Congratulations DialPlus!

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.

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.

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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.

Deadline: November 21, 2008.

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.”

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…)

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”.

SOMA Mobile Advertising Platform Opens Up New Revenue Streams For Developers Of J2ME Polish - The De-Facto Standard Toolkit for Mobile Java

San Mateo, CA / Barcelona, Spain, February 7, 2008 — Smaato Inc. and Enough Software have joined forces to bring new revenue streams to mobile developers by embedding advertisements into mobile applications.

Smaato’s mobile advertising solution can be integrated into any mobile application and is now bundled with J2ME Polish – the mobile application development platform for JAVA by Enough Software. 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 licensed by Nokia, Motorola, Mozilla and others.
The new strategic alliance allows J2ME Polish developers to enrich their mobile applications automatically with advertising, without the need to change the source code of their applications. For selected applications J2ME Polish licenses are even provided for free, when advertisements revenues are shared.

Smaato’s open mobile advertising platform SOMA™ delivers advertising across all leading mobile operating systems, including JAVA, Symbian, Windows Mobile and Palm OS, as well as on mobile web pages. Smaato is partnering with ad-sales networks worldwide to provide access to mobile inventory on the most personal device with enhanced targeting features for relevant advertising.

“Thanks to Smaato’s innovative and open mobile advertising platform we can offer our developer community new revenue streams”, explained Robert Virkus, CEO of Enough Software.

“We are thrilled to extend our reach to the worldwide J2ME Polish developer community with this partnership”, said Ragnar Kruse, CEO of Smaato. “In-Application advertising allows developers to extend their reach and launch ad-enabled business models. This is a further step to broaden the reach of our open mobile ecosystem”.

Smaato at Mobile World Congress in Hall 2, booth 2B104

Enough Software at Mobile World Congress Hall 7, booth 7A43

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About Smaato Inc.

Smaato Inc. is a leading mobile advertising technology company that provides the open mobile advertising platform called SOMA (Smaato Open Mobile Advertising) for developers, publishers, ad sales networks and operators. The SOMA platform enables the delivery of targeted display advertising to mobile phones within applications and on mobile sites. SOMA’s unique feature is the SOMA client, which is a mobile ad server on the handset that optimizes the process of ad-enabling applications for mobile software developers. SOMA can be easily integrated with 3rd party ad sales networks, ad inventory owners (developers, publishers, operators) and ad technology providers. Smaato is an active member of the Mobile Marketing Association, the dot.mobi Advisory Group and the German digital media association BVDW. Smaato received a Top 100 Private Company award by AlwaysOn Media (US) in January of 2007. Smaato Inc. is based in San Mateo, California. The privately held company was founded in 2005 by an experienced international management team. The European headquarter is in Hamburg, Germany.

About J2ME Polish – Enough Software

Enough Software is the company behind J2ME Polish. This development solution overcomes the device fragmentation barrier and provides design, customization, persistence and rapid development features for Java ME developers. Using J2ME Polish developers can target all Java ME, Windows Mobile, Android, iPhone and BlackBerry devices. With a highly active community, more than 600,000 downloads and a book published by Apress, J2ME Polish is the de-facto standard for mobile developers worldwide. Learn more about J2ME Polish at www.j2mepolish.org.

The Service Provider Forum of the Telecom Council of Silicon Valley’s Zephyr Award for Best Mobile Opportunity

San Mateo, California - February 7, 2008 – Smaato, a pioneering provider of mobile advertising platform technology announced that it has been nominated for a SPIFFY Award - The Zephyr Award for Best Mobile Opportunity.

These awards are given by the Service Provider Innovation Forum
(SPIF) of the Telecom Council of Silicon Valley to recognize and acknowledge outstanding innovation and execution by Telecom entrepreneurs. By their nomination, this global set of Operators and Service Providers including AT&T, British Telecom, NTT DoCoMo, Orange, Swisscom, Vodafone and many others, have indicated to the rest of the Telecom industry that Smaato is a company to watch.
The Service Provider Forum Annual Networking and Recognition Event with the award ceremony will be held Feb. 28th in Palo Alto.

“Our Service Provider members review hundreds of new telecom ideas, products, and services each year, said Liz Kerton, President of The Telecom Council. ”While we saw plenty of mobile advertising startups in the past year, Smaato’s unique approach of an Open Mobile Ecosystem with their Mobile Advertising Platform stood out and got them nominated.”

The SPIF exists so that colleagues with similar goals and duties can gather and share ideas, contacts, opportunities, and knowledge. The member carriers have telecom operations across the globe, but usually have an office in the San Francisco Bay Area to pursue investment, technology, and partnership opportunities. At each meeting, a few interesting young companies present who are seeking funding, strategic investment or have a product or service that would be useful to the carriers. The Telecom Council of Silicon Valley and the Service Provider Forum (SPIF) are online at http://www.telecomcouncil.com.

Smaato’s open mobile advertising platform SOMA™ gets increased demand from ad-sales networks, developers and mobile operators. Smaato delivers groundbreaking ways to connect new generation software applications for mobile devices with targeted advertising. The latest version of the mobile ad-server platform SOMA™ (Smaato Open Mobile Advertising) supports full mobile Web and WAP advertising delivery.

The SOMA™ open architecture platform delivers advertising across all leading mobile operating systems, including JAVA, Symbian, Windows Mobile and Palm OS, as well as on mobile web pages. Smaato is partnering with ad-sales networks worldwide to provide access to mobile inventory on the most personal device with enhanced targeting features for relevant advertising. Partners include: Adconion Media Group and leading US-mobile ad-sales network Third Screen Media (now part of AOL’s Advertising.com business unit).

Smaato will be exhibiting at the upcoming Mobile World Congress
(3GSM) in Barcelona, Spain, February 11 - 14 in Hall 2 at booth 2B104.

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