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The company, which launched in preview mode today, gives people a simple polling tool that makes it easy to get feedback about a decision between different choices. Users can ask a question and supply images using bookmarklet tool, which also allows you to supply a price for that item. Or users can paste in a URL as another option. The question can then be shared to the Maybe community and also out to Twitter, Facebook and to friends via email.

When it comes time to vote, a user can easily choose between each option, add their own comments to a discussion forum or  share it again as a “Re-Maybe.” There doesn’t appear to be a time limit. The results of the vote tallies are not displayed until a person votes.

Hamoui told me many people just resort to sending each other emails with a list of links to get feedback about what choices to make. That can be inefficient because people aren’t able to see all the choices side by side. Maybe is trying to simplify the process of making informed decisions.

“There are a lot of places to discover things and a lot of places to get more detailed information about stuff but the general process of making a decision isn’t documented anywhere or facilitated,” said Hamoui.

Maybe is still a work in progress and doesn’t have a mobile interface, which is a top priority. The site is also working to add research tabs, which will automatically pull in relevant online information about the question a person is trying to answer. That speaks to Maybe’s larger ambition to become a resource for helping everyone make any decision they need to make. So it won’t just be multiple-choice decisions, but other types of questions like putting choices in ranked order. And it will help people discover options in the first place, when they’re not sure what they should be choosing from. Ultimately, Maybe will try to provide people a way to understand the rationale and reasoning that goes into other people’s decisions, which can help guide a user’s choices.

I’m not sure how big it will be initially, but I think Maybe can find an audience. For a lot of decisions, you can still just get quick feedback by going to Facebook or Twitter or using mobile apps like Thumb. But those aren’t designed like Maybe to help choose between different options. Having something built around decision-making can be useful for people, especially as it evolves and takes on more use cases and provides more information and resources. Many people are piecing together tools to make good decisions, but they’re not always sure they have all the right information. It would be nice to have a place that provided more services to ensure people ultimately have confidence in whatever decision they need to make.

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From their AdWords dashboard, advertisers can now choose to have their display ads appear in mobile apps. They can also now target specific device models, manufacturers or app categories in the Google Play and Apple App Store. The AdWords campaigns on AdMob will only cover cost-per-click campaigns for now but will incorporate CPM campaigns later.

There’s no guarantee that this will solve the mobile monetization problem, but it should make it much easier for certain advertisers to give mobile a try, providing them access to more than 350 million mobile devices in AdMob’s network. And for AdWords advertisers who stick with mobile, they can manage all of their campaigns from one interface. This is big news for mobile developers and publishers, many of whom are still struggling to make big money from mobile.

Many advertisers have been slow to embrace mobile, out of ignorance or inertia, while some are still aren’t convinced of mobile’s efficacy or haven’t set aside a budget for mobile ad spending. And with the explosion in mobile, there’s been a lot more supply of mobile ad inventory than demand.

But advertisers are realizing that users are spending more and more time on mobile devices, which are even more personal than computers and can provide more context for targeting such as location. Consumers spend about 10 percent of their time with mobile devices, but only 1 percent of U.S. ad spend currently goes to mobile, Meeker said. That suggests there’s a big upside to mobile advertising once advertisers start catching up to where their audiences are.

The news comes shortly after the two-year anniversary of Google’s formal $750 million acquisition of AdMob and shows how it is incorporating the mobile ad network into its existing businesses. Google in the past year has brought AdMob’s mobile app inventory to the Doubleclick Ad Exchange and also shifted AdMob’s CPC campaigns to an AdWords-style auction. Advertisers can now also serve ads from Doubleclick for Advertisers into AdMob’s network. The latest step has been a long time in the making but it shows why Google was interested in paying so much for AdMob. It now has a better way to take its success in online advertising and convert that into more mobile ad revenue.

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That’s what a team ex-AdMob and Google scientists believe they’ve put together with their stealth start-up Drawbridge, which is finally going public today with $6.5 million in funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital. The interest from these top VCs underscores the potential breakthrough Drawbridge and its founder, former AdMob lead scientist Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan, have hit upon.

