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Make sure you’ve registered for MobileBeat, our mobile conference.

I think it’s going to be fun, because we’ve gathered all the significant mobile players under same roof: Carriers, handset manufacturers, operating systems, content providers, top investors, and leading start-ups. We’ll have cocktail party to cap it off. We’ve got just a few tickets left.

Our latest addition is Bart Decrem, of Tapulous, which owns the most successful iPhone application to date: Tap Tap Revenge, a game that is a cross between Guitar Hero and Dance Dance Revolution. He will let us know what it’s like to be in trenches of the iPhone furor, tell us what apps have been successful (it’s music, stupid), and how he plans to keep the lead by maneuvering within Apple’s software developer terms.

We’ll also have some notable first looks at some data provided by companies focused on iPhone traffic trends, such as Pinch Media and Medialets. I’ll try not to spill a the beans here, but the numbers they’re seeing are quite profound.

Get your tickets to MobileBeat here. The fun starts at 9:30am, with a special pre-event discussion for developers (though you must sign up separately with Jacob Mullins for that). Regular programming will start at 11am sharp.

Over the last five years, we’ve seen a staggering creation of wealth by two companies with mobile device strategies: Apple (which owns the iPod and iPhone) and RIM (which owns the blackberry).

Their success comes even as the major operators have stagnated — the big three have created almost no value at all.

Below is a chart of the stock performance of Apple and RIM, compared to the Nasdaq over the past five years. They’ve grown about 1,500 percent, compared to Nasdaq’s (the blue line) anemic 33 percent. You’ll also see that Sprint (in green) has actually had negative growth. AT&T and Verizon haven’t done much better.

Consider, for a second, the numbers. RIM has a mere 12 million customers, and it’s valued at $65 billion. Sprint has more than 52 million customers — more than quadruple RIM’s count — and yet is is valued at a $24 billion, or less than half. How can that be?

Well, after fees and other costs associated with its business, RIM is reportedly pocketing between $3 and $7 from every user every month — because it’s offering such a compelling service for professionals. More significantly, it shows the value in being able to manage partners. RIM has some 200 carrier partnerships. Few other device companies have mastered this — until now, with Apple.

Whereas RIM started with the business customer, and is moving over to serve the consumer, Apple is doing it the other way around. Apple has played impressively with managing partnerships, first in the music business, but now increasingly, with operators globally. Apple looked like it might go out of business some five years ago. But it’s now valued at $144 billion (and just announced record earnings and revenue).

The operators need to figure out how to exploit their networks more efficiently than just putting calls through. Increasingly, they are doing that, especially abroad. But are they doing it quickly enough? And how are they going to react to the success stories of Apple and RIM?

At our MobileBeat conference Thursday, we’ll be hearing from the operators, as well as some of the representatives and investors related to the device platforms — RIM, Apple, Android and Nokia.

At 9:30am, during our pre-event morning session targeted mainly for developers (note there is a seperate registration for this), we’ll be hearing from Matthew Fix (of Vodafone) and Sattya Mallya (of Orange), two of the more dynamic international carriers.

Then, at 11am, during our venture capital panel, we’ll hear from AT&T’s Rupert Young (pictured left), who leads the company’s business development, including strategic investing and M&A. He’ll be on a panel joined by Rick Segal, of the Blackberry Partner Fund, and Richard Wong of Accel Partners, as well as Shawn Carolan (left below), a managing director at Menlo Ventures. Carolan (left below), who we haven’t announced until today, is backer of TeleNav, a MobileBeat Top 30 mobile companies, which is one of the most popular mobile applications around. On the panel, we’ll be discussing the most attractive areas for investments.

Finally, in what could be our highlight panel, at noon, we’ll have Kleiner Perkins’ Matt Murphy, who is investing in the Apple iPhone ecosystem with the iFund, and Google/Android’s Rich Miner — representing two of the most exciting new entrants.

They’ll be joined by JH Kah, a representative from one of the more dynamic operators around SK Telekom. The Korean carrier now has 20 people in an office here in the valley, and has a $100 million fund it is investing. It’s looking to enter all kinds of areas — even, we hear, bricks and mortar retail. JH Kah (left) is a sharp guy. He says, only half-jokingly, that 3G really stands for “gambling, gaming and girls.” That’s where the money is on phones. The panel will be moderated by Michael Arrington of TechCrunch. It will also include Sam Altman, CEO of Loopt, one of the first social networking companies on the iPhone that exploits GPS. Here again, while Loopt initially signed deals with the major carriers to get distribution. But with the iPhone, the company no longer needs agreements with the carriers to get circulation: It gets distribution directly through the iPhone’s App Store.

