• August 10, 2007

Onil Gunawardana has joined video search engine blinkx to direct strategy and development for its new contextual video advertising platform, AdHoc.

Most recently, he was COO and vice president of products at Searchforce, an SEM platform for centralizing and optimizing pay-per-click advertising campaigns. He also managed marketing and analytics products at Siebel.

Former MediaZone.com executive John Bryan has joined video search engine blinkx as a director of content acquisition with responsibility for large U.S. content acquisition deals.

Also new onboard is former Babelgum executive Marco Nardotti, who will be the director of content acquisition for partnerships across Europe.

Gavin Morgan joins blinkx from Miva to drive syndication strategy in Europe. Morgan is a former group head of media at JCDecaux.

"Following a successful IPO on the London Stock Exchange AIM in May, we're strengthening our team by attracting top engineers and specialists in content acquisition and distribution, who have proven track records of success, and a wealth of contacts in the media industry," said Suranga Chandratillake, founder and CEO, blinkx.

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 200 partners and 14 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.