rein zufällig stieß ich auf die folgende nachricht:
was thomas nitsche gerade so macht:
i found the following interresting link in the internet:
http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_7104095?nclick_check=1
Tiny start-up rival to Google?
POTENTIAL SEEN IN GERMAN SEARCH FIRM
By Elise Ackerman
Mercury News
Article Launched: 10/06/2007 06:45:43 AM PDT
CEO Philipp Pieper, left, and CTO Thomas Nitsche of Proximic in Germany.
The company may give Google a run for its money in the search business.
It's the nightmare of any Silicon Valley CEO: The thought that a smart kid in a messy garage in Silicon Valley is right now developing technology that will make his company's products obsolete.
So should Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin be losing sleep about a tiny German company called Proximic?
While the notion may at first seem ridiculous, given Google's strengths and cash hoard, computer scientists at some of Silicon Valley's biggest Internet companies have been struck by the firm's promising new search technology.
Although in this case, contrary to stereotype, the extremely powerful software code was actually developed by a 54-year-old German mathematician working in a spick-and-span office near the University of Munich.
Thomas Nitsche's program matches Web pages with relevant advertising. That's what Google's AdSense network also does. But Nitsche and his 33-year-old partner, Philipp Pieper, chief executive of Proximic, believe they do it better. People who have played with their program say that seems to be true.
While Google looks at the words on a Web page, Proximic looks for patterns of characters. That means Proximic's approach is completely language-independent, so it works as well with German and Chinese as it does with English.
In theory, this makes Proximic ideal for the random spew of user-generated ******* posted daily on blogs and social-networking sites around the Web, material that often gets the
better of Google's algorithms.
"If they can do this, it could be a breakthrough," said Sue Feldman, an analyst with IDC.
A veteran of an Internet giant who recently took a close look at Proximic's technology and who asked to remain anonymous said it has the potential of being a game changer, but that Nitsche and Pieper face the challenge of proving that a dramatically different approach is better than existing methods.
Currently, Proximic is showing off its technology via a Firefox plug-in available at
www.proximic.com. The plug-in produces a sidebar that matches the ******* of a Web page with additional articles on the Internet or other information, such as an ad.
It is currently being used by the Independent, a daily newspaper published in the United Kingdom, and the Nature Publishing Group, which is owned by one of Proximic's venture backers.
Proximic raised $4.5 million in its first round of founding from Wellington Partners, a European venture capital firm, and Holtzbrinck, which owns Nature through Macmillan.
Ian Mulvany, a product manager for Connotea.org., Nature's social-bookmarking service, said he has tested Proximic and Google AdSense and that Proximic had so far come out ahead. "The matching seems to be of a very high quality," he said.
A Google spokesperson said, "We continually update our targeting and contextual matching technology to make sure that we are delivering the right ad to the right person at the right time. We are able to do this because we have the technology and scale to deliver relevant, useful ads no matter the ******* of a Web site."
A world microcomputer chess champion in 1984, Nitsche drew on that experience during the five years he spent writing Proximic's matching engine. In programming a computer to play chess, Nitsche also learned, by necessity, to write very efficient programs. The computers he was using had only about 5 kilobytes of memory. He said Proximic's core technology amounts to less than one megabyte of software code.
Nitsche and Pieper first met in 2001, at a party thrown by Pieper's sister, Loretta Wurtenberger, founder of Webmiles, a travel-loyalty program that was acquired by Bertelsmann.
At the time of the party, Nitsche was developing big trading systems for banks. Pieper had a start-up that focused on electronic data interchange. Pieper chatted with Nitsche about a technical problem he was having. Nitsche proposed a solution. "The next day we went off and started a company," Pieper said.
Together the two made the quintessential odd couple. Polished and debonair, Pieper embraced the business side while Nitsche, straight-spoken and tweed-wearing, reveled in the abstract math. Uncomfortable in English, Nitsche frequently lets Pieper do the talking.
Nitsche worked alone the first few years in Bauhaus-style offices furnished through purchases on eBay. "It was a very hard time," he recalled. Pieper would join Nitsche nights and weekends, helping to hash out core algorithms.
The company came out of stealth mode Oct. 1 and immediately faced questions about the king of Internet search. Pieper says tiny Proximic, with its slender string of code and 14 employees, does not imagine itself slaying the Google Goliath. But he is hoping to do business with a number of Google competitors, and he promises Proximic will be making some major announcements soon. Stay tuned.
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