Given their reputation, this inevitably brings us back to how little the average person knows about Proximic.  For a company that claims to "connect publishers, bloggers and end-users by delivering related news, articles, background information and ads," it certainly isn’t big on announcements – its press pages were last updated in early October.

Also, although Erick Schonfeld was able to interview the co-founder and CTO, he writes, "Nitsche is vague about exactly how it works."

So, with those disclaimers in place regarding imprecision, here you go.  The "it" in question is Proximic’s ad delivery system; the system functions using some sort of character pattern analysis rather than keywords.  And the system will now advertise about 20 million items from each of those two big friends we mentioned earlier.

The whole thing is being mentioned in the same breath as Google’s AdSense, and indeed, is being painted a possible serious competitor to it.  With so little known about Proximic, it’s hard to go that far, yet we’ll note that a potential Google killer is exactly the sort of thing Yahoo and eBay would embrace.