Mobiya’s presentation at DPA Annual Conference in Brighton

From a late arrival at the wonderful De Vere Grand Hotel in Brighton, I am able to offer you a preview of my presentation for tomorrow. Download a PDF copy of the presentation here: Download mobiyaDPA.pdfand enjoy the image I shot with my camera-phone earlier today.

Chinese mobile advertiser Madhouse receives funding from Nokia

India, America, and now China… mobile advertising powerhouse Madhouse receives another round of funding, after closing $8M last year. Good to hear that Alvin Foo's previous company has landed the necessary funds to continue their expansion! A bit of help and influence of Minh Tran maybe?

Mobile advertising marketplace AdMob closes $15.7M series C-round

AdMob's mobile web display advertising model seems to fly. The 6,000 connected publishers allow AdMob to deal with about 5 billion mobile ad requests per month. This C-round is needed to deepen the technology side of the network: targeting, optimization and serving algorithm. AdMob is probably ready to start acquiring companies that can make its business more efficient and the advertising more effective. Press release: click here.

Investors push $11 Million into Indian sms marketing company

SMS GupShup has raised $11 million in funding from Charles River Ventures and Helion Ventures. Business Standard reports that the money will be used to grow the business, product development and increased sales and marketing. The seven-month old company claims to have 12 million unique users, and is hoping to generate revenues through mobile advertising. The free service currently foots the bill when members send each other messages. Source: By Dianne See Morrison – Tue 07 Oct 2008 06:13 AM PST at mocoNews.net (permalink).

I personally like the idea of “Free Group SMS” a lot. It’s simple yet so powerful. Just think about the group applications to update members of all kinds of offline networks: your local sports club announcing weekly activities, your favorite restaurant updating you with the Friday lunch special, your children’s teachers sending you suggestions about class activity, etc. SMS GupShup allows every individual in India to start a group, by simply creating it via an SMS text message. Define the subject and start adding members… and of course, start to broadcast as much as you want!

Scary times for startups; mobile investments remain strong

In the last couple of days a lot of investment activity took place in the mobile media landscape

• ShopText Raises $1 Million For Powering Text-Based Promotions
• Transaction Wireless Raises $2.25 Million In First Round For Mobile Gift Cards
• Tungle Raises $5 Million First Round; Launches Beta Web Scheduling Service
• Local Searcher Zvents Gets $24 Million Second Round; Nokia, AT&T, Navteq Invest

Also the advertising spending in mobile services seems to keep up

• IT And Telecoms Giant To Spend $1 Billion To Promote Mobile Broadband

SMS revenue for operators declining – focus on MMS and Mobile Advertising?

We had an interesting meeting with a London based wireless access service provider today who told us that they are putting a strategy in place to monetize outgoing SMS traffic via mobile advertising. It all makes sense as the article below from paidContent:UK talks about a decline in SMS revenues for mobile operators.

Operators need to start backfilling the declining revenue with other revenue streams and will have to recover about €2 billion by 2011. Now, €2 billion doesn’t seem a lot from an operator perspective, but this is pure bottom-line profit since SMS delivery infrastructures have long been written off. A very different new margin rich revenue stream will need to be developed: mobile advertising.

Another aspect is the difficulty operators have to sustain premium rate business models for mobile content. More and more mobile services companies are finding advertisers that are subsidizing the service, preferably the user communication… (hello Blyk). Our vision (as well as Blyk and, yeah, Ryanair) is to provide a completely free consumer service funded by advertising (Ryanair’s vision is to offer free flights funded by online trafficking and taking referral commissions for booking hotels, in-flight entertainment and catering, etc.). Mobiya doesn’t offer minutes against ads (or air miles), but a ubiquitous and convenient marketplace for selling and buying, from your mobile phone.

Further reading – Article: SMS Declining

SMS was Western Europes biggest mobile data services revenue generator in 2007 raking in EUR 16.42 billion, but operators are keen to push MMS and mobile instant messaging, as SMS revenues begin to decline. Research group Frost and Sullivan writes that SMS revenues have already begun falling, and will continue to drop 2.9 percent from 2007-2011, bringing in EUR 14.59 billion in revenue. In comparison, MMS and other data applications generated EUR 7.40 billion in revenues in 2007, but is predicted to grow to EUR 24.28 billion in 2011, with a CAGR of 34.5 percent from 2007-2011. The growth, though, will depend on whether European operators can resolve interconnectivity issues, as well as cutting MMS charges. Mobile IM could be trickier for operators, especially as many see it as cannibalizing SMS revenues.