The last batch MobileBeat tickets are on sale here.

Finally, thanks to our sponsors, Blackberry Partners Fund, Forum Nokia, Sun Microsoystems, Norwest Venture Partners, Amiando, Zanox, mTouch and Mippin for making this possible. If you’re interested in sponsoring the event, please contact Jacob Mullins.

We’ve added a special pre-event session to MobileBeat next Thursday, July 24.

This will be a free session for developers focused specifically on the trends we’re seeing on services platforms (Nokia’s OVI, for example) and operating systems (Apple’s iPhone, Google’s Android, etc.) and how they’re impacting developers writing mobile apps.

In addition, we’ve invited some operators to provide perspective on the challenges and benefits of building third party applications for their networks.

This session is meant to be an introductory session which will be followed by more specific topics to be explored at forums like Monday Mobile Monday (Fall) and Mobile 2.0 (November 2008.)

The session will run immediately before the MobileBeat programming, where we’re featuring a high-level group of panelists, experts and start-ups along with exclusive announcements.

We have limited space for this. If you’re interested, contact Jacob Mullins, provide your name and please write “Developers” in the headline. Even if you already have a ticket to MobileBeat, you’ll need to do this. We’ll send confirmation that you’re in.

Here are the details:

Subject: Overview of key trends in (a) service platforms and (b) operating systems impacting developers of mobile applications.

Time: 9:30am-10:30am

Why: Coffee and donuts!

Speakers:

Moderator: Gregory Gorman, Tertius (left) — Gregory is a consultant with more than two decades of experience in mobile (including at HP and Bell Atlantic). He is co-organizer of the Mobile 2.0 conference. His firm advises startups on business strategy, building mobile ecosystem partnerships and fund raising. Among his clients is Soonr, a MobileBeat best company nominee that lets you read documents on the go.

Matthew Fix, Vodafone Venture — Matthew is a principal at Vodafone Ventures, a $200M fund focused on mobile and digital media. He has invested in and is an active board observer for Amobee, Evolution Robotics, and Caringo. Previously, he was an investment manager at Intel Capital, where investments included Financial Engines, Datallegro, SpikeSource, BlackDuck, BayPackets (acquired by Genband) and Incesoft. He founded a small communications company while an undergraduate at UC Berkeley.

Satya Mallya, Director at Orange Labs — Mallya and his group in South San Francisco is responsible for innovation in mobile, road-mapping products, technology, terminals, personalization and emerging wireless standards. Satya is also responsible for managing the Orange Developer Center and hosts Edge and 3G base stations enabling developers to test their applications on Orange devices and network. Prior to joining Orange in 2002, Satya worked at Bell labs(now Lucent), Octel communications, Aspect Software, Caritasoft and Humanconnect

Dr. Richard Koo, SVP of Augmentation Services, Augmentum — Koo has over 15 years’ experience in designing, developing and deploying enterprise software systems. Prior to Augmentum, he was chief architect at Vitria Technology. At Vitria, Dr. Koo also oversaw Vitria’s offshore outsourcing partner in the development of a broad, multi-platform line of connectivity products. Before Vitria, Dr. Koo held senior engineering positions at Tibco Software and Sun Microsystems.

Mike Rowehl, SkyFire — Mike is an mobile entrepreneur, hacker and programmer. He’s now architect at mobile browser company, SkyFire. He’s the organizer and co-founder of the Silicon Valley chapter of Mobile Monday and co-organizer of Mobile 2.0. He’s the former Director of Technology at AdMob, and co-founder of Mowser (a mobile content adaption service sold to dotMobi in May of 2008).

After some tough decision-making, we’ve settled on the ten companies to present to the full audience on stage at MobileBeat next Thursday, July 24.

They’ve beat out far more than a hundred companies after several rounds of selection. They are as follows:

Applications:

• Kyte.tv — a live video company that lets you broadcast live video from a phone, and keeps it organized on a web site through a personalized player
• Loopt — a company offering location based applications for users of various carriers, including Sprint and Verizon.
• mBit — a P2P search and file-sharing technology for phones, overcoming standard MMS limitations to 300kb.
• Mig33 — a mobile application that’s seeing rapid global growth for its bundle of SMS text messaging, instant messaging and cheap calls.
  
