The debate in Silicon Valley around the future of mobile browsing - the “full” vs. mobile web - takes as a given that user activity on the mobile internet is set to explode. The debate here in India is different, focused on the more basic question of whether it will reach a broad audience at all in the near-term. Media owners are, by and large, skeptical, and in any case assume that all revenue models “mobile” will be tied to the operators unto eternity.

It’s against this context that ecosystem experts invariably raise their eyebrows when they read that AdMob serves over 300 million ads per month to Indian users on non-carrier mobile websites. The numbers are significant because they suggest that India’s off-deck mobile web activity, along with the market for mobile advertising, have already hit a crescendo.

As in South Africa, many of the sites Indian users are visiting today are internationally-based, and that very well may be because local content simply isn’t available: of India’s top 10 internet sites (according to current Alexa rankings), only Rediff, Cricinfo, and MoneyControl have deployed full-fledged mobile versions (the latter two are AdMob publishers). The opportunity presented to media owners and entrepreneurs, then, is clear: invest in creating a strong mobile web presence today and you’ll have the opportunity to build a technology, traffic, and monetization advantage now and into the future.

If you’d like to work with us in India as a publisher or advertiser/agency, drop us a line: india@admob.com.

-Zubair Jandali
Mumbai, India

[Note: this is a cross-post from the AdMob Engineering Blog.]

A couple of months back we held our 1st Annual AdMob Engineering Chili Cookoff. We all love good food at AdMob. We’re especially serious about all things spicy. A cookoff seemed like a good way for us to hang out in the park for an afternoon and give one team of engineers and/or product managers bragging rights over the superiority of their culinary creation.

We had a ton of fun, and in the voting following the event, we had a clear winner. The winning team had a well-crafted strategy. They knew that a sizable fraction of AdMob engineering was vegetarian, so they avoided meat in their recipe. They also appreciated that even though almost everyone in engineering claimed to like spicy food, that everyone’s spiciness threshold was different. Accordingly, they made two batches of their chili and provided a variety of sauces and fresh chilies so that folks could tune spiciness precisely to their taste. The winning team also used great ingredients, sought advice on their recipe from experienced veggie chili makers, and did a good job of managing the logistics of chili construction by careful division of labor and time management.

Not to destroy that which is uniquely artistic about cooking good food for friends, but a lot of what led to the winning team’s success was good product design and engineering. They designed their product to appeal to the widest possible audience. They consulted their peers for best practices. They didn’t skimp on the quality of their components. And they shipped their complicated product on time by planning ahead, splitting the work up into semi-independent chunks, and carefully coordinating the integration of their individual work early and often.

Now here’s the winning recipe as conceived of and prepared by Alvin, Anu, Josh, Prasana, and Sashi.

Ingredients:

• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 1 onion, chopped
• 2 carrots, peeled, thinly sliced
• 1 red bell pepper, seeded, chopped
• 3 large jalapeño chilies, seeded, minced (about 4 1/2 tablespoons)
• 3 habanero chilis (for the spicy version only)
• 3 Choyote squashes
• 1 28-ounce can crushed tomatoes with added puree
• 3 cups water
• 2 15-ounce cans black beans, rinsed, drained
• 2 15-ounce cans kidney beans, rinsed, drained
• 2 cans of garbanzo beans
• 2 cans of lima beans
• 2 tablespoons white wine vinegar
• 5 garlic cloves, minced
• 1 1/2 teaspoons ground cumin
• 1 1/2 teaspoons ground coriander
• 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnammon
• 1/2 to 1 bag of Morningstar Veggie Beef Crumbles

Preparation:

Heat 2 tablespoons olive oil in heavy large pot over medium-high heat. Add onion, carrots, red bell pepper, and jalapeños and sauté until onion and carrots are almost tender, about 8 minutes. Add tomatoes, 3 cups water, beans, veggie beef crumbles, white wine vinegar, garlic, and spices. Bring to boil. Reduce heat to medium-high and cook, uncovered, until mixture thickens, stirring often, about 20 minutes. Ladle chili into bowls and serve.

–Kevin Scott, VP of Engineering

We’ve released our monthly Mobile Metrics report for June.  This report includes manufacturer and device data based on the 3.6 billion ad impressions we served in our network.  In addition to aggregate worldwide statistics, we also include reports on our top 5 markets (US, UK, South Africa, India, and Indonesia).

We are often asked “how fast is the mobile web growing?”.  For our featured section this month, we estimated mobile web growth by tracking the growth of a fixed set of AdMob publishers to estimate their organic growth rate.  We believe this is a good proxy for the organic growth of the mobile web, as it controls for the addition of new publishers on the network.  We found that:

* Traffic from the 473 publishers grew 104% from July 2007 to June 2008.  This indicates that the mobile web more than doubled in 12 months ending in June 2008.
* The US and UK grew substantially faster than the worldwide rate.

Smartphone usage continued to increase across our network in June.  Impressions from the iPhone and iTouch increased 32% worldwide month over month – and that was prior to the v2 launch.  The Palm Centro and Nokia N95 continued their strong growth as well.

Download the free report at http://www.admob.com/s/solutions/metrics.  You can sign up to receive future reports by emailing metrics@admob.com.  As always, we welcome your feedback.
 
Jason Spero
VP Marketing

Today we’ve updated the AdMob engineering blog with two new posts.  The first of these two posts continues an earlier discussion about ad serving mechanics for the mobile web.  The earlier post in the series talked about how mobile ads are retrieved, whereas today’s post motivates why ad retrieval for mobile sometimes needs to be different than it is for the web.

Our second post today discusses AdMob’s new ad creation user interface and describes some of the techniques that went into building it.  We also offer up a hint at the first of several upcoming contributions back to the open source community, an extension to the EXT JS AJAX library’s tree widget.

–Kevin Scott, VP Engineering

The mainstream media seems to be taking notice of the middle web trend we pointed out awhile back…

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/13/technology/13stream.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss