Unhandled Exceptions is a (soon to be) weekly web video series where each week a company, an individual or several individuals who are trying to do something different or interesting in Sri Lanka are interviewed. The types of people interviewed here range from startups to nonprofit organizations and even people in various disciplines such as sports or drama. This is done to give some much needed exposure to those who are interviewed and to promote innovation in post war Sri Lanka. If you are, or if you know of a business or individual(s) who can really benefit from this, please contact Adnan Issadeen via adnan.issadeen@live.comor via mobile (0773833241) or leave a message on the Facebook page www.facebook.com/techrumble. You can find out more about Adnan at @area51research or http://identyme.com/adnanissadeen
Summary. Adnan Issadeen sits down to chat with Dilshan and looks at the world of Addictive Mobility, a startup competing directly with Google in the mobile ad space. From his early days in Sri Lanka to the creation of his startup to the tech behind it that lets them compete strongly against Google and privacy issues it’s all here.
In this week’s interview I catch up with Dilshan to talk about the US based startup “Addictive Mobility” that he co founded. I met Dilshan first at Refresh Colombo which is fast becoming an event to meet amazing people and investors and potentially your future co founders. His talk for the day on how Addictive Mobility solves the mobile advertising issues blew my mind and ruined the live blog with an information overload (in the very best way possible). Dilshan, a Sri Lankan entrepreneur who has been the first in a number of things here, which you can find out in the first video, is the type of person who always tries to build their own solution if they can’t find one that satisfies their requirements.
Addictive Mobility is a result of an unaddressed need in the mobile ad space. With smartphones on the rise and many companies realizing that if they are building a product or service they need to try and be mobile enabled as soon as possible, mobile ads has become a huge space to play in. The problem is however, that mobile ad networks are for the most part, implementing things completely wrong. From my experience I have seen mobile ad networks simply throwing up ads based on feedback it has received or based on the highest bidder for a certain keyword. This for me feels like people trying to port a web ad experience into a mobile device but without realizing the key differences of the two platforms. Then there are ad networks like AirPush who try different ways of displaying ads where they actually try and push ads to the notification bar of the Android device. This is absolutely the wrong way to tackle the ad problem in the mobile space. Forcing people to see ads or essentially turning an entire device into an ad supported one creates misunderstandings and even an animosity towards ad supported apps as a whole. We have already seen how being overly intrusive can backfire such as in the case of the web and even Twitter’s fiasco of the “Dick bar”.
Addictive Mobility looks at this from a much more elegant perspective where their platform within an application is aware of the unique nuances of a mobile experience. Where location could be changing every moment, content within the app could be changing every second, the software developed by Addictive Mobility is built to take advantage of this enormous amount of information to serve the most relevant ads possible. I won’t delve into specifics here since that’s what the videos are there for but rest assured, it will be an amazing look into a world we don’t usually hear of.
A side note from Dilshan – It’s all about the language and the data.
Once you’ve watched the videos you ought to have a better idea of how Addictive Mobility depends on the knowledge of the various intricacies of a language to decide which ads to serve. To do this Dilshan told me in a conversation after the interview how dependent this technology is on a massive amount of data. His advice for Sri Lankans was, if anyone can build a platform where people generate content unique to the country, for example in Sinhala (read “singlish”) , and in large amounts, that would prove to be extremely valuable as a source of information in the future for ad networks being built to adapt to all nationalities or cultures. The take away from this? There’s a big opportunity that can be found in this space if you control the data. And while this may seem obvious on the surface, the interesting fact is that not many people are doing anything to really satisfy this need.
If you want to get in touch with Dilshan you can get through to him via dilshan@addictivemobility.comand that is something you might want to do if you want advice on how to get started here.
