The company utilizes a technology it calls “Pattern Proxmity,” which lets users highlight whole paragraphs of text to perform a search for more information. The idea is somewhat like contextual advertising – looking at content and then serving up relevant ads – except it’s being applied to search, and rendering links to Web pages. From a usability standpoint, this makes a lot of sense on mobile, because typing and refining queries can be clunky and time consuming.
No Google Killer Yet
While that sounds pretty interesting, what Proximic is launching today isn’t exactly a finished product. The company’s first mobile app – which is for iPhone only – is simply a news reading application that lets you browse stories from more than 1.4 million feeds, and utilize the search technology to dig deeper within them. You can also subscribe to what Proximic calls “Agent Alerts” – essentially, notifications of pre-defined queries when new items are available.
Making Use of GPS and Camera
The Bigger Opportunity
As I see it, building a standalone app to challenge the existing huge players in search and mobile search is an extremely uphill battle. Where it seems Proximic could eventually become disruptive is in licensing its technology to other software developers, who can then incorporate it into the mobile browsing experience.
For example, rather than having to load a separate application to utilize Proximic’s technology, being able to simply highlight a block of text from inside your phone’s browser to perform a search using pattern proximity. Since Proximic can serve ads based both on location and context, getting the type of distribution that would come with such deals could create a serious cash cow.
Final Thoughts