Developingeyes’ Entrepreneur of the week: Suranga Chandratillake

It’s yet another Monday an at developingeyes.com we like to start it off with a little inspiration and motivation with our entrepreneur of the week. In this series we acknowledge a young entrepreneur that has found some level of success in his/her particular niche. The story is meant to motivate us as young budding entrepreneurs so that we keep striving and working towards our own success as well.

This week’s entrepreneur is a bit more successful than what I’ve been writing about in the past but may still be a bit unknown to quite a few of us on this side of the Atlantic. Suranga Chandratillake is co-founder and CEO of Blinkx. Blinkx is a video search engine based in the UK and San Francisco, that indexes over 18 million hours of video online. According to their website:

Today, blinkx is the world’s largest single index of rich media content on the Web, delivering more content from a broader range of sources than either Google or Yahoo!

One of the main advantages Blinkx has over the other guys is software that turns speech into text and tells you how many times that word has appeared in a particular video. Blinkx has also taken on contextual advertising using a service they call AdHoc. Think of it as an "Adsense for videos".

The ads take many forms, clickable links that scroll across the screen, banner ads and interestingly a list at the end of the video that shows all the products mentioned in the video you just watched! This is some very interesting stuff and I think has a very good future ahead as more and more videos appear online. A story on Suranga and Blinkx can be found in the Business 2.0 September 2007 edition or on the business 2.0 website.

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