Smaato is proud to announce that among the 11 Finalists, the distinguished Jury has selected DialPlus as their favorite ad-enabled mobile application. San Diego based DialPlus won over the jury with its application that is showing visual information from the web for a phone number before, during and after a call.
As the winner, DialPlus gets free booth participation with Smaato at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and will have introductions to four first-class VC partners.
Finalist company Aka Aki (Berlin, Germany) received a special prize for participating with a free booth at the M-Days taking place in January in Munich, Germany.
“The Smaato Mobile Advertsing Award 2008 was an instant success. With more than 100 entrants in its first year we could not ask for more positive feedback. We think this is a clear indicator that there is a lot of creativity and positive energy in the mobile ecosystem. The best is yet to come!” stated Harald Neidhardt, CMO & Co-Founder of Smaato Inc.
Meet Smaato and DialPlus at Booth 7A38 at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain taking place February 16-19, 2009!
For further information about the Smaato Award please visit: www.smaato.com/award and download the award brochure.
108 companies participated in the Smaato Mobile Advertising Award 2008 to win a free trip to the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and other fantastic prizes.
Among them: PageOnce, Digital Chocolate, Nimbuzz, Smule, SoonR, Tapulous, Vringo, jajah and many more.
The first judging has already passed and the INmobile community voted their 11 finalists:
aka-aki, Buzzd, DialPlus, Fishlabs, Fring, FunkySexyCool, Peperoni, Qeep (by Blue Lion mobile), Skout, Tourspot & Vayyoo
San Francisco, CA – November 13, 2008 – Smaato Inc., a pioneering provider for mobile advertising solutions announced today that Tim Draper of DFJ will join the distinguished jury of the Smaato Mobile Advertising Award. Together with Silicon Valley based Vator.tv and INmobile.org Smaato also announced the names of the four venture capital partners, who will be introduced to the winning company:
Tim Draper, Draper Fisher Jurvetson (Menlo Park)
Howard Hartenbaum, August Capital (Menlo Park)
Frédéric Veyssiere, Innovacom Venture Capital (France / San Francisco)
Niall Davis, aeris CAPITAL (Switzerland / San Francisco)
Ragnar Kruse, CEO & Co-Founder of Smaato stated: “We are proud that, together with vator.tv, we created an outstanding opportunity for the award winner to be introduced to the VC community. The winning company has the chance to gain recognition from first class venture capital partners. This is a fantastic opportunity for a young mobile company.”
Tim Draper is the founder of the global venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson. He launched the Draper Affiliate Network, an international network of early-stage venture capital funds with offices in 34 cities around the globe. He founded or co-founded Wasatch Ventures (Salt Lake City), Zone Ventures (LA), Draper Atlantic (Reston), Draper Triangle (Pittsburgh), Timberline Ventures (Woodland, WA), DFJ EPlanet (global), Polaris Fund (Anchorage), Draper Fisher Jurvetson Gotham (NYC), DFJ Frontier (Sacramento and Santa Barbara), and DFJ Dragon (Shanghai). Draper is featured as a keynote speaker in entrepreneurial conferences worldwide.
Howard Hartenbaum joined August Capital in 2008. Prior to joining, he served as a General Partner at Draper Richards LP where he was the founding investor in Skype and a former member of the board of directors where his achievement resulted in his joining the Forbes Midas List of top venture capitalists.
Frédéric Veyssiere became General Partner of Innovacom Venture Capital in 2000. He is also Board member with Actelis Networks, Atrica (acquired by Nokia Siemens Networks), Radioframe Networks and Vantrix, and an observer with Bitfone (acquired by Hewlett Packard) and Bytemobile. Prior to joining Innovacom in 2000, Frédéric worked with TeleSoft Partners, a San Mateo–based venture capital fund, as a consultant in charge of business development for Europe.
Recently at the Symbian Smartphone show at Earls Court, Smaato was caught on camera of Mobile Industry Review. We took a chance to slightly punk the slightly bored video-grapher before we could talk about SOMA. See for yourself:
Speaking of London mobile experts: Nick Lane (lead analyst at Direct2 Mobile), was the first analyst to put a number on the mobile advertising market while he was at informa. He was recently quoted that we might be a long way from delivering on the mobile promise, BUT there is hope: “Companies like Smaato and Blyk have the right idea,” according to Lane.
When Bena Roberts, mobile impresario at GoMoNews.com and Visibility Mobile, noted “HUGE” about helping Zedge to maximize mobile Ad ARPU, we could not help but remember her warm words of encouragement way back when: “We love Smaato” or her Smaato RAP.
San Francisco, November 3rd 2008 – Today at the Mobile 2.0 conference in San Francisco, Zedge, a leading mobile content and social community provider and Smaato, a pioneering provider for mobile advertising solutions, announced a new strategic partnership for mobile advertising.
Zedge has over 11 million users of its leading mobile internet content destination site. Its user base is growing by approximately 10,000 users each day. After successfully integrating Smaato’s Open Mobile Advertising platform (SOMA), Zedge now maximizes its mobile ad revenue and ROI globally.
“We have significantly optimized our mobile ad sales revenue since working with Smaato and their SOMA mobile advertising platform,” stated Mark Rosner, EVP Strategy & Finance of Zedge Inc. “In times like these, we all need to maximize our mobile Ad ARPU. With Smaato, Zedge has found the right technical platform partner to help us reach our goal.”