Drawbridge’s self-learning algorithm takes a mountain of consumer behavior data from both online and mobile ad requests and then tries to determine through an inference model if two users from a desktop and mobile device are the same person. After a while, Drawbridge believes it can achieve a high level of confidence that it can basically follow one person between devices.

The system requires a number of observations to work  and needs to be reset regularly to ensure it’s got the right person. But when it works, it can boost conversions – post event clicks – by 3 to 10 times, Sivaramakrishnan told me.

Sherlock Holmes inferences

“We are essentially creating a mobile cookie, a cross-device cookie, once we tie it across devices,” she said. “The bar is very high on our ability to make associations. It’s almost like Sherlock Holmes, using all implicit inferences.”

This could be a big boon for advertisers, many of whom have resisted embracing mobile in a big way. Now, they can have more confidence that they’re reaching the right consumers. For instance, a consumer who visits a travel site on their computer may stop short of buying a flight. But with Drawbridge, an advertiser may be able to hit that same person with a timely ad to help them complete their purchase. This could mean more return on investment for advertisers and higher CPMs for publishers.

“Mobile advertising is a decade behind Internet advertising in both targeting and scale,” said Matt Murphy, partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers in a statement. “Drawbridge will close that gap by combining the best of both worlds to deliver industry-leading targeting and ROI across the entire digital landscape.”

Filling holes in mobile advertising

This also fills in some holes in mobile that have befuddled advertisers. In mobile, it’s been hard to replicate cookies. There hasn’t been the same kind of data exchanges like BlueKai as well. And now, with Apple banning the use of UDID, there’s one less way for advertisers and developers to target mobile users.

Sivaramakrishnan said Drawbridge can scale up and become an important tool for advertisers. But she said consumers should also be on board because the system doesn’t use personally identifiable information. And it will include an opt-out option for consumers. Still, this will probably raise more concerns from privacy hounds, who are increasingly speaking out against the ways advertisers track consumers.

A more business-related question is how Sivaramakrishnan’s old bosses will respond. Sivaramakrishnan, a Stanford PHd, was part of the team that built AdMob’s ad engine, before it got sold to Google. Many of the 20 people at Drawbridge came over from AdMob and Google.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock user Nimblewit.

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Well, Xyologic, a mobile app search firm, has come up with what it says is the first break down of mobile advertising on Android apps, showing that Google’s AdMob is well ahead of rival ad providers. Xyologic found that half of the top 1,000 apps in Android Market use an advertising SDK and 22 percent of all apps use more than one advertising SDK. Of those apps that use advertising, 89 percent of the apps use AdMob, well ahead of any other challenger. These apps also represented 89 percent of all downloads in October for the top apps with advertising.

That AdMob does well on Android may not sound too surprising considering Google owns both Android and AdMob. But I’ve been told before that AdMob sees Android as just another platform and doesn’t provide any special functionality for Android devs. And AdMob was the top mobile advertising network before it was purchased by Google.

The second most popular mobile advertising provider was Millennial Media, whose SDK was used in 34 percent of the top 1,000 apps, which represented 48 percent of all downloads in October among the top apps. It was followed by InMobi, which had presence in 22 percent of the top apps that use advertising. These apps represented 26 percent of all downloads of top apps with ads in October.

AdMob’s ad exchange AdWhirl was fourth with 19 percent presence on Android apps that utilize advertising followed by Mobclix with 15 percent. The overall numbers don’t add up to 100 percent because apps can work with more than one advertising company.

The rest of the market includes mobile ad exchange networks AdMarvel, Smaato, Burstly, Mopub, Nexage, Fiksu, and mobile ad network Jumptap who each make up less than 3 percent of the overall market share. They serve the remaining 15 percent of the top apps that use advertising. This group represented 26 percent of all downloads in October among the top downloaded apps with mobile advertising.

Xyologic said it came by its numbers by evaluating the top 1,000 most downloaded apps on Android for October and screening these apps for advertising SDKs. These apps have more than over 340 million downloads in total, representing 54 percent of the downloads in October.

It’s hard to know if these numbers are completely accurate. IDC tried to make some estimates in 2009 on the overall mobile ad market and who the biggest players were but it was criticized for its methodology. But the fact that AdMob is used in so many Android apps shows that the purchase of AdMob was worth it, especially now that mobile advertising is expected to grow to $20.6 billion by 2015, according to Gartner.

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What this means is that in the coming weeks when Google looks at how to decide which ads to feature, it will consider how well a site is tailored for mobile devices, things like whether it works well for touch, is made for smaller screens, has shorter load times and avoids Flash. To be sure, advertisers who adhere to these guidelines won’t be guaranteed better visibility. But connecting to mobile optimized landing pages that perform better in AdWords will now be a factor in determining ad placement. This will only affect advertisers who advertise on mobile and won’t affect ads served on PC browsers.

This is interesting because Google rarely talks about what affects keyword quality scores in AdWords. Advertisers bid on ad placement based on keywords, but Google looks at a range of factors like click-through rates and ad quality to determine what goes where. So ads that are considered to be beneficial to users can be featured higher than ads whose owners sometimes bid more in AdWords.

This isn’t the first time Google has pushed advertisers to optimize for mobile. Last November, it said it would limit ad serving to mobile devices if advertisers directed people to landing pages with a lot of Flash content. And it’s put out a string of blog posts on the topic and released a simple tool for businesses to build mobile sites. Now, it’s saying that good mobile landing pages aren’t just devoid of Flash but have other characteristics that appeal to mobile users. Those characteristics include prioritizing content and making layouts simpler. And it’s now putting some weight behind its suggestions.

Why does Google care about this? Well, it can encourage more people to click on ads if it can ensure that the landing pages look good on mobile devices. Google is, at its heart, about advertising, so it makes sense that it wants to improve the experience, which should ultimately benefit the bottom line. But it’s also a recognition that the web is different on mobile devices, and as people move toward smartphones and tablets, it requires some adjustment.

Google said it’s in the interest of advertisers and web publishers to embrace mobile optimization. Google has said early this year that 79 percent of top advertisers do not have a mobile optimized site. But a recent study found that 61 percent of users are unlikely to return to a mobile website that was hard to access from a phone. Mobile consultant Tomi Ahonen wrote today that jeweler Tiffany & Co. optimized its mobile website and found that sales of jewelry on its mobile website grew by 125 percent.

While Google has a stake in optimized mobile websites, it’s not a bad idea for publishers and advertisers to get on board. The world is going mobile and yet, it’s still surprising to see how many websites are not built with mobile users in mind. This is not just a lost opportunity to engage with a customer, but it’s potentially lost business as well.

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One area that’s getting the once-over is the company’s mobile advertising operation: Google has announced that it is moving all of its mobile web advertising to AdSense, while Admob — the mobile ad company it bought last year for $750 million — will becomes Google’s “primary, specialized solution for app developers.”

The news was first revealed in a blog post by Clay Bavor, product management director for mobile ads at Google. He notes that the move is another change in the reorganization that saw AdSense transfer all of its apps inventory to Admob earlier this year.

Bavor notes that the transition will be somewhat gradual — Admob will continue to serve ads to older, WAP-based mobile web sites; that service will discontinue at the end of this month, on September 30.

HTML5-based mobile web publishers, meanwhile, will have a bit more time to make the move. In fact, Bavor doesn’t specify a specify hard stop for that service: “For sites and ads made to be viewed on high-end devices (like iPhones and Android phones), the AdMob product will be around for a little longer, but we wanted to give mobile web publishers plenty of time to start the transition,” he writes.

