Briefs

COMPANY CLOSEST TO CREATING MONEY MACHINE IN MOBILE ONLINE ADVERTISING

By Elise Ackerman, Mercury News, 10/30/2007

Google and Yahoo see mobile search as the next frontier in Internet advertising. But as they begin building out their wireless homesteads, the founders of two of the Internet's most famous brands are bumping into a surprise competitor from their college days at Stanford University.

Brian Lent, 37, is chief executive of Medio Systems, which provides mobile search technology to telecom giants like Verizon and T-Mobile. Lent says Medio's behind-the-scenes approach gives the company a much broader reach than its rivals, whose popularity is threatening to carriers.

For example, it's Medio that helps Verizon's 64 million customers and T-Mobile's 27 million look up ring tones and mobile games from their phones in the United States.

In contrast, Google helped an estimated 6 million people search Google.com from their phones in August, according to M:Metrics, a mobile research firm. Yahoo helped an estimated 4 million people who used m.yahoo.com or Yahoo Go.

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Lent admits he missed the first boom in Internet advertising.

As a graduate student in the mid-'90s, he met Sergey Brin, soon-to-be Google's co-founder, while working on a research project called MIDAS (MIning DAta at Stanford).

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