Blinkx shares soar 40%

by Andrew McCormick, Media Week 23-May-07, 13:00

LONDON - Shares in Blinkx, the video search engine, soared by 40% yesterday, after its listing on the London Stock Exchange's AIM market yesterday.

Blinkx scours the internet for videos and claims to reach over 12m hours of footage. The company listed yesterday after parent company Autonomy, which specialises in software, rolled it out as a separate entity.

Suranga Chandratillake, CEO of Blinkx, said that interest from investors represented a major boost for online video.

The surge of investment in Blinkx follows a similar success story for video specialist YouTube, which was bought by Google for $1.65bn (£883m) in October last year. The positive reception of Blinkx's flotation will encourage other competitors to Google, in particular Yahoo! which is shortly set to unveil its new Panama search platform.