InMobi’s bets on ‘Miip’ to take on Google, Facebook
InMobi’s competitors on the world stage are Google and Facebook but that has not prevented this Bengaluru-based company from taking them on with Miip, a product that it terms as revolutionary
By Vidya Ram
The recent launch of InMobi’s mobile advertising platform Miip in China became a memorable one for its Chinese customers when Naveen Tiwary, CEO of the company, delivered a speech in Mandarin. InMobi is one among the few Indian startups that ventured into the Chinese market back in 2012, and has now started to make its presence felt on a global level.
Miip tracks mobile activities of the users and provides them with a more personalised and content rich experience by showing only relevant ads—this is unlike advertising that slams ads on people which may not be entirely relevant for them. The Bengaluru-based independent mobile advertising platform was launched in 2008 and claims to be world’s largest independent mobile advertising platform which provides global mobile advertising solutions to advertisers, publishers and developers by helping them connect with each other. They also help the advertisers to reach out to the target audience by providing targeting options like geography and demographics so that the right ads reach the right users. “Our core philosophy from day one has been on creating a platform that can allow developers to monetise the elementary on the mobile devices,” says Abhay Singhal, co-founder of InMobi.
In the first six months of 2010, the company doubled its network and saw a phenomenal growth and today they are present in 165 countries and have offices in over 30 locations across the globe. This year in July they took mobile advertising experience to a whole new different level with the grand launch of their product Miip in San Francisco. While their competitors Google and Facebook are ahead of them in terms of growth and revenue, Miip is capable of giving a tough competition to the global players given the innovative concept that it works on.
“Miip is a very recent phenomenon that we have been working on from past two years. After witnessing the importance and relevance of visual representation in this age, we thought of introducing window shopping network to the mobile platform by helping people see what they want to see and has been successful in providing this experience to over a billion mobile users now. Our core philosophy is to make users discover products while they are using content on their mobile devices.” adds Singhal.
Miip creates discovery zones within the app which provides the user with recommendations and let them buy the product on the go by just tapping on the ‘Buy’ button installed into over 40,000 mobile apps and that’s where partners like Paytm comes to play to provide seamless transaction experience to its users. The company is calling the whole concept as a medium which enables discovery led platform, the so-called “d-commerce”.
According to the company, Miip can drive up to 80% of new product discoveries for merchants and aspire to enable almost 50% of mobile transactions for mobile commerce merchants in the country within the next 12-24 months. Singhal also said that there are many future projects that the company is working on but is not in a position to reveal details about them. “InMobi employees participate in a lot of hackathons and recently two of our engineers went to the Sequioa hackathon and they created a product which they now want to create within InMobi. As and when they are ready to be showcased we will definitely come out and talk about it,” adds Singhal.
In terms of challenges, the company doesn’t find it difficult to hire talent but faces problems while training them and getting them accustomed to an environment which is into global operations. “We have managed to get an extremely talented lot and in fact our positioning is as such that we have been termed as the most innovative company in the country which helps a lot in hiring the right people. Challenge lies in training them and getting them used to the global environment and we try our best to encourage them and make them realise that they are better than the best,” he says.
