TechFold - Bold tech & web commentary

Bold tech & web commentary

TechFold is technology discussion, commentary, reviews, and opinions from well outside the valley. There's no koolaid to drink here, and TechFold is not in SL, or on Twitter.

BlinkX, Video Search, and the Corporate Shell Game

The Financial Times broke the news, but Mashable summed it up more succinctly: $20 and a free pony if you can figure this one out.

The demerger of the consumer business is a complex transaction, in which Autonomy will first take ownership of Blinkx, a separate company founded by Autonomy’s former US chief technology officer, Suranga Chandratillake, which already uses Autonomy’s consumer search technology. In exchange Blinkx will be given exclusive rights to the technology, everywhere outside China. Then the Blinkx business will be demerged again and floated. [From the FT article]

Sounds like an complicated way for Suranga Chandratillake to take a pay day while keeping shareholders happy. Or something.

Meanwhile, try using Blinkx. Personally, I found the search results from YouTube alone a lot better: less clutter in the results, more relevance.

BlinkX for “Nissan Skyline.”
YouTube for “Nissan Skyline.”

BlinkX results are full of a bunch of remote-controlled car stuff - not what I was looking for. Plus, the BlinkX interface, with preview videos playing unsolicited, video thumbnails, and so on, is distracting to the point of making the site painful to use - however technically impressive it may be. Say what you will about the aesthetics/usability of YouTube, but its better than BlinkX.

Finally, BlinkX doesn’t seem to be indexing YouTube properly either. The result sets from each don’t match, and I have no idea how BlinkX ranks video results from one site over another anyway. When it comes right down to it, BlinkX seems counter-intuitive, dis-organized, and a confusing way to find video. This is the fate I fear for CastTV.

blinkx, casttv, mashable, mergers, video youtube

Traineo + BIMA = Mobile + Social Fitness = M&A Heaven

Bones-In-Motion Active (BIMA) is a fitness tracker website who’s big hook is a mobile application that uses GPS phones to record and upload your runs, cycles, walks, etc.

Traineo is a “Fitness 2.0″ that uses social networking, “motivators,” and personal diet and workout logging to help members reach their goals.

Each has its own feature and business model strengths and weaknesses. Traineo’s social aspect has allowed it to grow quickly. BIMA’s subscription model creates a powerful revenue stream. Bring viral/social growth and a subscription model together, and you have a very compelling pitch for a merger or acquisition. Given that both are privately funded, there’s little standing in the way of this being considered.

A little more detail on each…

BIMA’s mobile application is stellar (view the demo here). It costs $9.99/month, billed through your carrier (Verizon, Sprint, or Nextel), and is available only for GPS phones. This is very cool functionality - hit start, put your phone in your pocket, go for a run, hit finish - and your route, time, waypoints, calories, etc. are automatically uploaded to your BIMA web account.

Unfortuantely, while BIMA’s website offers good mapping and tracking features, it fails to deliver on the wider promise of such an infrastructure. The site works hard to make connecting with other users difficult, and has missed many usability innovations that are de-rigeur elsewhere.

Traineo, on the other hand, has a whiz-bang 2.0 website, loaded with AJAX features, badges, and gradients. Traineo works the social angle hard, allowing for the creation of groups, detailed profile pages, contact lists, and motivator groups.

What Traineo appears to lack, however, are:

A revenue stream beyond advertising/sponsorships.
A market-leading, barrier-to-entry feature.

Right now, Traineo has no features that couldn’t be rapidly cloned by a competitor with a better distribution model (a social network/fitness site tied to the Curves franchise, for instance), leaving the site vulnerable. Hell, the JohnStoneFitness.com Forum, if you believe Compete.com, gets significantly more traffic than Traineo.

So, for Traineo, BIMA brings a mobile app (exclusivity w/ carriers?), revenue stream (margins after carrier fees?), distribution model, and a glitzy, attention grabbing site feature with a low enough price point to spread quickly through the social network.

I’d also like to point out one more thing:

Conjecture: People join a site for what they could do on it, and stay on the site for what they actually do on it.

Meaning: A site can justify both core features that get high utilization, and “halo” features that while they may not get mainstream buy-in, draw attention and membership to the site and brand, and create a barrier to/differentiation from competitors.

EDIT: Here’s a definitive overview of Traineo.

aquisition, bima, fitness, hdogroup, mergers traineo