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Blinkx: The Latest in Video Search Engines, Blinkx Pico Smallest Search Engine, but Does It Do What It Advertises? You Decide.

Out of the new innovative and amazing technologies that are available on the internet, now with YouTube, Hulu, and Google Video, a new and unique search engine has is solely dedicated to finding videos and TV broadcasts from around the world. The website is absolutely amazing, however, Blinkx also offers a downloadable software package that is advertised to be the smallest search engine that is only 1 MB. The website, www.blinkx.com, works on all computers, but the Pico software is only compatible with Windows, if you can download it.

First, the Blinkx website is amazing. When you open the Blinkx website, you will see on the right of the page a whole series of small TV screen shapes with all kinds of different videos. Note that you need Adobe Flash Player to view the videos on Blinkx. At the top of these different video screens, you will also see a set of tabs that sort the videos from World News, Entertainment, Business, Sports, and more. On the More Tab, you have a downward pointing arrow, which when you click on that tab, a pull down menu will appear with more video genre choices. On this menu you can choose from music videos, viral videos, science and tech videos, travel videos, home improvement videos, film, environment, automotive, gaming, and food & drink. You can click on anyone of these choices and all kinds of videos in that genre will appear on the box with the different TV screens on it. Furthermore, you as you hover your mouse over any of these videos in the video box, the box on which the arrow hovers on will enlarge itself, and when you click on that video, you can view that video.

You can also click on the three large buttons on the bottom right hand corner of the page. The first button near the center of the page will be “Inform Me,” and when you click on that button, you will see the current day’s news from Associated Press. The second button is the “Entertain Me” button, which will link you to funny and entertaining videos. The last of the three buttons on the bottom left hand corner of the site is the “Give Me” button, which when clicked on allows you to have the option of creating your own channel. You can click what you want to view by typing keywords or key phrases.

At the top left hand corner of the page you have a search bar, where you can type in just about anything and if it exists, Blinkx will find it for you. For those of you who can speak, read, and write in different languages, you are not limited only to the Latin alphabet, which is great for people who want to view videos in different languages. The search engine even recognizes alphabets, such as Georgian and all forms of Cyrillic and other non-Latin characters.

Blinkx also offers a downloadable search engine application that claims to be the world’s smallest search engine with the size of only one megabyte. This is the Pico Search Engine, however, the website works better. For one thing, the Blinkx website is compatible with both Windows XP and Vista users, or Mac users, as long as they have the Adobe Flash Player installed on their system. The Pico software, on the other hand is only Windows compatible, so as far as Mac users are concerned, unless they have Parallels Desktop or some other virtual machine with Windows on their Mac, they are left out in the cold.

Downloading Pico is also practically impossible. If you choose to go to the Download Pico link on the website, you will find a link that will tell you to download Pico for Windows, Upgrade to the full version of Pico, and Tell a friend about Pico. When you click on the Download Pico for Windows, you will see that system requirements are for Windows 2000 or XP. Once you have downloaded Pico, you will find that it is very user unfriendly.

In reviewing Blinkx, the website is great, however, as far as Pico is concerned, there is quite a bit of room for improvement. First, Pico should have a Mac version as well as a Windows version, so all users can enjoy it. Second, it should be as user friendly as the Blinkx site. Pico can have great potential if it is developed further.

The founder of Blinkx is Suranga Chandratillake, and he continues to serve the company as its CEO. Mr. Chandratillake is a seasoned electronics entrepreneur with over ten years of experience in the industry. After founding Blinkx in 2004 and launching it to the public in 2005, Blinkx enjoyed amazing success early in its life and was eventually publicly traded on the London Stock Exchange, where it continues to be traded to this day. Mr. Chandratillake is an expert on both the internet and TV and has the knowledge and has developed technologies to merge the two media together. Furthermore, Mr. Chandratillake also has expertise in interactive TV and online advertising. Along with this and other experiences in the field, Mr. Chandratillake is truly a pioneer in the online entertainment industry.

Other key people involved in the development of the Blinkx technological platform include Matthew Scheybeler, who serves as Blinkx’s CTO and Matthew Service, who works at Blinkx as the company’s COO.

Mr. Scheybeler has a whole wealth of experience in the ever evolving and rich media technology. Mr. Scheybeler has worked at Blinkx since 2004 and before coming to Blinkx, he worked for Autonomy Corporation as both a programmer and a team leader. Mr. Scheybeler also founded his own consulting firm.

Mr. Service also has a great deal of experience in the online media industry and financial operations as well. Mr. Service was a general principle at Regent Pacific Management. He also worked on over 34 engagements from 1998 to 2006, involving technology companies. Mr. Service also worked at both Clarent Corporation and Auspex Systems as the IT director for both companies.

Blinkx received $9 million in seed funding in 2003, but the names of the investors are not disclosed to the public.

Blinkx does have a few competitors. The two major ones are Hulu and Dabble.

Hulu is a service that is similar to that offered by Blinkx and advertises that it has a wide variety of TV shows that can be watched on demand. Hulu is based in Los Angeles, California and is a privately owned LLC. Hulu has six people on its management team.

Dabble is also a video search engine with a similar service as Blinkx and claims that it gets its videos from over 600 different sources and boasts of over 150 partnerships. Dabble is a privately owned company based in Berkely, California and is still in beta testing phase. Dabble has three people on its management team and one person on its board of directors.

For more information about Blinkx, click here.

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