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.