“We have come a long way since we introduced our SOMA open mobile advertising platform. If publishers today have more than 10 million page impressions per month - they need to look for the best possible solution to maximize their inventory,” added Ragnar Kruse, CEO & Co-Founder of Smaato Inc. “Zedge is a great partner for us and is taking our SOMA market place to new heights”.
Latest Revised Guidelines released today by Mobile Marketing Association
New York; London, UK; Singapore and Sao Paulo, October 29, 2008 – The Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) (www.mmaglobal.com) today announced the release of an updated version of its global Mobile Advertising Guidelines. The guidelines provide the global formats, guidelines and best practices necessary to implement mobile advertising initiatives in a variety of mobile media channels, including web, messaging, downloadable applications and video. The MMA has published regional ad guidelines since 2005 and globalized the guidelines in April 2008.
“For the first time now the MMA has recognized mobile applications as a viable way for brand marketers to reach out to their mobile consumers” stated Harald Neidhardt, CMO & Co-Founder of Smaato and active member of the MMA Mobile Advertising Committee. Members of the committee are international mobile experts of 36 different companies. Their work continues to bring in-application advertising into the more formal MMA guidelines document in the future.
“The interest in applications - not only by the iPhone AppStore - feels like a vital renaissance for mobile developers. When helping publishers to monetize their ad inventory with our SOMA platform, we need standards worldwide to help maximize mobile Ad ARPU” continued Harald Neidhardt.
Mobile 2.0 San Francisco is a one-day event on November 3rd, 2008 focusing on new Mobile Applications and Services, the Mobile Web and Disruptive Mobile Innovation presented by the Mobile 2.0 Organizing Committee (most notable: Daniel Appelquist, Senior Technology Strategist at Vodafone Group and Rudy De Waele, Co-founder dotopen / mTrends) in partnership with AMF Ventures.
The conference brings together experts and thought leaders from all aspects of the mobile ecosystem, including investors, mobile carriers, device manufacturers, mobile application developers and web technologists. The Mobile 2.0 Conference Business and Builder Track agenda’s are now completed and can be viewed here.
Smaato CEO Ragnar Kruse will speak on the Mobile Advertising panel with distinguished industry experts:
CTIA San Francisco, USA / Hamburg, Germany, 12th September 2008 – Today at CTIA FISHLABS, leading developer and publisher of high-end mobile games, and Smaato, pioneering provider for mobile advertising solutions, signed a deal to implement SOMA™ ad server technology into upcoming mobile games from FISHLABS. The first title to be ad-supported by SOMA™ will be the hotly anticipated successor of the multiple top award-winning 3D space shooter Galaxy on Fire™.
Galaxy on Fire™ 2 will be launched in late autumn as unlockable trial version free to download through www.fishlabs.net and viral channels in the internet as well. Gamers can play the game for free for some hours and purchase it later on when they want to move to higher levels in the game. This way, gamers can access the game without any download or traffic fees from the carriers and only pay for the game if they are truly satisfied with it. In some territories even the whole game will be ad-supported and completely free to play.
FISHLABS CEO & Co-Founder Michael Schade explains: ”Thanks to the outstanding quality of FISHLABS mobile games portfolio and the success of popular shareware sites in the internet and on mobile we have a huge fan base of several million mobile gamers worldwide. Fully integrated ads are the best way to monetize from free trial versions without bothering users with complicated billing methods or copy protection. The SOMA™ ad server technology delivers us the perfect tool to integrate ads seamlessly into our games and Smaato brings the service to sell our ad inventory through their ad sales network partners on top of that.”
”Major consumer brands are keen to market their products on mobile phones, especially in a premium environment,“ stated Harald Neidhardt, CMO & Co-Founder of Smaato. “However, the challenge is to find the right content that makes it onto the consumers’ phones. This why we are very excited about FISHLABS joining the Smaato network with their premium mobile games. The popularity and the extraordinary longevity of FISHLABS mobile games make them the perfect vehicle to bring mobile ads to a vast number of users globally and generate several million ad impressions per month.”
San Francisco, CA – September 03, 2008 – Smaato Inc., a pioneering provider for in-application mobile advertising solutions announces the Smaato Mobile Advertising Award 2008. Smaato teamed up with Vator.tv, a social network for technology start-up companies, to search for the coolest ad-enabled mobile application. More information is provided at www.smaato.com/award.
Smaato will invite the winner to participate at the Mobile World Congress, taking place in Barcelona, Spain in February 2009. This event is the world’s largest mobile conference and exhibition and gives the winning company the chance to present his application to the mobile community. In addition the winner will be introduced to 4 VC’s on partner level.
The Smaato Award features a world-class jury of leading influencers of the mobile community: Adam Zawel (INmobile.org), Bambi Francisco (vator.tv), Bena Roberts (GoMoNews), Caroline Lewko (WIP), Giselle Abramovich (Mobile Marketer), Jim Cook (MobiAdNews), Lubna Dajani (Mobile Monday, NYC), Mark Wächter (Mobile Monday, Germany & BVDW), Michael J. O’Farrell (dotMobi MAG), Ragnar Kruse (Smaato Inc.). The jury will look at: unique approach, traction in the market, idea, originality, company positioning and branding to name a few.
The award is addressed to mobile developers with an outstanding mobile ad-enabled solution either inapp or mobile web app/widget. Developers shall provide a video pitch of about 1 min 30 sec. and upload it to the award section at vator.tv (http://www.vator.tv/competition/show/smaato-inmobile-andvatortv).
In addition they may provide up to 3 PDF pages of screenshots and supporting materials.
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.”
