Bangalore-based mobile advertising company mKhoj has adopted a new avatar with as InMobi. In 2007, the company had started operations as a local mobile search service (hence the khoj in the name, which means search) but then moved onto mobile advertising. InMobi, as a name, is perhaps more acceptable given the companys global aspirations. After its expansion in South Africa, where it claims to have seen 5000% growth in monetisation and 3000% growth in network inventory over 6 months, inMobi is now expanding in Europe. Do note that such massive percentile expansions are likely to be on a very small base, and only absolute figures would be of any relevance. Last quarter saw it launch operations in UK. Now, it has set up a presence in France, Spain, Germany and Italy, and claims to have a presence in 23 countries. Expansion into new markets and to take a competitor like AdMob head on would require funds, particularly for building a sales presence. InMobile has offices in Palo Alto, California; Bangalore, India; Mumbai, India and Singapore. Admob hired Mahesh Narayanan as Country Head for India, InMobi's home turf. As of June 2009, InMobi had some 700 publishers. InMobi had raised $7.1 million Kleiner Perkins, Caufield & Byers and Sherpalo Ventures last year. Local Language Ads For International Expansion InMobi made its network local language compatible May, with UTF-8 encoding technology rolled out to provide advertisers the ability to upload creatives in local languages, in respone to a demand for the same. The company told Medianama that South East Asian countries such as…
