Advertising Delivery Support for Java Phones, Smartphones & Mobile Web;
Launch of New Version of SOMA Mobile Advertising Platform
CTIA – San Francisco Moscone Center, Booth # 108, October 23 – 25, 2007

CTIA/San Francisco/San Mateo, October 22, 2007 – Smaato Inc., pioneering developer of ad-enabling technology for mobile phones, will be presenting three major new feature extensions and new mobile advertising concepts for the Smaato Open Mobile Advertising platform (SOMA™) at this year’s CTIA Wireless I.T. & Entertainment convention.

– SOMA™ Enabled Carrier Solutions: Smaato Ad Call Display™
– In-Application Mobile Advertising for Java – including Facebook
– SOMA™ 2.1 Featuring Mobile Advertising for Mobile Internet

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 Smartphone Summit Presents ‘Smartphone Enterprise Solutions 2007′ San Francisco  - An exclusive conference event beginning October 22, 2007 with CTIA WIRELESS I.T. & Entertainment, dedicated to bringing you the top Smartphone based Enterprise Solutions from all Smartphone O/S platforms including Symbian, Microsoft, Palm, Linux, and beyond. The focused attendee demographic includes enterprise executives as well as wireless developers and I.T. professionals. 

Harald Neidhardt, CMO & Co-Founder of Smaato Inc. has been selected to present the SOMA Mobile Ad-Server platform together with industry peers at this leading conference. The Session Details:

Mobile Commerce - Payment & Marketing Solutions for Smartphone Devices

The smartphone platform lends itself to sophisticated on the go applications including the ability to shop for goods and services, along with processing mobile payments of any type, and displaying dynamic cutting edge mobile advertising. Join experts in these fields to explore commerce solutions that can help you engage in the next level of global commerce - wireless.

· Handmark - Douglas Edwards - Co-founder and CMO

· Smaato Inc. - Harald Neidhardt - CMO, Co-Founder

· Neo Media Technologies - William J. Hoffman - CEO

Smaato announces the launch of the AlwaysOn Reader – a new mobile RSS News Reader based on Smaato’s open mobile advertising platform SOMA.
AlwaysOn launched the new service at this week’s Stanford Summit.

AlwaysOn Reader: The latest news on your Smartphone. AlwaysOn Mobile is a free application for smartphones which allows to read RSS feeds while on the go. Stay connected with your favorite blogs, news sources and other personal feeds. The AlwaysOn Reader features default channels like CNN.com, CNET News and USAToday – and of course the AlwaysOn RSS feed. Users may add further RSS feeds to the set to personalize the information experience. The AlwaysOn Reader can be used offline – so users can download a fresh set of news before hopping on the airplane.

Smartphone & Pocket PC Magazine featured two SOMA enabled applications today in its weekly newsletter. iambic’s TopStory and Smaato Cost are presented and readers are provided info to download and invited to comment. Both smartphone apps for Windows Mobile are free to downlad, because they are ad-enabled by SOMA - the Smaato Open Mobile Advertising platform.

 Milwaukee, WI July 19, 2007 - Developer ONE today released their new RSS news reader product “News Mix” and announced their support for SOMA - the Smaato mobile ad serving platform.

Developer One is a leading Windows Mobile software developer with several award winning applications, including lead product AgendaOne. In 2005 Developer One has been named developer of the year by Handango.com.

NewsMix has been released today and can be downloaded for free at the Developer One website at: www.developerone.com. It comes with several pre-configured news channels and can be easily customized with personal news feeds. Versions of NewsMix are available fr Windows Mobile 4 (Pocket PC and Smartphone Edition) as well as Windows Mobile 6 devices.

 Red Herring (www.redherring.com) published a cover story about mobile advertising in its digital edition today. UK-based editor Peter Purton gives a great overview about the players and the current trends in mobile advertsing globally:

“Mobile advertising and marketing using the cell phone to sell is quietly turning into a global phenomenon. While web advertising has been getting all the attention, mobile advertising has grown up in the background, attracting the attention of tens of millions of people. […]

The prospect of getting this unprecedented level of access to cash-wielding consumers has lots of companies excited from global automotive brands like Toyota, BMW, Ford, and Peugeot, to consumer players like Coca-Cola, Proctor & Gamble, and Johnson & Johnson, to media groups like Warner Brothers, not to mention companies from the telecommunications, computing, and Internet worlds.”

Peter goes on and features several leaders in mobile advertsing, including Advertising.com’s newly acquired Third Screen Media, Screentonic, other players like Vodafone as well as Smaato.
“… San Mateo, California-based mobile advertising platform maker Smaato helps produce advertising revenue for off-deck services by allowing developers of mobile services to integrate ads with their content. Harald Neidhardt, Smaato’s chief marketing officer, agrees that carriers have a substantial advantage. But they won’t always, he says.

The carrier deck may be prime real estate, he adds, but you can’t put everything on the carrier deck. Mr. Neidhardt compares the situation to the days when AOL and Prodigy had all the content. They wanted to keep people within their walls but what the web people wanted to use was a thousand times bigger. And that is where they ended up going.

The lesson of that era leaves no doubt in his mind about where things are headed: “the off-deck market will explode”, he says. …

 Smaato is proud to announce that it has joined the dot.mobi advisory group chaired by Michael O’ Farrell and is active in the mobile advertising task force led by Eric Eller.

The Mobile Advertising Task Force is currently collaborating on a white paper that will address some of the frequently asked questions of mobile advertising and together are working to form the MAG perspective on the subject. This paper will look at identifying the product, policy and commercialization opportunities that mobile advertising has for the market using the .mobi domain.

Smaato CMO Harald Neidhardt has been selected as one of the co-editors for the white paper supporting Eric Eller (Millennial Media, USA) in his publishing task.

