Disclaimer: mKhoj is an advertiser on this site and I use their services to display ads on one of my mobile sites.
mKhoj a mobile advertising startup based in Mumbai, India with offices in Singapore, Bangalore and Palo Alto. The company has received funding totaling $7.6 million from The Mumbai Angels, Kleiner Perkins, Caufield & Byers and Sherpalo Ventures. I find mKhoj interesting for a couple of reasons.
First it is an example of something I've been expecting ever since the trend of outsourcing US and European software development to India started about six years ago. I knew that Indian entrepreneurs and engineers would not be content for long to limit themselves to doing contract programing for Western companies. The rise of Indian based international software and Internet companies targeting and competing in the word market was inevitable and mKhoj is an example of this. Indian firms have access to a large base of well educated and skilled technical talent giving them the potential to succeed in any area of technology. But in mobile they have the added advantage of being inside the second largest (after China and ahead of the US) and fastest growing major mobile market in the world in terms of subscribers.
The second thing that is interesting about mKhoj is that it is tapping into the globalization of the mobile web. Mobile web usage is growing fastest in Asia, Eastern Europe and Africa and the same is true of mobile website launches. I try to look at every new English language mobile site. It used to be that virtually all of the new sites I saw were coming from the US and the UK, but that's no longer true. Now new sites are as likely to be from South Africa or India as from the US or UK. These new mobile publishers are going to want to monetize their sites with advertising and I suspect many would prefer to use an ad network based in their own country rather than halfway around the world. Local networks are more likely to have access to locally relevant ads and dealing with an advertising partner in your own country simplifies fund transfers and tax reporting.
For these reasons, when mKhoj offered me the opportunity to interview their CEO, Naveen Tewari I had no hesitation. The interview was conducted by email and the following is a transcript it:
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DB) What are the number of mKhoj employees, advertisers and publishers. How many mobile ads do you serve per month.
NT)
DB) What markets do you serve and what areas are you looking to expand into.
NT) Primary focus is SE Asia, South Asia, Middle East, & Africa. For the next 12 months, we would want to continue to strengthen our position in these countries.
DB) As a mKhoj publisher I often see days where mKhoj fills very few of my requests for ads. This is true of other ad providers as well. Would you agree that there is more mobile web inventory than available ads? To what degree do you feel is this related to the global recession and what efforts is mKhoj making to increase the ad supply?
NT) Ad inventory as well as mobile web inventory fluctuate due to various factors. We observe that advertisers who are on the mKhoj network have been seeing positive ROI and hence continue to spend on the mobile medium, despite the global recession. mKhoj also focuses particularly on ensuring high advertiser ROI and our self-serve application enables advertisers to get started with mobile marketing very quickly, with features like 2-minute Ad Creation.
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posted by Dennis Bournique
January 29, 2009 @ 3:36 pm
7 View Comments
