Today Yahoo! News ran an interesting story that entitled, “Ad software maker OpenAds girds to take on Google,” and this story was on the potential growth opportunities of this open source advertisement maker. Openads, based in central London and started their open source advertisement project in year 1999, has growing to a stage that attracted the interests of a lot of venture capitalists recently. They have raised $5 million in a round A financing from Index Ventures, and joined by early-stage First Round Capital, Mangrove Capital Partners, and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures. Currently they have more than 25,000 website publishers in more than 100 countries and 20 languages. The uniqueness is its global distribution whereby only 30 percent of its customers come from the United States.

There are few things that I like about their project: They are relatively small, as stated in Yahoo! News, Openads was a 10 man company and I always wondered small team can work the same productive and profitable way as a big corporate such as Google. Secondly, economic theory stated that if there were a demand for something, the marketplace would supply the means of achieving it. In this view, open source project was no longer termed as a “bungled attempt,” nonetheless we should realize of this fact by looking at a lot of open source projects that worked remarkable well, i.e. in term of revenue on the web nowadays. Thirdly, since this software is free and fully control by the users, we may see this is a better step to assure security and privacy. Perhaps the most interesting part is they planned to take on Google AdSense system in which both companies are striving for the lower-end market.

Well, I don’t know how far this company can go, but certainly most of us are penchant for the ambitious projects.