moving up the Comcast and Nielsen ratings. Then, because they seem to be infatuated with company management in general and Chandratillake in particular, they look around for reasons other than management failure for the non-moving share price. They don't seem to consider the following points:

1/ Blinkx may be doing more traffic, but how well (or at all) are they monetising that traffic? Once again I'll quote the adage that 'turnover is vanity, profit is sanity'. Until Blinxk update the markets about their acquisition costs for that traffic, and more generally the running costs of the company (100 employees now across 6 offices - sounds very expensive to me) it's no surprise that the markets don't have a clue how to price Blinkx, and apparently aren't very interested in doing so...

2/ More generally, Blinkx needs to update the market about the progress with the Zango/Pinball acquisition, and if I had my way they'd release a full trading statement (which, if I had my way, they'd do immediately after sacking the current CEO with instant effect and without compensation). I for one find it totally unacceptable that shareholders - the people who own this company - are persistently kept in the dark about how their company is being run. In a landscape as fast-moving as online video it is totally unacceptable just to release figures twice a year, especially after an acquisition like Pinball which has the capability to so transform the company's fortunes (including bankrupting the company if costs do run away with them).

So - ignoring those points - the Blinkx/Chandratillake fanboys look for other reasons why the stock isn't performing. And they persuade themselves that it's because of 'paid de-rampers', mythical entities (allegedly I'm one of them) who are paid to slag companies off on financial bulletin boards and, apparently, get paid by the negative post.

Which only goes to show the endless capacity some people have for self-delusion. The answer to why the Blinx share price isn't moving is staring us all right in the face - lack of clarity around costs, business model, and the competence of senior company executives (especially after the Miva fiasco). And yet to post any reasonable questions about Blinxk delivery and execution (why no iPhone app? Why no Facebook widget? Why no large deal announcements of any kind for many months now?) makes one, apparently, one of these paid de-rampers.

To which there is one obvious response: what's the point in trying to talk down the Blinkx share price when the company's own management are doing such a very VERY good job of it themselves?

[edit] And for those who think I'm a paid de-ramper, I suggest they go and re-read my latest letter to Dr Lynch. Does that letter read as being from someone who wants the share price to go up, or to go down?

You'd have to be pretty dumb to think I'm trying to talk this stock down - but then again, you'd have to be pretty dumb to be happy with the job Blinkx management has done so far of delivering shareholder value...

Apple Has Hired an M&A Specialist? What’s Adobe’s Market Cap, Again?

Apple made its first acquisition on March 2, 1988, with the purchase of Network Innovations. Since then, Apple has bought just 23 more companies (see table; click to enlarge), including Quattro Wireless, which it purchased for $275 million. Which isn’t all that many for a company with $23 billion in the bank (as a point of comparison, Google has acquired 11 companies in the last 18 months alone)...

from Digital Daily

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Comment: message to Steve Jobs - Steve, take over Blinkx! Please! You could get it for £100m, probably, and it would serve Blinkx management right for letting their stock price languish so low for so long...

Bye-bye Blinkx Music (part the latest)

Vevo Bounces Back From a Rough Start With 20 Million Streams a Day

Remember Vevo, the “Hulu for music video” service that launched with a lot of fanfare, then earned a ton of lousy press for an error-filled launch?

It has fixed its tech problems and is doing just fine, thank you very much. Vevo says it is generating around 20 million video views a day, which puts it on track to generate some 600 million views a month.

Some context: ComScore (SCOR) says that Hulu itself generates some 900,000 video views in the U.S, making it the second biggest video site after YouTube. And Viacom (VIA), the current No. 3, generates 500,000 views...

from MediaMemo

------------------

Comment: 20 million video views a day. Wow! And Blinkx Music is doing how many?

And the difference? One is a site that's had huge amounts of press and publicity, with big-name partners - and the other is an apparent vanity project from a two-bit also-ran that nobody has ever heard of*, with a management team that doesn't appear to know the first thing about building a brand, delivering shareholder value or promoting the company's products...

* I'm a contractor and I move companies/projects every 3-12 months. In the 2 years since I was dumb enough to buy into this turd of a stock I've yet to meet anyone at any company I've worked at who actually knows who Blinkx are, what they do or has even heard of them. Pathetic - absolutely pathetic...

Search Market in December: Same as it Ever Was

[click image for a larger version]

from Digital Daily

IAC's Diller: Bing's Rivalry With Google Will Boost Ask.com

By Nat Worden, Of DOW JONES NEWSWIRES

NEW YORK -(Dow Jones)- Barry Diller, chief executive with IAC/InterActiveCorp. (IACI), said Wednesday that Microsoft Corp.'s (MSFT) deep-pocketed marketing push for its Bing search engine bodes well for the future of his company's search engine, Ask.com.
"They're going to get a decent enough share for them to be competitive," Diller said at an investor conference in San Francisco. "That's good for anyone in search who is unaffiliated."
Currently, Ask.com is affiliated with Google Inc. (GOOG), the search leader, but Diller said that contract will end within 2 1/2 years and possibly earlier. While he's not planning to sell Ask.com, Diller said he does think the company needs to make a strategic move with the business...

from Nasdaq

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Comment: later in the article it says: "As for IAC's cash pile, Diller said the company is investing in online premium media businesses, and it's looking for ways to return cash efficiently to shareholders or invest it at above-market returns."

