The eighth annual AlwaysOn Global 250 top  private companies have been announced. The AlwaysOn Global 250 represent the top emerging companies in the Global Silicon Valley that are demonstrating significant market traction and pursuing game-changing technologies in on-demand computing, digital media, and greentech.

Click here to read the official announcement and the list of the 250 companies.

David Murphy talks to CEO Naveen Tewari about the mobile ad network’s rapid growth and global expansion. Naveen believes the key reason for success has been InMobi’s relentless focus on the technology platform. He also talks about InMobi’s Mobile Customer Discovery - an smart way for advertisers to discover new audience. Read more about this in the cover story on page 18.

Anne Frisbie is confident that five years from now we’re all going to laugh about the relative simplicity of the mobile advertising marketplace. It is after all, dominated by two huge companies. It is still in the nascent phases of creative development. And global brands are just starting to develop their expertise.

Not that the new VP & Managing Director, North America of InMobi doesn’t take her job seriously. Frisbie is experienced enough to know that there is still plenty of room to compete for mobile advertising in the expanding domestic and global market. Her company claims to be the world’s largest independent mobile ad network, and recently announced its official launch in the US market.  InMobi already maintains 2 billion US ad impressions monthly following its soft launch in January 2010, most of those for global publishers who have a US footprint. In addition to complete operations in India, Africa, and several Euro capitals, she will now position InMobi to compete with Google’s AdMob and iAd, as well as other independents including Millennial Media.

“We’ve worked with global brands, we’ve developed a lot of expertise with global operations and I think we have a clear advantage in terms of global scale,” Frisbie says. “In other global markets we’ve seen Google and Apple as a competitor and we’ve still operated a very strong business.”

In less than six months, InMobi has more than doubled from 7.5 billion to 16.7 billion available impressions monthly across Asia, Africa, North America, and Europe. It’s platform covers display and in-app ads, and will offer US advertisers the ability to reach 179 million consumers in over 108 countries through a single integrated buy.

Frisbie also believes InMobi’s analytics platform will give her and her team a strong competitive position. But mainly that “five years from now” perspective provides her with an understanding that the market is young.

“”Personally I think the US marketers are unprepared for how big the mobile marketplace will be,” she says. “We’re in the very early days and just starting to look at video, display, and search. We’re independent which is a decided advantage and focused on advertising. This will all become bigger than we expect.”

With that in mind InMobi also recently announced a $2 million world developer fund to encourage application developers to use InMobi for in-app advertising. Developers on Android, iPhone and iPad are eligible. Developers who sign up for the program and add InMobi via their SDKs will get a new revenue split. InMobi usually keeps 40% of gross advertising revenue, and 60% goes to the developer. But during this program developers get to keep 100% of the advertising revenue, and InMobi’s 40% comes out from the $2 million.

Frisbie joined InMobi in 2008 as Head of North America. She most recently served as Vice President of Category and Sales Intelligence at Yahoo! where she worked from 2003 to 2008, managing Yahoo’s most important categories that accounted for a majority of the company’s revenue. She has been working in the digital media industry for the past eleven years. She helped found an online shopping service in 1996 that was ultimately funded by CMP Media, and then she focused on local search in 1997 at Zip2 Corporation where she served as a Director of Publisher Development. Zip2 was acquired by AltaVista in 1998.

Yesterday I wrote about InMobi’s bold plan to grab mobile advertising market share while the getting is good. Apple and Google are distracted in an ugly turf war over iPhone/iPad advertising; meanwhile, InMobi, one of the largest international mobile advertising networks and backed with U.S. venture capital, is just starting to make inroads into the U.S. They soft launched in the U.S. earlier this year, and turned things on formally a couple of weeks ago.

Today they’re announcing a $2 million world developer fund to encourage application developers to use InMobi for in-app advertising. Developers on Android, iPhone and iPad are eligible.

Here’s how it works: first come first serve. Sign up for the program and add InMobi via their SDKs. InMobi usually keeps 40% of gross advertising revenue, and 60% goes to the developer. But during this program developers get to keep 100% of the advertising revenue, and InMobi’s 40% comes out from the $2 million. Once that $2 million is gone the normal split applies. See this video for more details.

This clearly encourages big names to sign up because they can grab a chunk of that $2 million fast. Of course total revenue depends on how much InMobi ads are selling for. If developers have feedback on their monetization rates v. AdMob and other ad networks, I’d love to hear it in the comments.

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Mobile advertising network, InMobi, has come a long way since we first covered them in April 2008. Today they are probably the second biggest mobile advertising network in the world, with nearly 17 billion monthly impressions combined on mobile apps and mobile websites. Google’s AdMob has 18 billion impressions/month.

