Archive for the ‘Press Releases’ Category

Contextual Advertising and Audience Targeting Provider Proximic Launches Proximic Brand Protection, Enabling Online Advertisers and Publishers to Flag Objectionable Content and Target Ads from Single Platform

Palo Alto, CA - March 25, 2010 (MARKET WIRE via COMTEX) — Proximic (www.proximic.com), a leading provider of Contextual Matching Services for online advertising networks, agencies, publisher networks and demand-side platforms (DSPs), today announced the launch of Proximic Brand Protection, a brand-safety product that provides third-party verification of ad placements on Web pages, online publications, and other online content areas, increasing the potential value and commercial viability of the content while protecting brand advertisers from any non-premium or objectionable traffic. In addition to helping partners avoid objectionable or non-premium advertising environments, Proximic’s page contextualization and audience targeting services then enable advertisers to easily direct their ads to safe and more relevant and monetizable areas online, all at the speed of ad delivery, as opposed to ‘after the fact’ analysis.

Leveraging language-independent technologies, Proximic’s contextualization and targeting services were initially deployed with several of China’s most prominent Internet entities, including Taobao, China’s largest Internet retail platform, which also includes an online advertising exchange and affiliate network for hundreds of thousands of publishers, as well as Allyes, one of the leading Internet advertising properties in China.

Using its proprietary Pattern Proximity profiling and filtering technology and following established industry guidelines from the Interactive Advertising Bureau, Proximic Brand Protection was developed to proactively prevent online brand damage and increase media efficiency, all while protecting advertising brands online, with the goal of improving the success and ROI of campaigns. It can also certify and endorse network inventory, then monitor and classify the inventory for increased inventory performance.

Proximic Brand Protection’s matching and filtering technology provides:

• Distinct content scores: Provides industry-standard content quality scores across different levels (page level up to publisher/site) and over time, specifically targeting and flagging non-standard content types such as sexual content, offensive content and user-generated content found in social media environments; monitors compliance of a partner publishers’ inventory and assesses the overall risk on brand exposure;
• Protection beyond English: Pattern Proximity empowers brand protection in Spanish, French, German and Chinese, with more languages to follow. Proximic’s core technologies are language-independent, making it possible for Proximic partners to leverage the power of Brand Protection in markets beyond the US;
• Preventive Ad-call Implementation, rather than after-the-fact analysis: Prevents unsafe impressions monitoring within the ad call rather than relying on post-campaign analysis secures “real-time readiness” through adaptive processing frequency of pages depending on various risk levels;
• Transparent and Live API Reporting: Proximic provides live reporting access and alerts servers in real-time with transparent scores when Proximic Brand Protection identifies scoring flags;
• Lower total-cost-of-ownership: Proximic customers can now use one technology platform in conjunction with both audience targeting and page contextualization;
• Easy integration, with versatile levels of deployment: Proximic designed Brand Protection to meet various levels of client needs and technical capabilities. Clients can use different methods to access the Proximic API for scoring data in all common reporting standards.

“In launching Proximic Brand Protection, we have made it easy to avoid brand damage as immediately and transparently as possible. We’ve merged this with our targeting services for the simple reason to help our partners remove the risk from featuring ads in non-premium inventory and increase advertising reach and boosting efficiency at the same time. With that, our customers can reach relevant brand audiences at larger scale and with more confidence,” said Philipp Pieper, Proximic CEO. “Proximic Brand Protection runs together with other Proximic services and is operated on the same infrastructure, which significantly increases ad efficiency, unlocks targeting potential and reduces the total cost of ownership for our partners.”

Brand Protection is part of Proximic’s Suite of Contextual Matching Services. By merging services for brand protection and ad targeting, Proximic safeguards and verifies ad placement, while boosting advertising reach and efficiency. Together, this helps Proximic partners reach relevant audiences at larger scale with higher confidence.

About Proximic

Proximic is a leading provider of Contextual Matching Services for online advertising and publisher networks. Combining non-linguistic contextual profiling technologies, Proximic enables advertising networks, agencies, DSPs, and publisher networks to identify better ad matches across highly granular topical interests. Proximic is a privately funded company based in Palo Alto, California with offices in Beijing, China. The company is backed by investors such as Wellington Partners, which ranks among the most successful pan-European venture capital firms, and the Holtzbrinck Group, the publishing group of numerous publications including the Scientific American. To learn more, visit www.proximic.com.

