Menlo Park, CA and Mobile World Congress, Barcelona, February 16, 2010 - CloudMade, the mapping, developer and mobile advertising platform that powers numerous market leading location and map based applications from prominent mobile and web developers, today announced it has integrated Location Based Advertising (LBA) into the CloudMade Mapping Platform

The service enables developers to display highly targeted location-based advertisements in their web or mobile applications, providing them with a valuable additional revenue stream.

The announcement comes in the wake of last night's Mobile Premier Awards - the Oscars of the mobile industry - at which CloudMade was awarded 'Best Emerging Startup' by a a panel of mobile industry heavyweights. <!--[endif]-->

Last month, Gartner predicted mobile advertising would reach $600M this year growing rapidly to $7B in 2013. This highlights the vast opportunity for developers to implement advertisements in their applications. To allow developers to experiment and capitalize on this, CloudMade has designed its LBA solution to be quick to implement and capable of achieving the highest click-though rates.

"There is huge potential for growth in the mobile advertising market," said Tim Shepherd, Mobile Analyst, Canalys. "Location information brings contextual relevance to advertisements and consumers are more responsive and willing to engage with adverts that are appropriately targeted and pertinent to them. With more developers exploring how to monetize free applications and services, mobile advertising is becoming an increasingly attractive option." 

CloudMade's LBA offering provides developers with the ability to tailor the advertisements they display to their application type and user location. With no additional development resources required, a developer can display ads in their application in under five minutes by inserting just one line of code into their code base.

For developers with a mobile travel application or website, this could mean choosing to display only advertisements from the CloudMade Travel Advertisement Channel, featuring hotels, taxi companies, restaurants, bars, and more. Alternatively, developers of more specialized applications such as cycle navigation could find displaying only bike and sporting good stores and only those nearest the cyclist, return higher click-through rates.

CloudMade will have several Advertisement Channels that provide a wide range of options for developers to monetize.

"I've been looking for new ways to increase revenue from my iPhone applications: OffMaps and Trails," said Felix Lamouroux, Founder, Curly Brackets. "Until now, there has been no LBA product capable of serving up ads onto the maps in our applications, so I'm extremely excited to start using CloudMade's LBA product."

"We've been eager to start using CloudMade's LBA and plan to integrate it into our forthcoming iPhone navigation product for North America," said Philipp Kandal, CTO, skobbler. "Integrated LBA in CloudMade's platform will not only provide a valuable service to our users by displaying highly targeted ads such as restaurants, shops, gas stations, and hotels when they need it most, but will also help increase our revenue."

"The number one request from our developers continues to be for location based ads to be included in our platform," said James Brown, CTO, CloudMade. "We've now fulfilled this request coupling it with detailed analytics on user behavior to help developers reduce churn. Next, we'll be introducing sponsored points of interest and our roadmap features retailer coupons and special offers to put even more money in our developers' pockets."??

Prior to CloudMade, James Brown built advertisement-supported networks for WinWin Techonogies and Fairgain. CloudMade services are fault tolerant and run in a high availability configuration.  The services are designed to increase advertisement fill rates, maximize developer revenue, and improve advertisement targeting. 

CloudMade's services scale to serve large-reach environments, enabling projects ranging from small developer applications up to signature mapping and location applications from mobile operators and handset manufacturers.

Availability & Revenue
CloudMade's Location Based Advertisements will be available early Q2 2010 for all mobile platforms and the web. Native LBA framework support will be available for CloudMade's iPhone SDK (http://bit.ly/2y3L5i) and Web Maps Studio (http://bit.ly/bNl3sA). Potential revenues will depend on the number of click-throughs and impressions a developer generates from their application.

Developers can be alerted to when LBA becomes available by registering here: http://bit.ly/bn1zIe