TechCrunch Disrupt: San Francisco 2011 winner Qwiki has a hot iPad app (250,000 downloads in 11 days) and plenty of cash. But one thing they no longer have is cofounder Louis Monier. He’s left the company, he tells me, to join Proximic as Chief Scientist.
And that means Monier won’t be attending Disrupt next week in New York to help hand over the Disrupt Cup to the next winner.
Why did Monier leave? Nothing juicy, he tells me. “The research phase is over, the basic technology is in place,” he says. Monier, who founded the first popular Internet search engine, AltaVista, has a history of moving on from projects after the hard parts are finished. He also had stints at eBay rebuilding search, Google and Cuil. He even worked for a time on our CrunchPad project.
Proximic, his new home, was originally a German startup that has moved to Palo Alto. They’ve raised over $10 million in three rounds of financing. It’s an ad targeting and analytics platform for brands on the surface. But what excites Monier, he says, is all the data that needs to be cultivated. “Proximic is analyzing billions of impressions per day,” he says.
Louis Monier is currently the Chief Scientist of Proximic. He is best known as the founder and spokesperson for AltaVista, the first large-scale search engine on the Internet. During his 4-year tenure he took the search engine through several firsts (very fast scalable Web crawler, support for many languages), while his colleague Mike Burrows (now at Google) built the first scalable search back-end. Louis also launched BabelFish, the first machine translation site. Louis got a Ph.D. in Mathematics and Computer...
Proximic provides web services for Page Contextualization, Audience Targeting and Brand Protection to advertising networks, agencies / DSPs, and publishers, with the goal to empower greater control, precision, confidence and profitability of ad placements across the ad ecosystem. Proximic precision-matches complex and unstructured online content to the most effective advertisement targeting. At the same time the company helps brand advertisers assess the quality of ad environments for their brand messages. This leads to higher acceptance of online ads for users...
Qwiki is an industry leader in automated video production. Most recently, Qwiki released an iPhone app that automatically turns the pictures and videos from a user’s camera roll into brief, beautiful movies to share. The company’s initial product, an iPad application that created video summaries of over 3 million search terms, was downloaded more than 3 million times and named by Apple as the best Search and Reference application of 2011. After integrating this technology in the Bing Search...
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