Israeli startup TicTacTi offers in-video advertising for advertisers and publishers that tackles this problem. The company offers two categories of in-video ads: product placement (see image above) and standard ad units (see image to the left). In both cases, the ads are placed using a photomontage overlay layer that is detached from the original video source.

TicTacTi’s product placement ads can also be superimposed on live video streams. The advantage of its standard ad unit solution is that it works seamlessly with the most common ad servers and ad networks tags, which means advertisers can simply take their standard banners and place them in videos. TicTacTi uses a relevance algorithm to analyze a broad range of information from the web site, the video meta-data and also uses speech recognition in order to optimally place the right ad in the right video. Their ads can run on all browsers and all player types, including Microsoft’s Silverlight.

TicTacTi was founded in 2007 by online advertising veterans Eyal Margalit, who is the company’s CEO, and CTO Nir Hagshury. The two met when they worked at Hotbar, an online company providing free browser toolbars that collect users’ behavior and displays optimized pop-up ads. TicTacTi raised a seed investment of $550,000 in January 2008 from undisclosed backers and is currently in the process of raising a Series A round. It has already inked several contracts with publishers (AOL’s ICQ TV, NarrowStep, RayV), ad networks (Ybrant Digital, Right Media, DoubleClick) and broadcasters, and is currently finalizing its first contract with a major consumer brand, which it declined to name.

TicTacTi is not alone with its in-video ad services. OverlayTV is a startup that focuses on user-generated advertising, motivating users to make videos into clickable ads by sharing affiliate relationships with online retailers. SeamBI, also of Israel, offers in-video-advertising by placing an invisible “green screen” wherever product placement opportunities can be found. This solution, however, not only requires having the video file, re-editing it and re-hosting, but is less scalable and doesn’t support advertising in video streams.

All the above companies are less than four years old, so their fortunes remain to be seen. The big players seem to think that in-video-advertising is the next big thing. For instance, YouTube CEO Chad Hurley sees in in-video product placement a potential extension of the company’s current in-video ads:

“That becomes even stronger as we experience that in the player itself, and maybe at some point it makes sense to have something identified to click within the video space — it may be a little bit too random, and the user may not understand it in a good way — but I think linking to products and services, that’s a big opportunity in terms of direct response.”

If in-video-advertisement can generate higher click-through rates (and higher revenues), it has the power to start a whole new genre of online advertisement.

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To provide an adequate mobile Internet browsing experience, it’s not enough to shrink the web page into a size that fits on a mobile phone screen. A web site designed for the mobile Internet should consider the different keyboard, the lack of a mouse-like pointing device and the different context; if it can wait until a user gets home, it probably will. So, how do we make the mobile Internet work well on different handsets with different screen sizes and different operating systems?

One solution is offered by Israeli startup Moblica. Founded in December 2007 with a seed investment of $700,000 from angels, Moblica aims to bridge the gap between the richness of Internet services and the limitations of mobile devices to offer an iPhone-like experience on Java-enabled mobiles. Moblica takes relevant web sites and redesigns them to give customers a better mobile user experience.

After downloading the Moblica application, users are presented with an iPhone-like desktop that contains different mini applications, such as weather forecasts, RSS feeds, Picasa pictures and more. Navigating is easily done using the keys, and pages load very quickly. Currently only Picasa and RSS are available, but Moblica says many more are set to launch by the end of the September, along with a consumer web site. Moblica says it can work with content providers to develop a mini-application version of their site in one to two weeks. The downside is that the Moblica solution currently only works on Java-enabled phones. Still, seeing these efforts to improve the mobile web experience leaves me eager to throw away my fork.

Moblica’s competitors include WidSets by Nokia, which also provides a downloadable application that contains different mini applications. While WidSets currently offers many more sites, after seeing both applications in action, I can say that I definitely had a better user experience with Moblica. An additional competitor is Volantis, which provides automatic content adaptation services for mobile operators.

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It takes very advanced programming skills to develop even a simple mobile game. Moreover, enabling an application to run on the hundreds of available handset models is an endeavor fraught with technological barriers. The investment of time and resources needed to overcome these pitfalls keeps many individual mobile game developers from ever entering the market.

Help is on the way. Mo’Minis, which was launched back in January 2008 and has raised $400,000 in funding from a private group of investors, plans to offer a free end-to-end solution for both skilled and amateur game developers. The Mo’Minis Studio will include a graphical user interface for programming, allowing even non-programmers to create games from scratch. Once a game is ready, the Mo’Minis Studio will then port it to fit a wide range of handsets in real time — it will even have the option of being “packaged” with relevant characteristics (such as ads or language of the user interface) particular to the distribution channel and/or advertiser. The Mo’Minis Studio is still in stealth mode but according to co-founder Aviv Revach, is due to be available in the first quarter of 2009, together with an online community for game developers where they can co-develop games and receive support from Mo’Minis.

Mo’Minis is not the only company that’s recognized the opportunity to support mobile game developers. Playyoo and Frengo offer tools for customizing mobile games, changing levels or adding custom pictures, and Giant Steps and Base77 are among the companies offering outsourced porting services.

But the services that Mo’Minis plans to provide game developers range from development, through porting, all the way to distribution (which may be both on-portal and off-portal), a significantly more ambitious undertaking. And the Mo’Minis Studio will be offered for free to encourage the creation of a substantial amount of new mobile games; Mo’Minis plans to make its profits out of a percentage from the games’ distribution, whether if the game will be sold or will be supported by advertising.

Will this business model prove to be profitable? That remains to be seen, but successfully delivering such end-to-end solution would be a meaningful contribution to the entire mobile games ecosystem, one that could both make it easier for game developers to get their work to the mass market and result in a wider offering of mobile games overall.

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