Smaato are busy boys these days. Its been one week since the mobile advertising company announced an analytics partnership with Motally. Now it has announced it is providing global mobile powerhouse Alcatel-Lucent with the advertising API for its mobile application initiative.
What’s this now?
An API is an Application Programming Interface – it’s a programming tool which allows developers to create applications that will work on a particular platform. It’s an essential bit of kit for any developer, and Alcatel-Lucent is doing an interesting thing with its APIs. It’s is offering them to developers in bundled tiers, in much the same way as an operator sells plans to mobile subscribers:
As you can see, the Advertising API is part of every bundle. Every single developer that buys an API bundle from Alcatel-Lucent (AL) will be getting that API. So any advertising enabler that gets involved there should be seeing a lot of use from any developer that fancies a go with AL. Smaato’s SOMA ad platform is specifically designed to serve ads to as great a variety of mobile devices as possible, so it’s perhaps no surprise that AL chose them – with a global reach, there are a bewildering number of devices that run over AL technology.
Ragnar Kruse, CEO and co-founder of Smaato Inc. said “We welcome the pioneering social API initiative of Alcatel-Lucent to provide more upside for developers to reach better monetization through mobile advertising and added targeting value, such as location. We are proud our SOMA mobile advertising platform supporting Android and iPhone is already implemented to help mobile publishers maximize their impact on mobile audiences through value added services.”
What we think?
This is an interesting drive from Alcatel-Lucent, and it just might work. It has been interesting to observe how the growing importance of application developers has seen them gain access to ever larger platforms. To begin with, they were creating apps for one device at a time. That grew to families of devices, all based on the same OS. We’ve seen them gain access to an entire operator’s-worth of mobile devices through network APIs. Now Alcatel-Lucent is aiming at giving them access to every single operator that runs on its network infrastructure… which is a lot.
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