Qualcomm, Amobee Team For Mobile Ads

Qualcomm announced Monday a partnership with Amobee to help carriers bring more targeted mobile ads to customers' cell phones.

The deal will integrate Amobee's large ad-serving platform with Qualcomm's Plaza platform, and the goal is to enable wireless carriers to give its customers unique mobile Internet experiences while cashing in on the mobile ad revenue.

"Amobee's mobile ad-serving solution has been deployed by more operators than any other solutions to date," said Noam Raffaelli, managing director of Plaza for Qualcomm Internet services. "Their proven technology is serving the mobile needs of global operators, as well as top brands that are reaching out to mobile users with targeted advertising."

Announced in May, Plaza is platform agnostic end-to-end framework that can deliver Internet-based widgets on a variety of mass market handsets. Qualcomm officials said it uses basic Web standards for development, which could make it easier for the existing Web development community to create widgets for the mobile Internet.

Plaza is not device-specific, so operators could integrate it into their hardware and opt to give these widgets a prominent placement on the device. With Amobee, the carriers also have the opportunity to generate more revenue by having those widgets feature targeted ads that are relevant to the end user.

"This collaboration between Amobee and Qualcomm gives operators an easy-to-deploy and trusted solution that creates a new revenue stream and the opportunity to boost mobile Internet usage," said Ziv Eliraz, VP of alliances at Amobee, in a statement. "It will also allow developers and media companies to get closer to the promise of the new mobile media."

Qualcomm said Plaza negotiations with carriers are already underway, although no announcement was made. The company did say mobile advertising is still in its infancy, and it believes that the deal with Amobee offers cellular operators a large benefit for this growing industry.