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.” (more…)

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.”