For further information, please contact:
Mark S. Peterson
Pointer PR LLC
mark@pointerpr.com
206-390-0204

A Breakthrough in Language-Independent Search, “Proximic Agents” Make Search Adapt to the Unique Properties of Mobile Phones; Available Today at the iPhone App Store, First Version of “Proximic Agents” Enables Users to Follow Topics With Search Agents and to Search for News Simply by Pointing to Entire Blocks of Text

SAN FRANCISCO, CA, Dec 02, 2008 (MARKET WIRE via COMTEX) — Proximic, an emerging player in the search- and contextual advertising market, today announced the general availability of Proximic Agents, a mobile application that enables users to search for information in ways that are better suited to the unique properties of mobile phones. Based on Proximic’s language-independent approach to finding and matching contextually relevant information, the new application enables users to search and receive the information they are looking for by using features designed for the new generations of mobile phones (for example, touch screens) while de-emphasizing features better suited to desktop computers (for example, keyboards for punching in keywords).

Available today at the iPhone App store, the first version of Proximic Agents allows easy access to personalized and intelligent news on the device. The Agents app is built to improve users daily productivity by searching through more than a million RSS news feeds to find relevant content. Agents comes with a number of smartphone-friendly features, such as “Point to Search,” which enables users to find relevant information simply by pointing to an entire block of text on the touch screen.

Following versions of the Agents app will be committed to two main causes: increasing the relevance of information reaching mobile users, and substantially decreasing the users efforts in accessing that information. Scheduled for release the first quarter of 2009, Proximic Agents will leverage other iPhone capabilities (e.g. using the GPS position and digital camera) and add other unique value-added layers of searchable data.

Proximic CTO: “Mobile Search Must Adapt to Consumer Behavior”

“The market for search and contextual advertising has as much potential — if not greater potential — on the mobile handset as it has had on the computer desktop,” said Thomas Nitsche, CTO of Proximic. “But first, search must adapt to the way consumers use their mobile phones. Mobile handset manufacturers have spent a great deal of time and energy understanding how consumers use their phones. It’s time for the search market to catch up, and become more proactive and less of a strain for the users. At Proximic, we want to contribute to solving this situation and make a big move in the right direction.”

Proximic’s language-independent approach — dubbed “pattern proximity” — automatically reads and matches relevant content according to interconnected “patterns” that are not even based on words but which exist within each document. The approach enables publishers to automatically serve up meaningful content — articles, ads, and products — without the need for keywords or preset categories. It’s similar to querying a search engine with a complete set of 200+ words, and finding the most relevant and similar results to that query. The approach is enabling Proximic to pursue some of the most interesting market opportunities in the global market, including China, where Proximic’s language-independent approach has gotten considerable notice from technology vendors and advertising agencies.

In addition to “Point to Search,” Proximic Agents enables users to request and receive timely, relevant information on any number of topics from more than 1 million news feeds. By avoiding the time-consuming and data-intensive work that both keyword search and semantic search requires, Proximic’s language-independent approach enables the system to scale much faster and accommodate users with quick access to larger stores of information.

“It’s the easiest way to stay on top of the information you are interested in from what is one of the world’s largest news databases,” said Philipp Pieper, CEO of Proximic. “And Proximic Agents does the work for you, freeing you to do the things that are far easier to do on mobile phones.”

About Proximic

Proximic provides a high performance contextual matching service for advertising partners and publishers. The Proximic platform integrates with the Internet’s largest consumer shopping and classifieds sites to automatically generate listing-based text and image ads. Contextually matched information is then served into web publishers, ad networks, and mobile apps through various Proximic publisher programs. It enables a better way to monetize special publishing environments by automatically serving up highly relevant content — articles, ads, or merchandise — on their sites. Powered by a radical new search technology called “pattern proximity,” the network delivers relevant content to the reader at performance levels that outclass other technology approaches. Proximic is a privately funded company based in San Francisco, California and Munich, Germany. Investors include Wellington Partners and the Holtzbrinck Group, the publisher of numerous publications including Scientific American. To learn more, visit www.proximic.com.

