blinkx Launches Pico, the World's Smallest Search Engine

blinkx Launches Pico, the World's Smallest Search Engine

Pico Mines the Latent Web, Making Implicit Connections and Dynamically Delivering Highly Relevant Information to Users

SAN FRANCISCO, March 7 /PRNewswire/ -- blinkx, the smartest thing on your computer and on the Web, today launched Pico, an entirely new way to navigate the next-generation Web. Today, searching the Web is a disruptive experience -- users are forced to interrupt the activity they have at hand, go to a search engine, enter a search and examine the results for relevant material. Pico, a free 1MB download available at www.blinkx.com, revolutionizes the search process, by bringing relevant information to users, and organizing it for them, proactively and automatically.

Pico appears as an unobtrusive series of channels at the top of your desktop, each representing a different type of content: news, blogs, video, Web, Wikipedia, images, shopping, and "people," which retrieves information from online communities, including MySpace.com.

As you work, Pico reads your active screen, infers the meaning of what you're looking at based on context, and then dynamically retrieves relevant information from across the Web, including next-generation Web content, such as blogs and rich media. It works invisibly, so that you only see the results of its search if you click on a relevant channel. Pico does the searching for you, constantly updating its query, based on what's on your screen at any point in time.

"With Pico, we turned the search paradigm on its head, and asked, 'What if search could be brought to you?'" said Suranga Chandratillake, founder and CTO of blinkx. "While others, including Microsoft and Apple, have talked about the potential of implicit search before, blinkx has once again pre-empted others by making it reality first. More than anything else, Pico is about the possibility of search-less search."

Pico also allows you to easily create Smart Folders based on the content that is active on your screen. With Pico, you can save what you are reading or writing as a search and blinkx will automatically populate a Smart Folder on your desktop with related content. In addition, you will benefit from a feature called Pico View, which unifies the results of all six Pico channels in a single pane.

About the Latent Web

In recent years, the term Semantic Web has been used to describe the idea that metadata can be used to identify and track hidden connections among content silos on the Web. In reality, the lack of a consistent schema and the massive manual effort involved in tagging every piece of content has left the Semantic Web little more than an unrealised ideal. blinkx's Latent Web applies technology to the challenge of making those connections, avoiding the manual process altogether and providing an objective framework of meaning with which to navigate content, wherever or whatever it is.

About blinkx

blinkx, the smartest thing on your computer and on the Web, is changing the way that people think about search. Only blinkx can harness the desktop, Web and TV -- unifying content with a one stop search tool. Available to users on the Web at www.blinkx.com and www.blinkx.tv, as well as free to download, blinkx automatically and intelligently links to content anywhere and in any format, on the Web, on the desktop and even on TV. blinkx's conceptual toolbar means users are no longer limited to keyword search; instead, blinkx assesses all the information that the user is actively viewing, and automatically recommends and retrieves relevant content, from local, Web and TV searches, based on context. In addition, www.blinkx.tv makes thousands of hours of TV content fully searchable and available on demand for the first time. blinkx is a privately-held company based in San Francisco and London. More information is available at www.blinkx.com.

Contacts:
Julia Blystone,
415-392.8282
OutCast Communications
julia@outcastpr.com

Source: blinkx

CONTACT: Julia Blystone of OutCast Communications, +1-415-392-8282, or
julia@outcastpr.com, for blinkx

Web site: http://www.blinkx.com/

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