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Photo courtesy of clipart.com
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PALO ALTO, Calif. – Mobile advertising company InMobi has found good success in India, but now the company is increasingly turning its efforts toward the United States, seeing it as the market from which much of the world's mobile Web content comes.
The Bangalore-based company provides a mobile ad network that helps its customers collect ad revenue through the traffic to their mobile Web sites. It's a game that has been proven successful by giants such as Google and InMobi has spread through India providing such services.
Founded in 2007 by Naveen Tewari, Abhay Singhal, Amit K. Gupta and Mohit Saxena in Mumbai, the company provides services in 25 countries and works with businesses such as Reebok, Nokia, Peperonity, Samsung, Yamaha and Friendster.
Originally backed with seed funding from Indian investors, such as Mumbai Angels, the company is now fueled by U.S. firms. It raised $7.1 million in April 2008, led by Kleiner Perkins, Caufield & Byers and Sherpalo Ventures.
According to InMobi, its network has over 3 billion ad impressions a month and the company is pulling in approximately $1 million in revenue per month. Its numbers also suggest that the company works with more than 700 publishers of mobile Web content.
Out of India, InMobi has made a living focusing on the local market, but also markets in Bangladesh, Indonesia and South Africa.
As Anne Frisbie, InMobi's head of North America, points out what the company really does for its customers is help them generate local advertising dollars for mobile sites that provide global content.
Which is why, for example, InMobi was able to sign a deal in August with a German-based Web 2.0 platform peperonity.com, which has 10 million users. According to the social networking site, which features site building, blogging, chat, photo albums and video, it is among the top-five mobile sites in South Africa and Indonesia and ranks with Facebook and YouTube worldwide.
Just last month, InMobi began working with MocoSpace, a Boston-based mobile social network that has over 6 million registered users and over 1 billion page views. InMobi will push MocoSpace's mobile content across 10 countries in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Europe.
"We selected InMobi as our first choice for an ad network in these international markets because their focus provides a better overall user experience and increases our revenue," Justin Siegel, chief executive officer of MocoSpace, said in a statement about the agreement with InMobi. "InMobi's new data infrastructure offers outstanding ad response times that have exceeded our expectations and set a new bar."
InMobi hopes MocoSpace is just the start of increased business from U.S.-based publishers of mobile Web content.
"U.S. publishers have large audiences in markets around the world, but they don't have a sales team that can generate revenue for their audiences abroad," said Frisbie, who works out of InMobi's U.S. headquarters in Palo Alto. "We can help publishers here by generating more revenue for them."
As Frisbie explains it, the mobile content may be global but the ads need to be relevant to the local market and InMobi insures that happens.
With most of InMobi's competition based out of the United State, the company feels it has a leg up because of its international presence. "I think people really are looking for strong international partners," said Frisbie. "The businesses in the U.S. know their business is becoming more international, but they need international partners to help them."
As an example of the perfect U.S. client, Frisbie creates the scenario of U.S.-based mobile Web site that launches and then discovers that 30 percent of their viewers are in Asia. According to Frisbie, the first question that company is going to ask is "How do I make money from those viewers?" InMobi is the answer, she said.
InMobi anticipates that a large percentage of its future revenue is going to come to the United States, which is why the company, which also has offices in Mumbai and Singapore, decided to open an office in Silicon Valley at the start of the year.
"The U.S. is a very large market and has a lot of key advertisers and publishers," Frisbie said. "We see an increasing importance in our company doing business in the U.S."
InMobi's leaders are no stranger to the U.S. market as many of them worked and lived in the United States before returning to India to start the company. Frisbie said they had no doubts that they could start the company from India and still have it be a global market. The company also has strong U.S. guidance from board member and investor Ram Shriram, founder of Sherpalo Ventures and former Amazon.com executive, as well as a founding board member of Google.
At the same time as InMobi is high on its U.S. business, the company continues to be excited by the growing mobile content consumption patterns in India.
In September, it released the results of a survey of Indian college-aged consumers that found that 57 percent of respondents browse the Internet on their mobile phones and close to one-third of them engage with the brands that advertise. This engagement is described by the survey as visiting the ad's Web site (72.5 percent), calling the company (10 percent) or buying the product (17.5 percent).
The survey, which was conducted at an Indian Institutes of Technology School of Management, stated that results show that college-aged consumers are equally interested in almost all genres of mobile advertising, as long as the advertisements have something significant to offer and do not interfere with the mobile browsing experience. Welcome ads isolated by respondents include free coupons, free mobile games with embedded unobtrusive ads, money transfer services, free humorous clips and Bluetooth-based "alerts" for items on sale nearby.
With reports suggesting India is adding as many as 12 million mobile subscribers per month, InMobi's excitement about the growing demand for its services is not a hard argument to swallow, as the company emphasizes.
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