Oakdale / San Mateo, August 18, 2008 – Smaato Inc., a pioneering provider for in-application mobile advertising solutions, and Star Gaming Network today announced their collaboration for mobile advertising. Star Gaming Network, a subsidiary of SimFreaks.com, offers a wide range of mobile games, based on Java.

By integrating Smaato’s SOMA™ (Smaato Open Mobile Advertising) platform and ad-enabling their games Star Gaming Network can now offer mobile games for free to their users. This business model is attractive to a lot of gamers as they appreciate mobile advertising in return for high quality games. This initiative is expected to raise the brand awareness of Star Gaming Networks within the gaming community.

“By ad-enabling our mobile games we expect to grow our user base and brand recognition significantly”, said Patrick J. Barrett III, CEO of the Star Gaming Network. “We are thrilled to partner with Smaato and take advantage of the SOMA platform and their experience with in-application mobile advertising.”

“Reaching mobile consumers on their handset becomes a very attractive real estate and entertainment publishers and game developers have an attractive audience”, comments Ragnar Kruse, Co-Founder & CEO of Smaato Inc. “We are excited that Star Gaming Network partners with Smaato to offer their mobile gaming inventory to our growing network of partners.”

Meet Smaato on July 21st  at the IAB Leadership Forum: Mobile in New York, NY. Ragnar Kruse, CEO & Co-Founder of Smaato Inc. is going to speak about SOMA - the Smaato Open Mobile Advertising platform as a part of the Ad Network Marketplace session. The interactive sessions explore opportunities of mobile ad sales networks for mobile applications, mobile web and opportunities for MMS / text . The IAB Leadership Forum: Mobile takes place from 2:45 PM - 3:45 PM in the Promenade Suite, Mezzanine Level  at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau consists of leading interactive companies that actively engage in and support the sale of interactive advertising. Several times in the year they set up events to provide information to marketers, agencies, advertisers, publishers and solution providers.

Smaato welcomes the new iPhone 3G

Sometimes innovations from the Valley are brought to life first in other parts of the world. Last Friday, the Smaato team in Hamburg got an 9 hour advantage on having the new iPhone in their hands ahead of the U.S. based Smaato team.

On Friday the 11th at 10 AM in the T-Mobile store - in 300 feet distance from the Smaato office in Hamburg - there were exactly 3 people ahead of us buying the new shiny smartphone from Apple. We got the 16G black edition and started to bring it to life with our CMO’s T-Mobile contract to get the whole “legal” experience – after playing a year with “opened” iPhones from the U.S.

Smaato is especially keen on getting the iPhone user experience first hand, as we announced earlier our beta program for developers of our iSOMA SDK for Apple iPhone developers. Today we like to re-invite Developers to start working with iSOMA.

The launch of the new iPhone AppStore was a great success as Fierce Wireless reported today:

“[Apple] … announced more than a million devices sold within the first three days of release, with iPhone and iPod users also downloading more than 10 million applications from the fledgling App Store, which debuted Thursday. According to Apple, there are now more than 800 native iPhone applications available via the App Store, with 200 of them offered free of charge.”

Mobile Analyst Dr. J. Gerry Purdy of Frost & Sullivan was all the rave about the new opportunities for mobile developers in his column last week. Gerry states: “I believe that custom applications yield the best user experience in mobile. … The advantages of custom applications include a better user interface, access to remote data, a ‘mash up’ of data from multiple sources, which is almost impossible to do with Web applications for mobile.” Read the rest of this entry »

London / San Mateo, July 7, 2008 – Smaato Inc., a pioneering provider for in-application mobile advertising solutions, and Blue Whale Systems Ltd today announced a new strategic partnership. Blue Whale Systems introduces the free ad-supported BlueWhaleMail application that offers a mobile push e-mail and push Facebook service.

With its BlueWhaleMail application, Blue Whale Systems offers a service to make simple and effective e-mail and Facebook access available to the 2.7 billion people using mass market mobile phones. Many of these phones have either an unusable or hard to configure built in e-mail service; BlueWhaleMail allows users to keep the phone they like and still get a great service for mobile e-mail and Facebook. In connecting BlueWhaleMail to the SOMA™ (Smaato Open Mobile Advertising) platform, Smaato enables Blue Whale Systems’ business model by allowing them to offer their service to users for free; financing this by ad-enabling the application.

“The partnership with Smaato is a great step forward for us. In ad-enabling our application and offering it free of charge to our users we can enhance our reach and build a greater community”, said Richard Seward, Founder & CEO of Blue Whale Systems. “We believe that banner adverts at the top of the BlueWhaleMail message viewer provide an unobtrusive way to support the service”.

“We are excited to partner with Blue Whale Systems and their innovative mobile e-mail solution”, comments Ragnar Kruse, Co-Founder & CEO of Smaato Inc. “Access to e-mail on mobile phones is getting more and more mission critical for businesses or a vital part of our connected lives in the mobile age. Together with Blue Whale Systems we enhance our reach in Europe for our ad sales network partners.”

The MMA Forum in New York was a great success for us.