Maybe a letter to Diller is in order - see if he wants to 'invest' in Blinkx - 'cause that's the only way shareholders are going to see the share price move up...

Yahoo’s Pitch to Advertisers: We Sell Ginormous Ads

Another ad from Yahoo to people who buy ads on Yahoo: Look at all the great ads people have bought on Yahoo!

Before you snicker, bear in mind that Carol Bartz’s “B-” aside, people are still buying a lot of ads on Yahoo (YHOO), at least when it comes to display ads, where the Internet giant dominates. JP Morgan (JPM) puts the company’s share of the U.S. market for display ads at 17 percent, well ahead of No. 2 Microsoft (MSFT) at 11 percent and AOL (AOL) at seven percent...

from MediaMemo

from Shares magazine 7th January 2010

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So a target price of 26p? Whoop-de-doo: that's a penny more than I paid for this dog of a share more than two years ago, and only just over half the IPO price.

If that's all shareholders have to look forward to no wonder nobody's interested in buying Blinxk.

And if I'd bought at the IPO and had held since I'd think that the selling of shares at 45p at float was at best overly optimistic by management and at worst borderline fraudulent..

What an absolutely useless shower...

Broadcasters face challenge of armchair revolution

Amid a recession and a steep downturn in advertising spending, commercial broadcasting in Britain is being confronted by a new threat. According to analysis seen by The Times, the increasingly popular video-on-demand (VOD) is challenging the business model of commercial television.

A report by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), the accountant and business adviser, suggests that consumers’ growing appetite for VOD could lead to broadcasters losing a further £280 million from annual advertising revenues if they continue to focus their efforts on cost-cutting and fail to cash in on the boom...

from The Times

Canvas’ Biggest Threat Is Happening In Las Vegas Right Now

Like I wrote last year, the Project Canvas connected-TV front-end may have been approved by the BBC Trust - but its biggest challenge may be winning over the TV makers who are already launching their own standards and services for TV internet content…

Exactly that is coming to pass at this week’s annual Consumer Electronics Show, where connected-TV services are some of the hottest announcements and some products are already available...

from paidContent: UK

Bye-bye SmartShopper...

Appy shopper

RETAILERS are quaking over a new iPhone gizmo that tells users the cheapest shop for products.

Bargain hunters scan an item's barcode on the mobile's camera - then the Sccope app checks its own price comparison website...

from The Sun

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Comment: so another part of Blinkx's USP bites the dust. Blinkx Music is now an irrelevance, SmartShopper is being overtaken (not that anyone ever knew about it anyway), and doubtless soon Transaction Hijacking will go the same way.

Blinkx management has been criminally negligent in losing the company's competitive edge. They need removing NOW, and someone installing who has a clue about (new) media, someone who can react to a rapidly changing landscape (like the emergence of an app and widget economy)...

Oh, and note how this is another mobile app. You know - mobile, that area that Blinkx doesn't think is important, for which they're not developing any products...

Absolutely clueless. A perfect storm of opportunity raging all around them, and Blinkx can't even get rained on...

No reply from Mike Lynch yet. Maybe he hasn't answered because he doesn't have an answer to my points - maybe, as with many shareholders, the penny is starting to drop that Chandratillake just isn't up to the job.

And if that's wrong, then why aren't we - the shareholders, the people who own this bloody company - being told what really is going on?

Wired UK February issue cover

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Seems the whole world is going ga-ga for apps - except the clueless jokers running Blinkx...

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from New Media Age, 7th January 2010

TVCatchup launches an iPhone app...

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from New Media Age, 7th January 2010

So let's get this straight: TVCatchup - a video streaming service I'd never even heard of until this piece in New Media Age - can create an iPhone app and submit it to Apple for approval, yet Blinkx either can't or won't do the same thing?

The Blinkx management are just throwing away the competitive lead that the company used to have. The sooner they are removed en masse the happier - and wealthier - shareholders will be...

3D TV is being billed as possible industry saviour

3D TV is being billed as a possible saviour for recession hit manufacturers looking to boost sales.

On the opening day of the Consumer Electronics Show, CES, in Las Vegas, all the big names unveiled 3D TV's.

Industry experts said the picture looks promising with a survey showing around 3.4m 3D TV sets will be sold in the US this year...

from the BBC

Bye bye Blinkx Music (slight return)

Betfair and Muzu launch TV apps

Muzu has developed an app for Samsung 2010 internet-TVs. It allows music fans to view high-quality on-demand videos from the major and top independent record labels.

