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Two of the fastest growing mobile application startups -- AdMob and MyWaves -- both began with completely different missions than the ones they are pursuing today.
AdMob CEO Omar Hamoui told me last night at the MIT Club of Northern California's C3 Program that he was running a mobile social network called Photo Chatter prior to founding AdMob. He was having trouble getting users to sign up for the service so he offered to pay a mobile publisher one cent per click to advertise on the site. When it worked better than the existing ad solutions, he realized others would want to take advantage of that, so he brokered an ad deal for that same publisher and AdMob was born.
The 45-person company has since gone on to raise a $3 million first round of funding from Sequoia Capital and a $15 million second round led by Accel Partners. While it faces stiff competition from Google's newly launched mobile AdSense and AOL's Third Screen Media, AdMob is serving up one billion ads per month compared to second place mobile ad network, Third Screen Media, which is serving up about 250 million ads per month. Hamoui said AdMob is focused on optimizing its ads, improving analytics and offering advertisers mobile landing pages.
Incubated at Menlo Ventures, MyWaves was established to allow mobile phone users to create and share a personal channel consisting of the pictures and videos they shot from their phones. After finding that the vast majority of users prefer to consume, rather than create content, the company switched its focus to offering thousands of free video channels that could be viewed on the most basic of phones. Its most popular channels are cartoons, comedy and music videos. MyWaves CEO Rajeev Raman told me after last night's C3 panel that pornography accounts for about 10% of the video consumed by its users.
MyWaves has gone on to raise a total of $18 million. The 25-person company is now signing up 25,000 new users and drawing 1.5 million views per day. The company is focusing the rest of this year on experimenting with different monetization strategies such as pay channels and advertising.
Tags: admob, mywaves, google, aol, vc, venture+capital
You can also create and share a personal channel via http://www.hooqs.com/
Users can upload their favorite music and video clips directly from the site, without further installations, view them on mobiles and share with friends.
The mobile social network is actually called fotochatter, www.fotochatter.com and is still in business.