The move is not a surprising one, given that there may have been some confusion in the market over which platform to use for what end. Indeed, Bavor admits as much himself: “Some of our customers have asked us whether they should use AdMob or AdSense, since there’s some overlap between the two,” he writes. Putting all the web inventory under AdSense also makes sense for advertisers who are looking to create a converged campaign between their mobile web and basic internet services — and gives Google a bigger base from which to work.

But on the other hand, it seems to further the separation that has developed between the two mediums of mobile apps and the mobile web — a separation that has come to be known as “apps ‘versus’ the mobile web.”

The trend among many publishers seems to be to try to bring the two closer together, rather than further apart, by creating mobile web sites that behave “like apps”, often alongside apps that interface more with updated web content.

The idea of having to go to two different places to work out advertising inventory seems to counter that kind of convergence — and is a step back from what was originally one of the strong selling points for Admob in the first place.

At the end of May, to mark the one-year anniversary of Google’s acquisition, Admob said that it was working across a network of 80,000 apps and web sites. But it is unclear how those proportions break down. It may well have been small enough that Google didn’t think that it would be too much of a pain to shift them to AdSense.

What is perhaps more the case is that the change will leave Admob as potentially a much smaller operation: figures from the end of last year from IDC estimated that of the $1 billion that Google was making in mobile advertising in 2010, only about $150 million was coming from apps. With the continuing boom in apps, that may have changed but it’s unlikely that it can now be outbalancing mobile web revenues.

For those who have been using Admob for mobile web advertising, the change looks like it will signal more fuss for them:

“We know that these sorts of transitions can cause our customers some extra work,” he admits. But he goes on to claim that the transition will also give those advertisers better technology and reporting, and better revenue.

Admob has seen big growth in the last year. As of May of this year, Admob was serving 2.7 billion ad requests every day from mobile devices, three times the amount of traffic it was seeing a year before.

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Note that this isn’t an exhaustive list of any and all acquisitions made by the companies, but it is a good lay of land in recent years. (Click to enlarge)

Infographic courtesy of G+.

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The move to HTML5 also enables more rich media opportunities for ads. Before, multimedia ads often redirected users to a landing site where rich media was displayed. But by incorporating HTML5 fully into the SDK, developers can do more rich integration in the ad itself, better transitions and full-screen interstitials on tablets. For instance, an ad can now incorporate more location information and direct people to nearby retail outlets right in the ad.

Mark Schaaf, engineering director for AdMob said the move to HTML5 also streamlines the amount of code that’s needed and can also mean less data is transferred, which is one concern about rich media ads. He said developers and publishers have been pushing for more rich media ads, which are more interactive and deliver more revenue from advertisers.

“The formats we have now are fine but we want to make mobile advertising great,” said Schaaf, one of AdMob’s first employees. “The way you do that is richer ads and giving users something they want to see and interact with.”

Schaaf said AdMob’s strength lies in its open platform, which allows developers to hit multiple operating systems easily. And that makes AdMob more attractive for advertisers because they can hit demographic groups across mobile platforms. Since its acquisition by Google, AdMob continues to roll and now boasts 50,000 apps on its network with 2 billion ad requests a day. Schaaf said hundreds of publishers are making more than $100,000 a month with AdMob.

Rich media ads are still a small part of the mobile ad mix but they’re capturing significant interest because they boast a lot of interactivity with users. A recent Volvo campaign by AdMob found multimedia ads led to almost a 10x improvement in click-through rates compared to traditional banner ads. Some of that may be the novelty of these ads but proponents like AdMob say that they represent a real opportunity to engage users and drive actions.

AdMob isn’t the only one working on rich media ads. Medialets also announced today that Adobe will integrate its mobile advertising platform software developer kit with Adobe’s Content Viewer in the Enterprise Edition of Digital Publishing Suite.  This will allow publishers to manage their targeted brand advertising inventory in digital publications on tablet devices. We’re still early in the rise of mobile rich media ads but it’s looking more like the ad units could be an important part of the revenue mix for mobile developers and publishers alongside traditional paid downloads and in-app purchases.

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