The ad-funded service will feature display inventory running around the videos, with revenues gained split with the labels...

from New Media Age

Sky News latest to unveil internet TV app

Sky News has launched a TV widget allowing people to access its latest stories via internet-connected TVs.

The free widget offers text and images from Sky News via TVs which support the Yahoo! Widget Engine app store.

It follows the Sky News app currently available on the iPhone and features the same seven sections, such as UK News, Politics, Sport, Business and Showbiz...

from New Media Age

DivX TV: Online Television, No Box Required [VIDEO]

What’s different about DivX’s approach to bringing Internet TV to your living room is that it doesn’t require you to purchase a separate hardware box to funnel the content.

Other solutions like the Boxee Box and the Popbox are bits of hardware that have a footprint in your home theater, which can be a barrier when space is at a premium or where consumer preference is for less “tech” in the living room....

from Mashable

worth posting that video as a separate item...

Yahoo Further Bridges the Gap Between Internet and TV

Today at CES, Yahoo is expanding its partnerships and making the TV Widget Developer Kit publicly available.

In 2009, Yahoo! launched a pretty cool product known as Connected TV, which is built on the venerable Konfabulator widget platform. Basically it allows users with compatible TVs to access Internet-enabled widgets for stuff like stock updates, weather tracking and even Twitter. Now, you can get your hands on even more compelling technology...

from Mashable

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Comment: If Blink aren't in on this - or don't very soon get in on it - then the company's management really are a bunch of clueless muppets who should be removed forthwith and replaced with people who have more than two brain cells to rub together...

Reply from Citi

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Reply to mine of 28th December

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Comment: The shares haven't remained volatile at all - they've stayed pretty constantly at about a third of the IPO price...

Wonder who the other institutions were who bought as well as Autonomy?

In Odd Coincidence, App Store Hits Three Billion Downloads Milestone on GPhone Day

Apple’s iTunes App Store has hit another milestone: More than three billion applications downloaded. Impressive, considering it has been a little over three months since the App Store crossed the two-billion-downloads mark. Even more so when you remember, as CEO Steve Jobs reminds us in a gloating press release, that those three billion applications were downloaded in under 18 months...

from Digital Daily

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Comment: Three billion apps. Three. Billion. Apps.

And not one of them a Blinkx app - because they haven't written any!

Clueless, absolutely bloody clueless. The entire apps-economy revolution passing them by, while they try to sign up the next BobVila.com...

Blinkx - Top 100 websites Arts ..No 64..

64. www.blinkx.com/

blinkx is the world s largest and most advanced video search engine. blinkx has indexed over 32 million hours of audio, video, viral and TV content, and made it fully searchable and available on demand.

From the site: History » blinkx is the world’s largest and most advanced video search engine. Founded in 2004 by Suranga Chandratillake, the company completed a tremendously successful IPO on the London Stock Exchange (AIM) in May, 2007 and currently has a market capitalization of US$350M*, with headquarters in San Francisco, CA and the UK. blinkx has built a reputation as the Remote Control for the Video Web. ... More...

http://news8888.blogspot.com/2010/01/top-100-websites-arts.html

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Comment: If only Blinkx had a share price to match. I really don't understand this company management's pathological aversion to making their shareholders happy - or indeed to telling them anything about anything...

Oh, and that market cap is well out of date. $350m - I wish! Currently £52.75m, according to iii...

Google takes on Apple's iPhone

"GOOGLE, the internet search engine giant, will this week go into battle against Apple, the technology group, when it launches a smart-phone to much fanfare.

It is expected to unveil the Google-branded device, Nexus One, on Tuesday at a briefing at its headquarters in Mountain View, California.

...

In October, Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, told analysts that the number of mobile internet searches grew by 30% in the third quarter over the previous three months..."

from The Sunday Times

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Comment: So mobile search is growing massively (one might even say exponentially?) and yet Blinkx aren't interested, don't have any mobile apps, don't think it's important.

And people wonder why the share price is stuck at a third of the IPO price...

Sooner we get a new management team that has a bloody clue the better, you ask me...

Kindlemania could suffer from bite of the Apple

A strange thing happened at Christmas. Well, two really. Amazon.comreported that its Kindle eReader had become the "most gifted" product in its vast inventory; and on Christmas Day sales of eBooks on its site exceeded those of physical books. The phenomena are, of course correlated: all those recipients of Kindles needed to buy something they could actually read on the devices. But the combination of the two "facts" has further ratcheted up speculation that 2010 will be the Year of the Kindle and the end is nigh for the printed codex.

...

There is, you see, a shadow on Amazon's horizon. If industry gossip is to be believed, 2010 will also be the year in which Apple releases its Tablet (variously christened the iPad, iSlate and iTab by fevered commentators; not since Moses has a slate been the subject of so much advance speculation). This is a problem for Amazon because while the Kindle is probably the best of the current eReader breed, it is actually a rather clunky and primitive device...

John Naughton in The Observer