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Advertising - Friday, July 2, 2004

Quigo - Profile

HQ: New York City

Founded: 2001.

Management: CEO Michael Yavonditte hails from InterActive Corp., and also did time at Alta Vista, Juno, and Ziff-Davis.

Investors: Completed a $5M series A round in March 2004 with Highland Capital as the primary investor. Bob Davis, the founder of Lycos and now a Highland partner, joined the board. He's got pretty good Internet chops and should bring some good advice to board meetings.

Business Model: Two basic products, AdSonar Exchange and FeedPoint. AdSonar Exchange uses proprietary algorithms to match ads with relevant content from publishers -- and vice versa. FeedPoint provides both the technology and services to helps clients with search engine marketing (SEM) and search engine optimization (SEO) needs. If this all sounds familiar, that's because both the areas Quigo is targeting are heating up.

Competitors: Industry Brains, Tacoda Systems, and Kanoodle.

Dirt: Quigo spends a lot of its promotional space talking about "proprietary" algorithms. The company even has an R&D center in Israel! Though we suspect that's some guy's spare bedroom, it will be interesting to see if any of these emerging online ad infrastructure companies can actually rise above the crowd on the basis of better technology. Stranger things have happened -- remember that just when the search engine market was declared a commodity, Google rocked its competition with a better mousetrap.

##NEWS UPDATE - 08.26.04