Vserv, the Mobile ad network recently got a huge funding from IDG Ventures. We interviewed Mr. Dippak Khurana, Co Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Vserv Digital Services to find out more.
Tell us something about this investment.
Vserv has received $3 million is A series funding from IDG Ventures which is a leading Venture Capital fund , investing in technology related products and services. Given their vast experience in dealing with new media technology and global network of investments, we chose to work with them. As part of the investment, Manik Arora and Karan Mohla from IDG Ventures will be joining Vserv’s Board of Directors.
How will Vserv’s new funding be invested?
With the funds we plan to expand our sales and engineering teams to drive sales growth in India and internationally. We also plan to utilize the funds to extend our offerings to Android Apps and further develop our monetization solutions for the global App developer community.
Foresight – Vserv in the next 2 years in terms of investment
With the funds, we will be able to start seeding our international expansion. Once we are able to built momentum we shall start looking for Series B in the next 12-18 months.
Has Vserv received any other funding apart from this investment?
We acquired an Angel investment of US$ 0.2 million in from Mr. Ajay Adiseshann in Jan 2010.
Mobile advertisement in India – present and future scope
As we all know small is big. Mobile Screen is the most accessible screen for today’s consumer. With better connectivity and feature rich phones and short format content, users are being drawn to consume content on the go. Today there are about 40 million + mobile internet users in India alone. The number of mobile internet users in India will be twice of number of PC internet users in a couple of years.
Mobile Internet Advertising market in India is estimated to be US$15-20 Million.
As per Gartner, worldwide mobile advertising revenue is set to reach $3.3 billion in 2011 and the mobile advertising market for Asia/Pacific and Japan is set to account for 49.2 percent of this market. The global In-App advertising market will grow from US$900 million this year to roughly $5 Billion in 2015 according to IDC. Taking these figures into consideration the future of mobile advertisement market in India looks bright.
How are you betting with the 3G technology?
3G is definitely a big booster for the Indian mobile advertising market. Because of more bandwidth and high speed data transfer, consumers will be accessing all their digital content on the mobile phone. Since the market goes where the consumer is, mobile will be a new medium for advertisers and publishers to reach out to their consumers.
How is your technology different from your competitors’?
Vserv’s unique App Ad-Wrapper technology for J2ME Apps has been well received by the global developer community as it can support over 500 phone models and allows both new and existing Apps to be Ad-Wrapped and monetized. Vserv is the first company globally to have developed a unique App Ad-Wrapper solution for J2ME Apps and is now extending this solution to Android Apps
Which are the top countries with maximum J2ME downloads
Currently the top countries with maximum J2ME downloads are China, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the U.K. and Vietnam.