Scoble Discovers Soapbox

It seems that Scoble has come across Soapbox which is Microsoft's "answer to YouTube".  I'm signed up and now uploading my screencasts to my account for the masses to enjoy! ;-)

His post made me chuckle after he had previously talked about how he compared the aquisition of YouTube by Google to that of the deal made between Microsoft and Blinkx.  Talk about comparing apples with apples, or not - as the case may be. 

He missed the big picture here, whereas Google have bought a website and product, Microsoft has invested in a technology which searches audio in video and can return a result set based on audio matches. 

So where are we going to put that technology?  Well it doesn't take much to figure out that one of the first places is going to be Soapbox.  Imagine combining tagging and keyword search with that provided by Blinkx - you would get a truely powerful video search engine.

Next steps, well I'd hazard a guess that once we've sewn up the audio search side of things, we could start to include the technology we're developing in MS Research on image recognition called Photosynth, so that keywords and tags can be attributable to the actual video dispersed on the internet.

Whilst I get the "brand & website useability arguements" that Scoble made on YouTube vs. blinkx, I think he's missed the most important and strategic point; who has the technology that is going to determine who wins and loses in this area of multimedia content.  Ultimately, it's going to be driven by search - because who finds, wins.

 

What does blinkx do?

blinkx is the world's largest and most advanced video search engine. Fed by automatic spiders that crawl the web for audio video content and content partnerships with over 60 leading content and media companies, blinkx uses visual analysis and speech recognition to better understand rich media content. Users can search for content, create personal TV channels that automatically splice relevant content together and even use our download feature to automatically download content to mobile devices. blinkx is a privately-held firm, based in San Francisco and London and was founded in early 2004 by Suranga Chandratillake.

 

Technorati tags: Scobe, Blinkx, YouTube, Soapbox, Microsoft, Google