I spoke today to Peter Farago, VP of Marketing for Flurry, which despite its very plain vanilla website is one of three or four key players aiming to capture the in-app advertising market.

Flurry is a 10 person, South of Market SF company that started as a unified mail client for a number of mobile devices (including a wide variety of Java handsets), and is now offering a comprehensive analytics package for iPhone developers. Backed by top-tier Venture Capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson, the company sees a strong market for advertising supported free apps, on iPhone, Android and other platforms. We agree.

Flurry’s philosophy is “to eat your own dog food”, and as developers of one of the more widely used mobile apps (3million+ downloads across a wide variety of platforms) they clearly know what they are talking about. For Java apps, they have got the analytics integration down to a 30 second process; for iPhone however, it requires an integration of the Apple SDK with Flurry’s own custom libraries, a similar process to that being pushed by Medialets, a close competitor.

Flurry intends to launch their advertising injection technology in early 2009. Their focus will be on claiming the integration piece on the app developers side, and are open to working with other, established networks, including AdMob for inventory fill. The strategy reminds me a bit of an iPhone version of the Rubicon Project – one of the more talked about tech startups here in LA.

I was impressed with Flurry’s vision and knowledge of the space. This company will be one to watch very carefully as the iPhone ad market unfolds.

For more articles like this, subscribe to the AppCraver RSS feed.

category: Breaking News