Archive for November, 2008

Smaato announces VC partners for Mobile Advertising Award - Tim Draper will join Award Jury

Friday, November 14th, 2008

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.

London loves Smaato - Smaato loves London

Thursday, November 6th, 2008

London has been a hot spot for mobile this year and the show goes on. Smaato will go to the vivid FOM Future of Mobile conference on the 17th and 18th of November at Kensington Townhall.

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.

Smaato loves London - did we say that?

Zedge selects Smaato for Mobile Advertising Partnership

Monday, November 3rd, 2008


 

 

 

 

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”.