Most of InMobi’s ad impressions are outside of the U.S. The bulk – 10 billion – are in Asia where the company first launched. 2 billion are in the U.S., where the company has had limited operations since January 2010. Africa takes 2.3 billion, Europe 1.6 billion and the Middle East .5 billion. A full U.S. launch took place last week, and a Japan launch is coming soon.

How well will InMobi do in the U.S.? They were bullish before the recent news about Apple taking steps to make it nearly impossible for non-independent advertising networks like AdMob to work on the the iPhone and iPad.

Now, with the market in disarray and the FTC looking into the situation they think they can grab a lot of market share really fast. That’s because they’re hitting the ground running with a self serve platform and a human sales team. Apple’s own iAds is actually going to have to catch up to InMobi in some respects.

InMobi isn’t just some random Asian focused ad network. They’re backed in part by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sherpalo Ventures and revenues, we’ve heard, are in the $35 million range already. The company is targeting $75 million in 2010, say our sources.

Leena Rao rightly points out that while the new rules, if they stand, both help and hurt independent ad networks. They can grab market share but they probably can’t get acquired, for example. But InMobi doesn’t seem too concerned. Who knows how long Apple can keep these rules in place. And there are lots of other mobile platforms out there, particularly the exploding Android ecosystem. And while chaos reigns the smart guys will grab everything they can.

We interviewed InMobi CEO Naveen Tewari last week to talk about his business. Click on the logo to see the full article and the video interview.

Apple’s new iAd platform has brought more attention to mobile advertising, which can only benefit other players in the industry including other mobile OSes, say competing mobile advertising networks.

According to James Lamberti, global vice president of research and marketing of mobile ad network, inMobi, Apple will likely lead the iPhone mobile ad scene, given the weight the company is throwing behind the iAd platform.

However, for app developers to maximize the advertising opportunity in mobile phones, they will have to look across platforms, said Lamberti.

“Developers want to make money and there must be reach. We have that reach where the iPhone does not, through Symbian and Android platforms,” he said, noting that the Android is showing stronger growth than the iPhone.

Emmanuel Allix, inMobi’s Asia-Pacific vice president and managing director, noted that developers see opportunities for mobile advertising to be equal in both global and local markets, where app makers will likely see half of their audience located outside their home countries. The mobile ad network they choose must then have the sales presence to engage vendors away from home, Allix added.

And for developers in the Asia-Pacific region, Lamberti said inMobi is touting itself as the network of choice with some 5 billion impressions a month. “We are able to run a pan-Asian campaign because of our salesforce on the ground,” he said.

Allix noted that the need for developers to include other mobile OSes in their scope is especially important in parts of Asia, such as Indonesia and India, where the iPhone does not have significant market share.

In these countries, Nokia has the largest market share,  he said.

While people are not consuming many apps on Nokia phones, he noted that increasing amounts of data is consumed via mobile browsing so mobile Web ads are “exploding” in the region’s emerging markets.

And the more popular mobile sites accessed are social networks, he added.

Lamberti said most new developers are targeting Apple devices and this has driven ad demand on iPhone apps, followed by Android, Symbian and BlackBerry.

But these developers are mostly from the United States, where the iPhone is enjoying significant market share, he said.

The Asia-Pacific region is not seeing much development work, he noted, although this will grow as smartphone usage increases in the region,  said Lamberti.

According to inMobi, the company serves 7.5 billion impressions worldwide and 5 billion of this is to Asia.

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Naveen, your company began with a strong focus on the Indian market. Can you tell us about the basic structure of that market?
In fact there are 2 distinct sets of users in the Indian market.
The first segment uses the mobile as a “snacking device”. They have other ways to access the internet at home or work, and the phone is a secondary means.
The second segment is the one that I think is more important. These are people whose first access to the internet is through mobile. The mobile is not the “third screen” for them, it is the only screen. This second segment is actually more exciting because it is really huge, and will grow significantly over the coming 2 to 3 years.

What factors do you see effecting growth of the Indian market?
A couple things have to happen over the next couple of years. First of all, more local mobile content needs to be developed and published. Most of the mobile content distributed today is primarily global. We have local entertainment content over mobile, but it doesn’t go much beyond that.
We see that one of the main reasons behind this is that the size and reach of the mobile market in India is not really well understood by the content community. Correcting this view is something we are working hard on over the coming 6 to 9 months.
We believe this will help the local mobile publishing industry to grow, which in turn will provide much more high quality mobile inventory into which InMobi can sell mobile ads.
So in effect InMobi is working to “prime the pump” in the Indian market.

