Founder and CEO of mobile ad network giant, InMobi, Naveen Tewari, has come a long way. Naveen is an engineer by training, studied at Harvard Business School, and worked at consulting firm Mckenzie. In between all that, Naveen also had some experience working in startups while he was in Silicon Valley.

Entrepreneurs being entrepreneurs, Naveen was very fascinated with the rapidly changing mobile internet. He wanted to build something which he could call his own. Naveen and his team started to dabble and among their first few projects was a VOIP application and also a chat application. But it was too early for the market back then. So the team started to question, “What are the things that could work? Maybe there’s a play for us if we were to build a fundamental service?”

These fundamental services range from mobile e-payments to advertising platforms. Therefore, with more interest in the advertising side of the business, mKhoj was founded in 2007. The name was later rebranded to InMobi to suit the international audience better.

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Fewer than 150 start-ups are promoted by venture capital or angel investors annually in India compared to over 60,000 angel investments in the US. In 2011, Indian angels, constrained by regulations that make both investing and exits cumbersome, invested only about Rs.100 crore in around 50 deals compared withRs.2,000 crore angels invested in Canada.

These figures don’t surprise Indian product software start-ups. India has produced few of the world’s leading software products, has 3,400 software product start-ups, and adds 400 every year. But it needs the right environment and incentives to build a world-leading industry.

For several decades, the Indian ownership laws and the investment and business environment have not allowed a conducive setting for the brightest of minds, many of whom have migrated to California. The new Indian entrepreneurs spend significant time on product development to build patentable products with a global market. However, as soon as the product gains traction, venture investors and professionals advise entrepreneurs to move the holding structure, if not the entire business, outside India.

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“In the last two years, mobile advertising has started to take advantage of the real innovation that is happening on mobile with the hardware and operating system,” Satija says. “People talk about rich media but rich media on mobile is five to 10 times richer than rich media on PC.”

Satija says smartphones are equipped with sensors such as cameras, accelerometers (to measure movement and vibration) and gyroscopes (to measure direction), microphones and speaker phones and these could all be used in creative ways in advertising. For example, a mobile advertising campaign for diet products maker Slim-Fast involved consumers shaking their phones to explore the seven new Slim-Fast flavours, with the option of going deeper to look at nutritional information for each flavour. InMobi reports that the ad engagement level was twice the industry standard. The average user went three pages deep, while Slim-Fast gained insight into consumers’ top three flavour preferences. Developers usually create native apps for the main smartphone operating systems, but Satija says there is no need in mobile advertising because HTML 5 works “brilliantly” for this purpose. InMobi has an authoring tool for agencies and marketers and has recently signed a deal to offer this to News Ltd clients. Satija says many mobile ads are for the purpose of direct response rather than brand building and app downloads are the main call to action.

That will include so-called Android app stores that run on “forked” versions of the platform that get loaded on to phones particularly in markets like China; as well as GetJar, Mobango, Slide Me, among others. Collectively, these app stores claim to drive billions of downloads per year and reach millions of Android users.

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Four campaigns made by InMobi’s stellar Creative Services team in Singapore made it through as finalists across a number of categories, totalling ten nominations. The campaigns nominated were: Unilever Dove Hairfall with Mindshare, Singtel MioTV with MEC, Samsung Galaxy Camera Reborn with Starcom, and Starhub TV Anywhere with Mindshare.

InMobi won awards in Best Mobile Ad Solution, Best In-App Advertising, Best Direct Response, Original Mobile Content and Use of Mobile Channels: in the In-App Advertising category we were in both the silver and bronze spots – a testament to the great creative work of our Singapore team. Phalgun Raju, Vice President & General Manager of the India, Southeast Asia, Hong Kong and Taiwan region indicated, “These multiple awards in multiple categories is a huge win for our Singapore team and testament to our creative services team and capabilities using the InMobi Sprout technology. Our ability to deliver award-winning, high quality rich media through Sprout is a huge differentiator for us.”

Impressively our wins were more on the app side rather than ad side, meaning that we won across a number of categories in which an app would usually take the gold. We also took home the most awards for any single non-agency vendor!

Overall a great achievement for InMobi as a whole and the Creative Services team in particular. Well done folks.

