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April 27, 2007

On April 25, software company Autonomy Ltd. said it is exercising an option to acquire video search engine Blinkx, which it wants to completely revamp and then relaunch at a later date.

Autonomy's technology is used by Blinkx. The company said it would spin off its consumer division, which is responsible for developing and applying its technology. The new division is to be called Blinkx PLC.

The new company would focus exclusively on the consumer market, while Autonomy would cater primarily to the enterprise market.

In October 2006, Blinkx signed a deal with Microsoft Corp. to incorporate its search functions into the software giant's MSN Live.com services.

Overall, Blinkx uses Autonomy's technology to index video from CNN, BBC and YouTube, among other broadcast and Internet services. The videos can then be searched on Blinkx's Web site or others that license its underlying technology.

The company employs speech recognition capabilities to extract search data, which it uses to index some six million hours of online video, audio and TV programming.

Blinkx's new stock is expected to start trading on the London Stock Exchange's AIM market in a few weeks.

Autonomy would own about 10 percent of the new firm's common shares. In an unrelated development, San Francisco, Calif.-based web video search startup Cast TV Inc. said it has received $3.1 million U.S. in its first-round funding from venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson.

CastTV on Tuesday said it "has signed a two-year deal with a major media corporation to provide online video crawling and indexing technology for the company's online video search offering."

Netscape Inc. founder Marc Andreessen is a member of CastTV's board of directors. Draper Fisher Jurvetson has previously backed technology startups that include Hotmail, now owned by Microsoft, and VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) company Skype, now owned by eBay Inc.

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Source: Google Watch