Blinkx To Go Public

The idea of a “Google killer” has lost most of its meaning – challenger after challenger came along, assumed that title, and proceeded to fail miserably.  Google Video may face a real threat in the form of Blinkx, however – the Autonomy corporation has announced plans to demerge that video search engine.

“Blinkx will then be combined with Autonomy’s consumer arm and will float on AIM [England’s Alternative Investment Market] in May, with analysts tipping a market value of anywhere between $150 million and $500 million,” reported the Times Online’s Joe Bolger.  From a business perspective, I’d say that’s not a bad start.

One analyst, Derek Brown of Seymour Pierce (an investment bank and stockbroker), seemed to agree.  “We expect it to be a highly sought after offering, given the explosion of unstructured video content on the web,” he told The Guardian.

(Brown’s prediction is probably less impressive – and yet all the more accurate – due to market movements that have already occurred; Bolger concluded his article with the update that “Autonomy shares were trading up 59.5p at 758p at 9am” due to the Blinkx news).

Blinkx is also looking pretty good from a user’s perspective.  Even as Google and YouTube face lawsuits on every front, Blinkx boasts of “partnerships with 200 leading content and media companies,” and the service has also “indexed over 7 million hours of video content and made it fully searchable using speech-to-text transcription and visual analysis.”

Expect big headlines, then, when the Blinkx IPO occurs.  And expect the phrase “Google killer” to be used a lot.