Blinkx: A citizen journalism moment

Just got back from the daylong Getting Ready for Prime Time: Online Video and the Future of Television conference in Berkeley, CA. Wanted to blog from the event, but the wi-fi was iffy.

I experienced a citizen journalism moment at mid-day when I received an email about Blinkx TV.

If you go to the Blinkx website, you’ll see just two mentions of the global enterprise search company Autonomy. (The About page mentions that CEO Suranga Chandratillake worked there for three years. And in a December 2004 story, the Wall Street Journal reported, “Blinkx’s TV search (www.blinkx.tv) uses technology licensed from Britain’s Autonomy Corp. for analyzing audio tracks of video.” But the relationship seems to go much deeper.) Meanwhile, on the Autonomy site, you’ll see this page, which makes no mention of any association between Blinkx and Autonomy.

But James Whittaker of the United Kingdom emailed with this report:

As a reader of your blog I have noticed that you seem to be a fan of blinkx. I have also noticed that you have a certain passion for the truth, an open discussion and all things journalistic so I thought you may be interested in what I know about blinkx. As someone who has spent more time than is healthy in the search market I thought that you might like to know that the ‘tiny internet startup’ blinkx is in fact a front for global enterprise search company, stock market listed corporation and dotcom boom darling Autonomy. Whilst blinkx paint themselves as a small company, which is an oem of Autonomy, this is actually completely untrue. Blinkx actually IS Autonomy. The blinkx software has been entirely developed by the Autonomy development teams and cleverly marketed by Autonomy and more importantly is wholly maintained by Autonomy. Suranga Chandratillake and the blinkx brand are merely a clever front. I have had my suspicions for some time, which have been confirmed by an Autonomy employee with a loose tongue. I wasn’t going to do anything but I was forwarded an article in a magazine here in the UK from a marketing magazine (below in italics) and thought that there may be some interest:

Comms mix-up at Autonomy/Blinkx

On a internet we noticed Charlotte Herbert, whom we reported as Marketing Manager for search engine Blinkx last March, was listed as the press contact for software firm Autonomy.

We rang Herbert, who said she hadn’t worked for Blinkx, but that a certain Charlotte Fildes did.

But a message left for Herbert through Autonomy’s switchboard was quickly followed by a call to us from Fildes.

Fildes reassures our confused newsdesk she is not the same person as Herbert, who ‘probably earns more than me’. Glad to see though that communications between Autonomy and its independent business partner, Blinkx, are so seamless.

Maybe Autonomy is deceiving people because they are scared of a repeat of their first attempt at web search, called Kenjin which they released in 2000, saying it was going to be the biggest thing ever, before it was shot down in flames as it didn’t work.

To be honest me and my colleagues think blinkx is similarly flawed – it isn’t scalable (it only searches a very small index of video that Autonomy actually have signed agreements with such as the BBC etc and not the web at all – note how the original web index has disappeared from the site.) Should any major acquirer become involved (as Rupert Murdoch has been hinted at) they would find that the Autonomy infrastructure simply wouldn’t scale to search the web, as it has not been designed to do this. Other points of interest are how come blinkx claims to use ‘contextual search’ (see the white paper on the site) to find you the most relevant answer for the user, which is not true. For example by entering ‘Jackson’ I get results for Michael Jackson, Jackson Hole, Samuel L Jackson, and no option to refine this search even further. It is based merely on on dates and statistics.

Also blinkx claims that it is performing ‘speech to text searches.’ This is again lies. The speech to text is seemingly only performed on a couple of the sources that it is searching, and for the rest it is just performing bog-standard keyword search on terms around the videos (basically on the names of the video.)

I’ve spoken with Suranga and emailed him a few times over the past few months, and I couldn’t let this pass, so I raised it at his session today. He responded by acknowledging, in general terms, the links between Autonomy and blinkx. He basically suggested that blinkx was a spinoff of Autonomy and that Autonomy developed the software, but that blinkx was now a completely separate company.

But it’s an important point. Blinkx is constantly portayed as a small, independent company up against search engine giants like Yahoo! and Google. (Indeed, some of the banter at the session today was about underdog Blinkx up against the likes of Yahoo.) If its ties with Autonomy go much deeper — that is, Autonomy created the software, does the marketing, and works out of the same offices — then that’s a relationship that the tech press needs to look into more closely.

Also, if Suranga would like to provide further details, he’s free to email me or post a comment here.

Addendum on Oct. 10: James Whittaker just responded to my query about whether he was satisfied with Suranga’s description of the relationship between blinkx and Autonomy. He wrote:

I would have to disagree with him saying blinkx is a spinoff – it is owned 100% by Autonmoy and in my opinion would be better described as a division of autonomy! What else would you call something that is 100% developed, owned and marketed by Autonomy? If you do a google search you can see they are confused about this because blinkx has been called an oem, a spinoff, absolutely nothing to do with autonomy and a whole heap of different things. Does the fact that it is in a different office consitutute it being a spinoff?

i think it is a bit smoke and mirrors really.

Today at SearchEngineWatch, Gary Price sheds some more light on the blinkx-Autonomy relationship, including this response from Blinkx CEO Suranga Chandratillake:

Autonomy is not one of blinkx’s shareholders. We [blinkx] enjoy a close relationship with them (Autonomy) but that’s because (I was there for years (including as US CTO) and have lots of friends there, (b) we are an OEM customer of theirs, and so depend on them in a number of ways technologically. Under the terms of the OEM agreements, under certain circumstances, Autonomy does have an option to invest in blinkx.

JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.