Monday, July 7, 2008

Press release: Blue Whale Systems selects Smaato Mobile Advertising Platform for its E-mail & Facebook Service to Mass Market Mobile Phones

London / San Mateo, July 7, 2008 – Smaato Inc., a pioneering provider for in-application mobile advertising solutions, and Blue Whale Systems Ltd today announced a new strategic partnership. Blue Whale Systems introduces the free ad-supported BlueWhaleMail application that offers a mobile push e-mail and push Facebook service.

With its BlueWhaleMail application, Blue Whale Systems offers a service to make simple and effective e-mail and Facebook access available to the 2.7 billion people using mass market mobile phones. Many of these phones have either an unusable or hard to configure built in e-mail service; BlueWhaleMail allows users to keep the phone they like and still get a great service for mobile e-mail and Facebook. In connecting BlueWhaleMail to the SOMA™ (Smaato Open Mobile Advertising) platform, Smaato enables Blue Whale Systems’ business model by allowing them to offer their service to users for free; financing this by ad-enabling the application.

“The partnership with Smaato is a great step forward for us. In ad-enabling our application and offering it free of charge to our users we can enhance our reach and build a greater community”, said Richard Seward, Founder & CEO of Blue Whale Systems. “We believe that banner adverts at the top of the BlueWhaleMail message viewer provide an unobtrusive way to support the service”.

“We are excited to partner with Blue Whale Systems and their innovative mobile e-mail solution”, comments Ragnar Kruse, Co-Founder & CEO of Smaato Inc. “Access to e-mail on mobile phones is getting more and more mission critical for businesses or a vital part of our connected lives in the mobile age. Together with Blue Whale Systems we enhance our reach in Europe for our ad sales network partners.”

Blue Whale Systems, after careful review, selected the SOMA (Smaato Open Mobile Advertising) platform that is available with free APIs and a software development kit from www.smaato.com for mobile developers. Smaato is partnering with leading ad sales networks international such as Ad Infuse, Third Screen Media (Advertising.com) and Screentonic (Microsoft). SOMA supports all major mobile platforms such as Symbian, Windows Mobile, J2ME and the iPhone platform and saves mobile developers time and money to enter new business models with ad-enabled content and services.


About Smaato Inc.
Smaato Inc. (www.smaato.com) is a leading mobile advertising technology company that provides the open mobile advertising platform called SOMA™ (Smaato Open Mobile Advertising) for developers, publishers, ad sales networks and operators. The SOMA platform enables the delivery of targeted display advertising to mobile phones within applications and on mobile sites. SOMA’s unique feature is the SOMA client, which is a mobile ad server on the handset that optimizes the process of ad-enabling applications for mobile software developers. SOMA can be easily integrated with 3rd party ad sales networks, ad inventory owners (developers, publishers, operators) and ad technology providers.
Smaato is an active member of the Mobile Marketing Association, the dot.mobi Advisory Group and the German Digital Media Association BVDW. Smaato received a Top 100 Private Company award by AlwaysOn Media (US) in January of 2007. Smaato Inc. is based in San Mateo, California. The privately held company was founded in 2005 by an experienced International management team. The European office is in Hamburg, Germany.

A free white paper on Open Mobile Advertising is available for download at www.smaato.com

Smaato® is a registered trademark of Smaato Inc. - SOMA™ is a trademark of Smaato Inc. The names of actual companies and products mentioned in this release may be the trademarks of their respective owners.