Contact:

Giovanni Rodriguez

The Conversation Group

650-279-8415

giovanni@theconversationgroup.com

Proximic Establishes a Beachhead in Beijing to leverage unique capabilities in Chinese Language and explore business opportunities in high growth market

BEIJING, China, SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. — November 06, 2008 — Proximic, an emerging player in the contextual advertising market, has opened an office in Beijing to further develop groundbreaking work that it is doing in Chinese languages. In recent months, the U.S.-based startup has been running tests for measuring the performance of ads in Mandarin. The results of those tests have been promising, and Proximic is now building a presence in the region to better explore the business opportunities.

Proximic’s language-independent approach automatically reads and matches relevant content according to interconnected “patterns” that are not even based on words but which exist within each document. The approach enables publishers to automatically serve up meaningful content — articles, ads, products — without the need for keywords or preset categories. It’s similar to querying a search engine with a complete set of 200+ words, and finding the most relevant and similar results to that query.

The approach is enabling Proximic to pursue some of the most interesting market opportunities in the global market.

“Working in Chinese presents unique challenges, and current approaches have reached their limits,” said Proximic CTO Thomas Nitsche. “In contrast, ‘pattern proximity’ performs extremely well in these environments. At the same time, the approach enables us to run efficiently on high-scale demands, and meet the market requirements in a different way.”

“China may be the next big frontier in Web-based contextual advertising, but so far it has eluded many advertising technology providers,” said Proximic CEO Philipp Pieper. “With our unique approach to automatically leveraging advertising, product and listing inventories, we may have found a way to enter the market more meaningfully and fuel new market developments. With our presence in Beijing we are hoping to accelerate these opportunity.”

About Proximic

Proximic provides a high performance contextual matching service for advertising partners and publishers. The Proximic platform integrates with the internet’s largest consumer shopping and classifieds sites to automatically generate listing-based text and image ads. Contextually matched information is then served into web publishers, ad networks, and mobile apps through various Proximic publisher programs. It enables a better way to monetize special publishing environments by automatically serving up highly relevant content — articles, ads, or merchandize — on their sites. Powered by a radical new search technology called “pattern proximity,” the network delivers relevant content to the reader at performance levels that outclass other technology approaches. Proximic is a privately funded company based in San Francisco, California and Munich, Germany. Investors include Wellington Partners and the Holtzbrinck Group, the publisher of numerous publications including Scientific American. To learn more, visit www.proximic.com.

Media Contact: Giovanni Rodriguez, The Conversation Group, giovanni@theconversationgroup.com, +1-650-279-8415

Self-service program gives publishers, bloggers, content providers access to 50+ million ad units to better monetize online properties

PALO ALTO, Calif. - June 17, 2008 - Proximic, a new player in the contextual advertising and content-matching arena, today announced a self-service content and advertising program that will enable publishers of all sizes to monetize their traffic. Previously reserved for large global publishers, Proximic has opened its platform for mainstream media sites, blogs, and other content producers to take advantage of more than 50 million unique ad units in its repository. With the program, publishers of all kinds have a new, alternative way to earn incremental revenue leveraging a technology that is better optimized for monetizing the “long tail of content” - the vast store of information in the blogosphere and small publisher sites that traditional approaches to advertising have struggled to monetize.

New Approach, Incremental Revenue

Increasingly, publishers are under pressure to find better ways to monetize their online properties. However, traditional keyword-based search approaches neither have the matching quality, nor are they able to select relevant ads from a critical mass of advertising inventories. Additionally, semantic or statistic-based search methods don’t scale well for large ad inventories and serve ads too slowly.

Proximic’s language-independent approach automatically reads and matches relevant content according to interconnected “patterns” that are not even based on words but which exist within each document. This proximity analysis approach enables publishers to automatically serve up meaningful content — articles, ads, products — without the need for keywords or preset categories. This approach, coupled with Proximic’s growing inventory of e-commerce catalogs from partners such as Yahoo! Shopping and eBay’s Shopping.com, helps publishers match more relevant ads to content, and therefore capture more revenue from their site traffic.