InMobi has moved well beyond the Indian market, what areas does InMobi see as high growth over the next couple of years?
We’re actually making a couple of long term bets in Asia-Pacific and Africa.
In both of these regions there are lots of people coming on line for the first time, and for most of them mobile is the only means of access. This is the group we would like to target, although in the short term the value of these markets might not be appreciated.
Luckily though, there are pockets of activity where the value of these segments has already begun to be recognized. For example Indonesia and Malaysia are both huge markets, and South Africa is very upbeat.
These are “lighthouse” markets in each of these developing regions that showcase how vast this media can become. InMobi currently reaches 50 million people in Africa and 100 million in Asia each month, but it may take another 2 to 3 years for the entire region to fully develop. This is a long term bet we are playing.

Recently you’ve made some strong moves into other more developed markets, how does that fit your strategy?
The second segment of our overall strategy is to go after the more developed, higher value - lower volume, “mobile as a third screen” markets, such as America and Japan.
In these markets consumers are already splitting their time between PC and mobile, and we’ll be working to take a share of the mobile segment.
In the short and media term these markets show a lot of promise, and over the next couple of years they should be the leaders for us as the developing regions mature.
However, at some time they will hit a saturation point. At that time, we expect that the developing markets will have grown to a point where they become the larger part of our business.

What about the level of competition you have seen in these various markets?
In the US you have lots of competition as there are many ad networks, and we were prepared for this.
However, outside the US, the competition is very similar in Asia and Europe, and I was actually pretty much surprised by this. In each market we see a couple of competitors, but it is pretty much the same.
We are also now just starting up our operations in Japan, and there the competition is not other mobile ad networks, but rather it is the mobile arm of existing ad agencies.
Is there a differences in the ad formats you need to support in different regions?
We actually support the same set of ad formats across the world. However, the uptake may change by region – for example in Africa it may be 10% rich media buy where in Europe it would be 40%.

Of course there certainly are regional nuances that we need to take into account. For example, when we came into Europe we needed to get a good app strategy in place because the smartphone penetration is much larger. And when we entered the US we had to spend more time working with ad mediation agencies.
Overall however, I’d say that 80% of our business is globally applicable. And that is why our business is scalable.

What is your view of the role of ad exchange & optimization companies?
I think it is too early for them to pop up, and in the short term it may be hard for them to survive.
They work well when you have significant supply and demand side complexity, for example if you are solving the problem that a publisher doesn’t know how to work with 20 ad networks.
The reality is that a publisher doesn’t have 20 mobile ad networks to work with, only two or maybe three. So your value as a mediation layer is not that high at the moment.

What future trends do you see for the next 12 to 24 months?
There are several things we think are important to be aware of.
App Economy: First, the whole app economy will grow into a very different thing. I believe that in the long term browsers will again become dominant. But in the short term, apps will make consumption of data services very easy, and so they will increase the consumer uptake. Apps can change the user experience and take it to the next level so that phones become a major media for data consumption. This is what apps will do for us.

Mainstream Mobile: Secondly, mobile as a marketing medium will become more mainstream over the next two to three years. Before it was always budgeted as part of “Other”. Now it has started becoming its own line item, even though it’s still a small line item.

Data driven: Finally, we need to make this medium much more data driven. The promise has always been there that we can know a lot about unique users. But that has been the promise for the past 10 years, and where is it? We are now working on ways that we can know the user based on their consumption that we see across our network. Then we can put this out to advertisers so they know they are reaching the right users far more precisely and targeted.

Each month, we reach out to 170 million people across the world. We need to know much more about those 170 million people than we do today - we want to enrich the information about each user. And if we can get that data in a useable form, that is valuable information that will help this whole ecosystem to grow.

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If you haven’t heard of InMobi yet, don’t worry. You will. They’re coming. Having already locked up the Far Eastern markets (7.5 billion mobile ad requests a month, 170+ million user reach), InMobi is the biggest mobile marketing giant that you’ve never heard of. If you’re into mobile applications (or websites) in any way, you should definitely check out the range of services InMobi are offering to help developers monetise their properties. We bumped into James Lamberti, their newly appointed Global Marketing Director to find out a little bit more about the company.

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Naveen Tewari talks to Akin Naphtal from Mobile World about the future of Mobile as well as what InMobi has in store ahead. While he predicts mPayments to be the next big wave, he also strongly believes in InMobi continuing to be the world’s leading independent ad network. Read on to see how he predicts the future would unfurl.

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