Yet if you walk to the exit of that hotel and reject the option of an expensive limousine, or of hailing a bashed-up street taxi, and instead press “Book now” on your phone screen, another Indian tech scene appears. The application links a network of taxis using satellite positioning, cheap Chinese-made smartphones, souped-up Google maps and credit cards. A 6km (4-mile) drive north in a modern car will deliver you to a snack shop, above which is the firm that runs the system. Olacabs was set up in 2010. Its co-founder, Bhavish Aggarwal, is a 26-year-old engineer who has worked for Microsoft in Seattle. He has raised a slug of venture capital, some of it American, and says business is growing at 30% a month. “When you start you are viewed as a fool,” he says. “But if you are worried about that, you’re in the wrong line of work.” His goal is to transform transport in India’s congested cities.

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　　作为移动互联网上首批尝试APP杂志的媒体，YOKA移动传媒一直致力于帮助人们通过手机享受更好、更多的数字世界体验。其率先提出的“时尚意见领袖个人APP杂志出版平台”在APP报刊杂志应用类软件中一直占据优势地位。更是引入了美妆教父李东田，美容专家尼可、小新及各路明星打造了个人杂志，第一时间给予了软件使用者最为权威的信息。

　　非常值得一提的是，作为移动互联网时代的新媒体，APP杂志在延续了纸质媒体优质内容的同时，加入新媒体更为优势的交互性，使得阅读更有趣味性和交流性。其中最为明显地是在《YOKA美容》这类时尚类APP杂志中，读者能做到跟美容专家的即时交流，使得传播更为有针对性。此次YOKA移动和InMobi的合作，毫无疑问让这种有针对性的传播更具商业价值。

　　这次YOKA移动和InMobi和合作，让读者和品牌客户达到了双赢，定制化内容与精准广告投放，让用户获得的信息更加立体，更加多元。也让客户的广告信息直接传送给中国最有价值的白领用户！

　　关于InMobi

　　InMobi是一家创新型移动互联网公司，始创于2007年，现有员工超过800人,平台汇聚全球知名广告主与媒体以及运营商,致力于为全球客户提供优质服务。Inmobi创建了全球领先的技术平台，在数据传输，用户行为以及云架构方面让移动广告运行更加准确流畅，广告主和代理商可以利用其平台将产品展现给全球165个国家将近6亿用户。应用开发者与运营商可以利用其平台更好的将全球流量变现。Inmobi获得来自软银，KPCB和 Sherpalo Ventures的融资，在过去的5年中发展迅猛。

　　关于YOKA移动

　　YOKA品牌秉承“态度创造时尚”的品牌精髓，已经由中国第一个时尚垂直门户网站发展为包括YOKA时尚网、 YOKA男士网、 YOKA 移动、 YMALL商城多位一体的时尚新媒体平台。 YOKA移动, 是专为时尚前沿的活跃分子、高端人士提供的移动平台，全国APP免费开发商中，YOKA移动处于ios 领域国内业界领先地位。YOKA移动,旨在服务精英阶层、热爱时尚的高端消费人群,网罗时尚集团旗下众多热销的精品杂志，同时推出了自己的一系列原创品牌， 并立足打造 “中国时尚领袖个人移动出版平台” ， 汇聚中国时尚界核心力量， 提高领导力和影响力， 创造移动互联网的时尚领导力， 现已拥有115款APP, 有多款软件在iTunes 免费总榜突破前五。

“[The] Galaxy S IV launch is fantastic news for the mobile advertising industry,” said Crid Yu, VP & General Manager, InMobi, North America “The continued innovation that we are seeing enter the market will further strengthen the positioning of the smartphone as the number one media device.”

“If your mobile marketing strategy is as shallow as ‘We need an app,’ then having a large variety of smartphones and multiple versions of Android out in the world make reaching your audience consistently a challenge,” said John Haro, chief technology officer at Vibes. “This fragmentation does not really impact direct marketing through text or mobile display advertising in any substantive way. However, the continuing growth of the smartphone share of all phones is positive for marketers because they have a rich and powerful platform to build compelling experiences to drive their customers to post-click.”

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Whether it’s pre-roll or branded content, the development raises questions of how this will affect digital video ads. For instance, will the feature annoy consumers and create negative brand engagement?

That’s a distinct possiblity, said Crid Yu, InMobi’s VP and managing director, North America. “It might over time incentivize brands to create more relevant ads and more valuable video content,” he said.

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Des 5 milliards de téléphones mobiles utilisés dans le monde, 1 milliard sont des smartphones. D’après l’agence spécialiste dans l’étude marketing sur mobiles InMobi, près de 10 milliards de mobiles mobiliseront nos mains d’ici à 2016. Et combien d’applications, ces indispensables “programmes gratuits ou non, téléchargeables et exécutables à partir du système d’exploitation du téléphone” sans lesquels un smartphone n’en serait pas un ?

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