Proximic unveils content and ad delivery network

A German company is launching on Monday a new content delivery network that will serve up related articles and ads that are contextually relevant to whatever is on the Web site being viewed.

(Credit: Proximic)

Proximic, which has offices in Munich and Palo Alto, Calif., is offering a way for Web site publishers to display related information from other sources and ads, as well as to syndicate their content to other sites.

Rather than requiring advertisers to buy ads based on keywords or categories, the system automatically reads and matches relevant content according to "interconnected patterns" in the documents that "are not even based on words," whatever that means. Founder and Chief Executive Philipp Pieper declined to elaborate on what he called the "secret sauce."

In a demonstration, the system seemed pretty interesting. Clicking on a spot of text on a Web page or highlighting some text brought up relevant articles that seemed very well matched. The same with the ads. For instance, a site on the demonstrations in Myanmar displayed an ad for vegetarian recipes from an American Zen Buddhist monastery and another ad for a book on monasteries.

The Independent, one of the largest daily newspapers in the U.K., and the Nature Publishing Group, a publisher of science and medical publications, have signed on.

The Chief Technology Officer is Thomas Nitsche, the 1984 world computer chess champion. Back in the day, he designed for computers with only 5 kilobytes of memory. The Proximic system requires very little memory or computing power, "able to scale to index the entire Web" without massive data centers, the company said.