“Smaato welcomes the .mobi domain initiative and is proud to be an active member of the .mobi advisory group. We have identified that truly mobile landing pages are still a missing link in providing a engaging mobile user experience for brands and marketers.
We promote .mobi domains as a trusted initiative to accelerate the growth of the mobile economy even further. Being at the leading edge of the mobile advertising market - especially for smartphones - we see .mobi progressing on a daily basis,” stated Harald Neidhardt, CMO Smaato Inc.

In addition to its .mobi support and its membership in the US and European MMA (Mobile Marketing Association) and the German BVDW (German digital media association) Smaato is committed to help the mobile advertising community with its support of global advertising standards.

Update July 25, 2007: Harald has been elected Vice Chair of the dot.mobi MAG task force on mobile advertising.

 Erika Brown, from the Silicon Valley Bureau of Forbes Magazine published a great story on the recent Innovate Europe event and the Venture Capital and entrepreneur scene in Europe.

Smaato was mentioned in her report “Everything ventured“:

” … In addition to a handful of location-based services, Smaato was one of the interesting mobile businesses. The company, dual-based in Hamburg and San Mateo, Calif., offers a way for small companies that make cellphone software to make money from selling ads that appear as banners at the top of a screen. Co-founder Harald Neidhardt says he thinks mobile-phone advertising has the potential to reach $1.5 billion. “There are more smartphones sold than PCs or laptops, and there are more than 50,000 application developers for those devices,” he says. …”

SVASE Announces Most Promising Demonstrators of Launch: Silicon Valley 2007

Smaato, d.light design, Data Robotics, Eyejot, Jaxtr, Nuvora and LogSavvy are selected by Attendees from 29 Companies vying for distinctions

The Silicon Valley Association of Startup Entrepreneurs (SVASE) announced June 6th the Most Likely to Succeed at Launch: Silicon Valley 2007, the recently completed event for emerging technology companies.To culminate the June 5 event, held at the Microsoft Campus here, audience-judged awards were presented for best-in-class to companies in each of the six presenting categories. The companies singled out by the audience in each of the categories included:

1· Application Services : LogSavvy http://www.logsavvy.com
2· Business (Group I): Data Robotics http://www.datarobotics.com
3· Business (Group II): Smaato http://www.smaato.com
4· Digital Media: Eyejot http://www.eyejot.com
5· Energy: d.light design http://www.dlightdesign.com
6· Next Generation Internet: Jaxtr http://www.jaxtr.com
7· Life Sciences: Nuvora http://www.nuvorainc.com

“We are extremely pleased to pave the way for some excellent new companies and products entering the marketplace. Although we had to narrow down our salutations to just a few, there was tremendous talent as well as enthusiasm for the entrepreneurial spirit unearthed at this event,” said Chris Gill, President and CEO of SVASE.

More than 160 companies from across the globe applied for presentation spots at Launch: Silicon Valley and were narrowed down to 29 presenters by the event’s prestigious board of venture advisors. Each presenting company made a 10-minute onstage presentations to a voting audience of 300-plus in attendance at yesterday’s event.

The advisory board for Launch: Silicon Valley 2007 included Bill Reichert, Managing Director, Garage Technology Ventures; Allan May, Founder & Chairman, Life Science Angels; Warren Packard, Managing Director, Draper Fisher Jurvetson; Ian Sobieski, Managing Director, Band of Angels; John Occhipinti, Managing Director, Woodside Fund, and Nancy Pfund, Managing Director, Bay Area Equity Fund, and JPMorgan.

The event was co-hosted by Garage Technology Ventures, and was joined by a number of high-profile sponsors.

 San MATEO / MUNICH, GERMANY - May 9, 2007  Smaato Inc., pioneering provider for in-application mobile advertising solutions, and Adconion Media Group, the largest independent digital advertising network, announced a strategic partnership to deliver a new and innovative mobile advertising product for the European markets.

Smaato is rapidly building a network of partners and promoters of its Open Mobile Advertising Platform SOMA. Just recently, Smaato announced its partnership with Third Screen Media in the US and now looks to Adconion Media Group as its partner in Europe.

The announcement was made during Innovate! Europe 2007, a leadership conference for Innovation and Technology at Zaragoza, Spain today where Smaato CMO & Co-founder Harald Neidhardt was invited to present Smaato to the audience.

Adconion Media Group has a broad reach given its global network of publishers, advertisers and agencies. Adconion will steer its ad-sales initiatives towards the new mobile advertising opportunity through SOMA to promote new, effective and highly targeted mobile ads. Adconion, headquartered in Munich and active worldwide, will sell, manage and deliver advertising for SOMA  (Smaato’s Open Mobile Advertising Platform) and its turnkey in-application advertising solution to agencies and brands in Europe.

“Smaato’s SOMA platform combines targeting, optimization and a highly attractive target group. Through our partnership with Smaato we are able to extend our behavioral targeting products to mobile, providing our agencies and advertisers the ability to target the same user on their computer and their smartphone. We are thrilled to connect with Smaato’s innovative spirit and technology”, says T. Tyler Moebius, CEO of Adconion Media Group

“With Adconion, we have won one of the largest digital advertising networks as our partner. This partnership significantly enhances our reach for in-application mobile advertising and enables us to inspire more brands for mobile advertising”, comments Ragnar Kruse, co-founder and CEO Smaato Inc.

The first applications coming to market with partly European ad-inventory supported by SOMA are Red Herring Mobile (http://www.redherring.com), iambic TopStory (http://www.iambic.com), SplashNews (www.splashdata.com) and Smaato News - all available for Palm OS and Windows Mobile devices.

This was picked up by Fierce Mobile Content here.