Harald Neidhardt, CMO & Co-Founder of Smaato spoke about “Downloadables - An emerging mobile ad inventory for brands”. The slides can be found here: http://www.slideshare.net/hneidhardt/harald-neidhardt-smaato-mma-forum-2008-06-10/.

Mobile Marketer reported about us in their daily newsletter: http://www.mobilemarketer.com/cms/news/associations/1141.html

Integrated Ad Platforms Extend Reach for Advertisers Across Mobile and on iPhone MOBILE MARKETING FORUM

NEW YORK, NY, – June 9, 2008 –-Smaato Inc., a pioneering provider for in-application mobile advertising solutions, and Ad Infuse, a leader in delivering highly personalized mobile ad experiences, today announced a new strategic partnership to provide advertisers, publishers, and operators broad in-application advertising solutions.

With the connection between Ad Infuse’s adInMotion™ platform and the SOMA™ (Smaato Open Mobile Advertising) platform, Ad Infuse and Smaato will enhance their reach in the growing “downloadable” mobile advertising business throughout U.S. and in European markets. Earlier this year, both companies announced iPhone advertising solutions, which are enhanced by this new partnership. Ad Infuse’s multi-format iPhone advertising solution will be integrated with Smaato’s iSOMA in-application mobile advertising platform for iPhone SDK developers, providing broader reach for advertisers and new monetization opportunities for content providers and application developers.

“We see great potential in a partnership with Smaato with their SOMA platform. Their in-application advertising focus and expertise help us to enhance our offering and extend our reach beyond the mobile web,” said Brian Cowley, CEO of AdInfuse. “We see demand for this type of inventory from our discussions with partners in the mobile space, such as international operators.”

“Reaching a high fill rate with quality partners and brands is key to our mobile developers and publishers,” said Ragnar Kruse, Co-Founder and CEO of Smaato Inc. ”Ad Infuse is a recognized innovator in mobile advertising and, together, we will work on pushing the adoption of our mobile in-application ad inventory forward.”

Both companies are headquartered in the Silicon Valley, CA, and have expanded their operations to Europe, where AdInfuse has an office in London, UK. Smaato and Ad Infuse are driving the adoption of mobile advertising for mobile applications developers and their rapidly growing mobile inventory through active involvement in mobile industry groups and guideline initiatives, such as the MMA, the dot.mobi mobile advertising taskforce, and educational forums such as Mobile Ad Degree.

Last week Smaato partner Skweezer made the following press announcement:

“IRVINE, Calif., May 19, 2008—Skweezer, Inc. today announced it will begin distributing a new mobile banner advertising feed through partnership with Smaato, Inc.

“Smaato’s open architecture platform allows us to dramatically expand our mobile advertising capabilities,” said Skweezer, Inc. CEO Kevin Perkins. “By combining the breadth of multiple banner ad networks via Smaato, our premium publishers will have more opportunity to monetize their offerings world-wide with their Skweezer Ads feed.”

Skweezer Ads is an online advertising service that provides text-based cost-per-click (CPC) ads to both mobile and desktop environments through a single ad feed. The new partnership with Smaato will allow Skweezer to start offering banner-based cost-per-impression (CPM) ads created specifically for display on mobile platforms. This mobile banner feed is available for international distribution, which supports Skweezer’s presence in over 175 countries.

Initial traffic for the new mobile banner feed will be confined to 200 million requests per month and will be served to Skweezer Ads’ India market. Once the new feed has been thoroughly appraised and validated, it will be distributed throughout Skweezer Ads’ global network of publishers, carriers and ad providers.

SOMA Wrapper allows Java developers to profit from in-application advertising without touching the source code.

 San Francisco, May 5, 2008 — Smaato Inc. is showcasing new additions to its SOMA™ Open Mobile Advertising Platform. SOMA Wrapper, the latest addition to the SOMA mobile advertising solution will be launched during the summer with a European Operator.   SOMA Wrapper is a service which allows adding different ad formats and placements to existing binary Java ME applications (JAR files). These features include: on start-up and on exit, timer based and between levels (e.g. in games). The advertising components are “wrapped” around the JAR file.  The free SOMA SDK is bundled with Enough Software’s market leading J2ME Polish toolkit for mobile Java Developers. J2ME Polish is the de-facto standard for mobile JAVA developers worldwide. The J2ME toolkit by Enough Software has already been downloaded over 600.000 times and has been commercially licensed by Nokia, Motorola, Mozilla and others. The close integration makes it possible to ad-enable J2ME Polish based applications without manually changing the source code. Just enable the advertising option and press “recompile”.

Since March 1, 2008 Marc Junker is Chief Technical Officer (CTO & CIO) at mobile advertising pioneer Smaato.

Marc will be the driving force for the further development of the mobile advertising platform SOMA and building new mobile ad services. Smaato is looking to expand its European based R&D team significantly in the next months.

Marc Junker (37) has over 10 years experience in IT and mobile business. Before joining Smaato, he was Co-Founder and CTO of mobileview, one or Europe’s leading Wireless Application Service Provider (WASP). Mobileview provides mobile services and content for brand owners, media companies, web and WAP portals, carriers, service provicers and content owners in over 17 countries.