CTIA: Dan Olschwang CEO Mobile Search and Advertising provider JumpTap

by: admin Thursday, October 25th, 2007

Rating: It is not a search box its a targetting machine

by Bena Roberts

Last time I met Dan it was London in March when the WPP partnership was announced. Since then the company has grown to about 130 people and the Vice President of Marketing Eric McCabe has left as well. (More on Eric when I get to write about the GoMo News Blender).

So it was great to see Dan again and find out what is going on as he doesn’t do the events and trade shows that he used to. I have the interview on tape and I will write it up for The Mobile Search Analyst but some key points – because I have never really understood the whole JumpTap outselling advertising inventory thing and a few other companies and competitors have asked “what does that mean?”

Basically – JumpTap got the Telefonica Spain deal for emocion portal. The press release mentioned ad-inventory. Then one week later Yahoo! announced a global partnership with Telefonica (more from Yahoo! in a post on this for next week). And we had some more comments on this.

But to cut to the chase – I wanted to know what this all meant.

Dan said that what happened is that inventory for the portal was a hot property that advertisers were eager to sign up – and fast. That is what it was. It wasn’t about only selling or pushing and serving ads because that would mean the JumpTap prices were too low.

So there you go that is what it means. (Finally) the JumpTap answer.

Moving on from there we talked user interface as I have always found the user interface to be OK and nothing spectacular and Dan pulls out a BREW Alltel device. The device with one click access to the Mobile Search client run by JumpTap and called over the Product Manager Young who gave me an excellent demo.
This is clearly the best user interface I have seen from JumpTap. It took me by surprise and the client ODP for Brew is feature rich with live tickers, interstitials etc. I have a Telefonica SIM now and I just need to find a phone for it and test it because after seeing this I am eager to see the Telefonica service. In fact; I really feel a JumpTap vs Yahoo! analysis brewing!

More on Dan Olschwang in The Mobile Search Analyst – I fear the December issue is going to be flooded with interviews.