Ideas|Products|Startups|VCs

StratosHear, a leading mobile media company, yesterday announced the launch of MobiAdz, its premium mobile advertisingnetwork. With MobiAdz, StratosHear has expanded its mobile advertising offerings from rich audio advertising to include mobile Internet ad formats—such as banner, video and text—and has emerged as the one-stop solution for all advertisers embracing the mobile medium.

StratosHear has deep experience working with leading telecom operators to ad-enable their subscriber base through its multi-channel, telco-grade ad platform. StratosHear has worked with top global and national brands to deliver excellent brand campaign results with its AdRBT product that delivers radio-style ad placement on caller tunes.

The company has leveraged this experience in designing MobiAdz from the ground up. Furthermore, they have incorporated artificial intelligence—or self-learning—into the proprietary algorithms that power MobiAdz and that are used to ensure optimal ad targeting and strong campaign results. As such, the MobiAdz engine goes beyond the traditional ad networkapproach to deliver advanced campaign optimization techniques for its publisher and advertiser partners.

MobiAdz has received an incredible reception from the marketplace. Over 100 publishers across various verticals have registered with MobiAdz, which is now serving tens of millions of ad impressions per month across 200 countries.

MobiAdz uniquely positioned to offer the broadest set of mobile advertising solutions that can reach the breadth of mobile consumers, from the entry level handset to the highest end smart phone user, and from a rural village in India to anywhere in the world.”

Publishers too will benefit from StratosHear’s launch of MobiAdz. The company’s approach of having a strong media sales team in-house to reach the broadest set of advertisers for both brand and performance campaigns, will help publishers to more effectively monetize their inventory.

The idea of most consumers having their mobile device with them at all times coupled with the emerging technologies being built into today’s devices, bring a wealth of opportunity to marketers. With MobiAdz, advertisers are able to fine-tune their campaigns based on their needs and to measure performance based on metrics and real-time reporting. The ultimate result? More effective campaigns and a stronger return on investment.

Direct Competitors – AdMob (bought by Google) and Inmobi (backed by Sherpalo ventures and KPCB)

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

Inmobi has raised $8m venture capital from existing VCs – KPCB and Sherpalo Ventures. Inmobi is a bangalore based mobile Ad network which serves nearly 17billion ad impression per month globally.

InMobi offers advertisers, developers, and publishers a dependable global mobile advertising platform other InMobi has invested in building a highly scalable, mobile customer discovery ad network leveraging its unique analytics engine AdROItTM to optimize ad serving in real time.

Interestingly there was a strong buzz in the market that Yahoo and Apple had shown interest in acquiring inmobi but it didnt materialize.

Inmobi was founded in 2007 by Naveen Tiwari, Amit Gupta and Abhay Singhal

Last year they had rebranded itself to inmobi from mKhoj, check out here.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

Vuclip, a mobile video search and delivery start up based out of Bay area and having an engineering center in India raised $6m USD from JAFCO Ventures. Vuclip allows user to access any video on the Internet and watch it on any video-enabled phone.

Vuclip users can also take advantage of numerous personalized services, like creating “Cliplists”, receiving alerts about new videos and sharing their favorite videos with friends.

Vuclip has a significant presence in India, providing video search  to Bharti Airtel, Idea Cellular, Vodafone, Aircel and Tata Indicom. Vuclip also enables online publishers and content owners to mobilize their video content through its API Program and have partnered with Inmobi.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

Leading mobile Ad network mKhoj rebrands itself as InMobi, This rebranding exercise has been primarily done to attract and target the European, US, Australian and South African market. mKhoj has significant market share in Asian and African countries and with this new name they aim to become a leading global player in this space.

mKhoj which is a Hindi version of mobile search was relatively tough to pronounce and adapt in the western countries and with InMobi without any doubt sounds very cool and happening. Interestingly mKhoj has come a long way, initially it started as local deal search engine and later transformed itself into an Ad network.

mKhoj founded by Naveen Tewari, a Harvand graduate and few Andale veterans have raised capital totalling $8mn from Angel investors and from esteemed VC’s – KPCB & Sherpalo ventures.

At present they cater close to 2billion/month mobile Ad impression. InMobi has offices in US, Singapore and Engineering Center in India.

Good luck to this Indian start up which is head on with global Ad networks.

- Hitesh, vcBytes.com