As I pointed out earlier, Kanoodle is a company formed essentially in opposition: It was founded by the execs behind About’s Sprinks contextual advertising service, after that service was bought and then discontinued by Google. eWeek today has a good overview of their plans. Excerpt:
ContextTarget, and its upcoming expansion, determines the placement of ads on the bidding for particular content categories rather than on keywords in the content, Josephson said.
Kanoodle.com maps the table of contents of partner sites to build its categories and match appropriate ads, he explained. The automated program will use the same approach but more dynamically map Web publishers’ pages to ContextTarget’s categories.
“The way we look at the world is that the Googles of the world are great search companies that are trying to put the same model on ads,” Josephson said.
I say, competition is good….(though like everyone else, they’re stealing Google’s holiday-theme logos!)