“The three most critical factors in monetizing content are relevant matching technology, larger ad inventories and more control over ad programs,” said Proximic CEO Philipp Pieper. “Proximic’s self-service ad program equalizes the playing field to allow publishers of all sizes to reap the rewards of today’s powerful advertising economy.”

How It Works

A beta version of Proximic’s self-service content and advertising program is now available for sign-up at www.proximic.com. Like with other ad programs, publishers can set-up and customize their ad elements, get the ad code and track the live performance of the ads on their site. Additional features and publisher tools will be added subsequently to the service.

About Proximic

Proximic provides publishers with a better way to monetize their content on their own sites and across the Web. With the Proximic Contextual Content Network, publishers automatically serve up highly relevant content — articles, ads, or merchandize — on their sites, as well as syndicate their content to other sites throughout the network. Powered a radical new search technology called “pattern proximity,” the network delivers relevant content to the reader at performance levels that outclass other technology approaches. Proximic is a privately funded company based in Palo Alto, California and Munich, Germany. Investors include Wellington Partners and the Holtzbrinck Group, the publisher of numerous publications including Scientific American. To learn more, visit www.proximic.com.

With New Deals Signed with Yahoo! Shopping, Shopping.com, and Several Others, Proximic’s Advertising Repository Is Now Approaching 50 Million Ad Units

New and Innovative Approach to Contextual Advertising Enables Proximic to Rapidly Deploy E-Commerce Catalogs into Highly Relevant and Matchable Ads Across Its Publisher Network

PALO ALTO, CA and MUNICH, Germany — January 16, 2008 — Proximic, a new player in the contextual advertising and content-matching arena, today announced that it has signed business deals to use the product catalogs of e-commerce destinations — Yahoo! Shopping, Shopping.com, and several others — as advertisements on U.S. publisher sites within its new advertising network. (The advertisements generated from each of the agreements will appear on separate pages on Proximic’s network.) With a new and innovative approach to serving online advertisements, Proximic can rapidly deploy entire e-commerce catalogs as highly relevant and matchable ads on any number of content sites in Proximic’s global network. With the agreements that it has just signed, Proximic’s advertising repository is approaching 50 million unique ad units.

Meeting the New Challenges of Online Advertising

Increasingly, publishers are under great pressure to find better ways to monetize their online properties. Proximic’s language-independent approach automatically reads and matches relevant content according to interconnected “patterns” that are not even based on words but which exist within each document. The approach enables publishers to automatically serve up meaningful content — articles, ads, products — without the need for keywords or preset categories. It’s similar to querying a search engine with a complete set of 200+ words, and finding the most relevant and similar results to that query.

Approach Enables Online Publishers to Monetize More of their Content Better

With an already sizable advertising repository, Proximic is now prepared to serve the very large market of online publishers — mainstream media sites, blogs, and other content sites — that continually produce great stores of content but cannot monetize sufficiently because traditional approaches neither have the matching quality nor are able to choose from a critical mass of relevant advertising.

The growth of Proximic’s ad repository is a testament to its technology.

“When we launched back in October, we had a new approach that substantially met the technology challenge of serving up relevant advertising in a market where keyword-based systems were encountering their natural limits,” said Proximic CEO Philipp Pieper. “Now we are beginning to build the advertising repository that will make this promise a reality and we will see our technology-scalability translate into business-model scalability. In the next weeks we will introduce an open publisher program to let publishers participate in better revenues. This is a turning point for the company, and in the next few months we will announce a number of important wins on the publisher side that will further validate the approach we are taking.”

About Proximic

Proximic provides publishers with a better way to monetize their content on their own sites and across the Web. With the Proximic Contextual Content Network, publishers automatically serve up highly relevant content — articles, ads, or merchandize — on their sites, as well as syndicate their content to other sites throughout the network. Powered by a radical new search technology called “pattern proximity,” the network delivers relevant content to the reader at performance levels that outclass other technology approaches. Proximic is a privately funded company based in Palo Alto, California and Munich, Germany. Investors include Wellington Partners and the Holtzbrinck Group, the publisher of numerous publications including Scientific American. To learn more, visit www.proximic.com.

