Former Yahoo top exec to head start-up Blinkx

Mark Opzoomer, former Yahoo Europe chief, will be the new CEO of Blinkx, a San Francisco company whose search engines scout the Net and the desktop alike. Opzoomer, who had been Yahoo's European managing director for two year until December 2003, is expected to expand the startup's operations and handle business development and marketing. For 20 years, Opzoomer worked with the U.K.-based Virgin Group and Sega Enterprises.

Blinkx recently announced a search technology that looks up links before the user asks for it. The free tool uses self-learning algorithms that scrutinize the content a user is viewing and automatically initiate a search progress both the Internet as well as on the user's PC.