Rhythmone PLC (fka BLNKF)

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blinkx Doubles Size of Advertising Sales Team to Support Massive Online TV Opportunity
Wednesday May 7, 8:00 am ET
Strategic New Hires Capitalize on Thriving Internet Video Market

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--blinkx, the world’s largest and most advanced video search engine, today announced that it has doubled its advertising sales team to support new business development, and plans to continue its aggressive growth in this area. New hires will join blinkx in San Francisco, London, Los Angeles and New York.

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“We’re strengthening our team to help us take on a tremendous opportunity in online video advertising,” said Federico Grosso, senior vice president of business development, blinkx. “I am delighted that we have been able to attract several top advertising sales executives, all of whom have proven track records of success, and a wealth of contacts in the media industry.”

Kat Kashefi, formerly an account director for Euroclick, will join the London office as advertising sales manager. Erik Esfandiary, who worked for five years in TV sales for Sky Media, will also join the London team.

Darrin Porter, who previously worked for Ziff Davis, will join the San Francisco office as director of advertising sales.

Jason Whidby, who was with the advertising sales department for MTV, will be a sales manager for blinkx based in Los Angeles.

Finally, Maximiliano Ramirez, who has worked around the country for a number of top online publishers and created the successful advertising networking event “Digital Wednesdays,” will join blinkx as director of advertising sales. He will be based out of New York.

The online TV and video advertising market is growing exponentially: a recent report from Forrester Research forecast that the market will reach $7.2 billion in the US by 2012. In 2007, blinkx launched the world’s first truly contextual advertising platform for Internet television and video, AdHoc, to capitalize on this massive opportunity. AdHoc uses blinkx’s unique processing technology to match video content and consumer profiles to relevant ads, and since has been used in successful campaigns for leading brands, including Dell, Best Buy and Nokia.

As a pioneer in video search technology, blinkx has built a reputation as the most effective way to search new forms of online content such as video. With more than 220 partners and 18 million hours of indexed video and audio content, including favorite TV moments, news clips, short documentaries, music videos, video blogs and more, blinkx uses advanced speech recognition technology to deliver results that are more accurate and reliable than standard metadata-based keyword searches.

About blinkx

blinkx plc (LSE AIM:BLNX) is the world's largest and most advanced video search engine. Today, blinkx has indexed more than 18 million hours of audio, video, viral and TV content, and made it fully searchable and available on demand. blinkx's founders set out to solve a significant challenge – as TV and user-generated content on the Web explode, keyword-based search technologies only scratch the surface. blinkx's patented search technologies listen to – and even see – the Web, helping users enjoy a breadth and accuracy of search results not available elsewhere. In addition, blinkx powers the video search for many of the world's most frequented sites. blinkx is based in San Francisco and London. More information is available at www.blinkx.com.