New Startup Launches the World’s First “Contextual Content Network,” Enabling Publishers to Better Merchandize Content on Their Own Sites, As Well as Across the Web

New Global Network is Supported by Groundbreaking Pattern-Recognition Technology Designed to Deliver Superior Ad Performance and System Scalability

PALO ALTO, Calif., and MUNICH, Germany — October 1, 2007 — A new company came out of stealth this morning with a radical new approach to search and online advertising. The company is building the world’s first dynamic “contextual content network,” a platform that enables publishers of all sizes to better merchandize content on their own sites and across the Web. Based on a groundbreaking search technology called “pattern proximity,” the network serves relevant content and ads at superior levels of performance. A number of leading publishers have already joined the network, including The Independent, one of the largest U.K. daily newspapers; and the Nature Publishing Group, a leading publisher of science and medical publications.

Solving the Publisher Problem for the Post-2.0 World

Increasingly, publishers are under great pressure to find better ways to monetize their online properties. Existing search-advertising technologies are not providing publishers with significant revenue. Contextual advertising technologies based on key words often fail to grasp the core meaning of articles, resulting in irrelevant or inappropriate advertisements. Aside from performance issues within large scale deployments, semantic approaches often cannot keep up with the demand of sorting new content into the preset and trained categories they require to serve up contextually relevant ads.

Proximic has overcome these limitations with a language-independent approach that automatically reads and matches relevant content according to interconnected “patterns” that are not even based on words but which exist within each document. The approach enables publishers to automatically serve up meaningful content — articles, ads, products — without the need for keywords or preset categories. It’s similar to querying a search engine with a complete set of 200+ words, and finding the most relevant and similar results to that query.

“At Connotea, we are of course interested in finding ways to generate money out of Connotea, while at the same time keeping the service free, open and keeping the data open, said Ian Mulvany, product manager at Connotea, Nature.com’s Free online reference management for all researchers, clinicians and scientists. “The obvious first step at doing this is online advertising. At the moment, on some select pages, we display Google ads, but for some reasons the targeting of these ads to the specific content is not strong. As we roll out Proximic, we hope to be able to include channels with information such as nature news, perhaps links to nature articles, as well as related ad links, that we hope will be of value to our readers.”

Another way that Proximic is helping to solve the publisher problem is the content network. By joining the network, publishers not only have a way to serve up relevant content to their readers; they also have an automated way to syndicate their content across the Web, to wherever potential readers congregate.

“To be effective as a publisher today, you need to understand that it is no longer enough to have a destination site,” said Philipp Pieper, CEO and co-founder of Proximic. “Publishers need to catch their readers’ attention wherever they go on the web at the same time monetize effectively once they are attracted. The Proximic network was designed to do that — in a completely automated way –while generating ecosystems of content connections for like-minded users.”

From Computer Chess to Pattern-Based Search

The result of five years of R&D, Proximic’s patent-pending technology has benefitted from the perspective that one of its founders gained in the world of computer chess. CTO Thomas Nitsche, the 1984 world computer chess champion, looked for ways to highly optimize the process of matching content across increasingly large sets of documents.

“You need to remember, this was 1984, when we had to design for computers with 5 kilobytes of memory,” said Nitsche. “We took that same discipline when designing the underlying technology for Proximic which then resulted in a rat’s tail of positive effects. The Proximic system requires very little memory or computing power. We can scale to index the entire Web, at the same time don’t have to build massive data centers.”

About Proximic

Proximic provides publishers with a better way to monetize their content on their own sites and across the Web. With the Proximic Contextual Content Network, publishers automatically serve up highly relevant content — articles, ads, or merchandize — on their sites, as well as syndicate their content to other sites throughout the network. Powered a radical new search technology called “pattern proximity,” the network delivers relevant content to the reader at performance levels that outclass other technology approaches. Proximic is a privately funded company based in Palo Alto, California and Munich, Germany. Investors include Wellington Partners and the Holtzbrinck Group, the publisher of numerous publications including Scientific American. To learn more, visit www.proximic.com.