Tim Draper will join Award Jury
 

San Francisco, CA – November 13, 2008 – Smaato Inc., a pioneering provider for mobile advertising solutions announced today that Tim Draper of DFJ will join the distinguished jury of the Smaato Mobile Advertising Award. Together with Silicon Valley based Vator.tv and INmobile.org Smaato also announced the names of the four venture capital partners, who will be introduced to the winning company:

Tim Draper, Draper Fisher Jurvetson (Menlo Park)
Howard Hartenbaum, August Capital (Menlo Park)
Frédéric Veyssiere, Innovacom Venture Capital (France / San Francisco)   
Niall Davis, aeris CAPITAL (Switzerland / San Francisco)              
Ragnar Kruse, CEO & Co-Founder of Smaato stated: "We are proud that, together with vator.tv, we created an outstanding opportunity for the award winner to be introduced to the VC community. The winning company has the chance to gain recognition from first class venture capital partners. This is a fantastic opportunity for a young mobile company."

Tim Draper is the founder of the global venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson. He launched the Draper Affiliate Network, an international network of early-stage venture capital funds with offices in 34 cities around the globe. He founded or co-founded Wasatch Ventures (Salt Lake City), Zone Ventures (LA), Draper Atlantic (Reston), Draper Triangle (Pittsburgh), Timberline Ventures (Woodland, WA), DFJ EPlanet (global), Polaris Fund (Anchorage), Draper Fisher Jurvetson Gotham (NYC), DFJ Frontier (Sacramento and Santa Barbara), and DFJ Dragon (Shanghai). Draper is featured as a keynote speaker in entrepreneurial conferences worldwide.

Howard Hartenbaum joined August Capital in 2008. Prior to joining, he served as a General Partner at Draper Richards LP where he was the founding investor in Skype and a former member of the board of directors where his achievement resulted in his joining the Forbes Midas List of top venture capitalists.

Niall Davis is Partner of aeris CAPITAL AG since 2006. Prior to joining, he was IT Investment Manager of first Ventury and Director of the Astarte New Media AG. Niall Davis is one of the Board Members of Smaato.

Frédéric Veyssiere became General Partner of Innovacom Venture Capital in 2000. He is also Board member with Actelis Networks, Atrica (acquired by Nokia Siemens Networks), Radioframe Networks and Vantrix, and an observer with Bitfone (acquired by Hewlett Packard) and Bytemobile. Prior to joining Innovacom in 2000, Frédéric worked with TeleSoft Partners, a San Mateo–based venture capital fund, as a consultant in charge of business development for Europe.

 

About the Smaato Mobile Advertising Award:

The award will honor mobile publishers or developers with an outstanding mobile ad-enabled solution either in-app or mobile web app/widget. Developers shall provide a video pitch of about 1 min 30 sec. and upload it to the award section at vator.tv (http://www.vator.tv/competition/show/smaato-inmobile-and-vatortv). In addition they may provide up to 3 PDF pages of screenshots and supporting materials. Deadline: November 21, 2008.

 

Besides meeting with the above named venture capital partners, Smaato will invite the winner to participate at the Mobile World Congress, taking place in Barcelona, Spain in February 2009. An additional prize will be a free booth at the M-Days in Munich, Germany in January 2009.

The jury members are: Adam Zawel (INmobile.org), Bambi Francisco (vator.tv), Bena Roberts (GoMoNews), Caroline Lewko (WIP), Giselle Abramovich (Mobile Marketer), Jim Cook (MobiAdNews), Lubna Dajani (Mobile Monday, NYC), Mark Wächter (Mobile Monday, Germany & BVDW), Michael J. O’Farrell (dotMobi MAG), Ragnar Kruse (Smaato Inc.) and Tim Draper (Draper Fisher Jurvetson).

About Smaato Inc.
Smaato Inc. is a leading mobile advertising technology company that provides the open mobile advertising platform called SOMA (Smaato Open Mobile Advertising) for publishers, developers, ad sales networks and operators. 

SOMA’s unique feature is the aggregation of multiple leading ad sales networks globally to maximize mobile advertising ARPU. SOMA can be easily integrated with ad sales networks, ad inventory owners (developers, publishers, operators) and 3rd party ad technology providers.

Smaato is an active member of the Mobile Marketing Association, the dot.mobi Advisory Group and the German Digital Media Association BVDW. Smaato received a Top 100 Private Company Award by AlwaysOn Media (2007) and was an Andrew Seybold Choice Awards finalist at CTIA 2008 for best Newcomer, among other awards.

Smaato Inc. is based in Redwood Shores, California. The privately held company was founded in 2005 by an experienced International management team. The European headquarters are in Hamburg, Germany.