RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, N.C. -- Digitalsmiths, the innovative video indexing, analysis and publishing technology provider, today announced that Cisco has made an investment in the company. Digitalsmiths attracted interest from the Cisco Media Solutions Group, which has increasingly worked to develop and market products to media and entertainment companies with products such as Cisco Eos(TM), a hosted software platform it recently announced at CES.

Digitalsmiths indexes video with an unprecedented sense of context, nuance and intelligence that can open up entirely new revenue streams for existing content. The company's suite of visual interpretation tools process each frame of video with proprietary algorithms including facial recognition, scene classification, and object recognition and assign that information to a unique time-coded index.

Data culled from the video analysis is incorporated into informed publishing technology that matches consumers with the videos they are searching for, and similar content they might not have known about alongside relevant advertising. The resulting metadatabase is the foundation for a highly scalable and powerful search experience across large video libraries, and has already been deployed by major media companies for a range of high-volume web video destinations.

"We're incredibly proud that a worldwide technology leader like Cisco has seen what we're doing here at Digitalsmiths and chosen to take an investment role," said Ben Weinberger, founder and chief executive officer of Digitalsmiths. "Cisco has been a major industry player for more than 20 years and their support of our ongoing technology innovation is very encouraging."

The funding from Cisco follows a prior $12 million Series B round announced in November 2008 and will be used to further accelerate Digitalsmiths' product development initiatives and extend the company's technological leadership and engineering innovation.

Digitalsmiths Corp.

Cisco Systems Inc.