"What's very interesting is that there hasn't been much innovation in online advertising over the past few years," said Frank Addante, who is the CEO and founder of the Rubicon Project. Keep in mind that he is one of the pioneers of online advertising. After all, he took L90 public and eventually sold it to DoubleClick.

Well, this week, the Rubicon Project raised $6 million from lead investor Clearstone. In other words, Addante now has a chance to see if he will be the one to bring innovation back to the space.

Yesterday he gave me a demo of the new platform, and so far it looks pretty slick.

"We believe there are about 300 advertising networks in the US," said Addante. "Of course, there are those from Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) and Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO). But there are also many niche networks."

In a recent piece on C/NET, there's some chatter that the mortgage mess will ultimately lower online spending -- taking some of the wind out of biggies like Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) and Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO).

Hey, just based on my own browsing, I'm not seeing many mortgage banners. So should we be worried?

I had a chance to interview Frank Addante, who is a veteran of the online advertising world. He sold one of his companies to DoubleClick and his latest gig is The Rubicon Project.