blinkx Doubles Size of Advertising Sales Team to Support Massive Online TV Opportunity

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.
"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.