• Strands — The company’s MyStrands Social Player is a music player that lets you discover new music, connect with people, and share your tastes with friends. It reports more than 40,000 weekly downloads (news about Last.FM scrobbling here).

Infrastructure/service

• Admob – a leading mobile ad network, serving billions of ad impressions monthly globally, and doing interesting analytics.
• Greystripe — lets developers insert ads on the fly into their mobile games, bypassing carriers and other ad incumbents.
  
• Myxer — Myxer helps manage delivery of digital media to mobile devices to both their community and for other sites/partners.
• Ontela — offers easy-to-use photo-taking and sharing technology that lets you upload media from cameras to PC; Offers white-labeled product to carriers.
• Skydeck — lets you analyze your phone calling behavior based on bills you get from your phone carrier, for example showing you the strength of your friendships.

These companies were culled from the MobileBeat Top 30 companies, all of which have been invited to MobileBeat to show their stuff.

The Top 30 remain our real focus, however, and that’s why they’re eligible for a few of the MobileBeat Tesla Awards (design at left; the brass awards will be ready by event day). Also, while each of the final ten will have five minutes to present, the remaining 20 will also have a chance, via our “wild card” option.

We’ve got a stellar Panel of Experts lined up to help with the judging process.

We’ve got some cool stuff lined up for the event (including some looks at early iPhone application and analytics data from pathbreaking folks like Medialets and Pinch Media), but the best part is that it will be great networking, with a cocktail party to close.

MobileBeat 2008 tickets can be bought here.

Finally, thanks to our sponsors, Blackberry Partners Fund, Forum Nokia, Sun Microsoystems, Norwest Venture Partners, Amiando, Zanox, mTouch and Mippin for making this possible. If you’re interested in sponsoring the event, please contact Jacob Mullins.

I’m delighted to announce three more panelists for MobileBeat2008, our mobile conference scheduled for July 24.

They are Jed Stremel, director of mobile at Facebook (pictured top left), Brandon Lucas, senior director of mobile business development (pictured middle) at MySpace, and Jason Devitt, chief executive of a new mobile start-up called Skydeck (bottom). They’ll be speaking on our panel about mobile vs. web moderated by Om Malik. We’ll be announcing one more person on this panel shortly, from Nokia. Notes on the panel below.

Social networks are driving more action on the mobile web right now than any other applications, and their efforts to customize for the mobile experience are a great example of the web vs. mobile issues this panel will discuss. MySpace and Facebook are leading the show with mobile apps that are really catching on fire. MySpace announced some mind-numbing figures today: Its mobile version more than doubled traffic in three months, apparently blowing through 3 billion page views. Don’t be surprised if Facebook announces its own big numbers shortly. In the meantime, Facebook today just came out with its own mobile version for the iPhone, featuring mobile instant messaging.

In his role at Facebook, Stremel oversees the company’s mobile strategy and operations, including an emphasis on an open platform. Stremel joined Facebook in 2005 from Yahoo, where he was active on Yahoo’s mobile access technologies. Prior to Yahoo, he worked at Tellme.

At MySpace, Lucas oversees mobile business development. His previous experience in mobile includes business development positions with Vodafone, U.S. Cellular and Walt Disney.

Aside from MySpace and Facebook, another social networking company that made our Top 30 list of best mobile companies is MocoSpace.

Devitt, meanwhile, developed Skydeck (which lets you track your calling data) while an entrepreneur-in-residence at iHatch, a venture capital firm focused on the mobile industry. Previously Devitt co-founded Vindigo, one of the first companies to publish content and applications for mobile phones in the U.S. Products included Mapquest Mobile, MovieGoer, and the Vindigo City Guide. We picked Devitt because he’s refreshingly outspoken on issues such as open networks, open devices, and open development platforms, and represents the start-up community well. He holds a U.S. patent related to location-based services (see his recent column for VentureBeat). He blogs at Brash.com.

Here’s more about the panel:

It will address one of MobileBeat’s big questions: How is mobile different from the Web, and how can developers exploit this difference?

Here are some of sub-themes the panel will grapple with:

• Developing application for Mobile is different from developing applications for the web. What are those differences and what does it mean for developers today, and long-term, as they write applications for mobile, and for companies managing their mobile/web strategies?
• The phone you carry is by your side wherever you go. It’s closer to the place you live. This leads to different forms of behavior and interaction. Given that, how do companies manage their web/mobile strategies? How do developers and consumer-focused applications deal with this?
• Example: America’s Next Top Model tamagotchi/avatar-based mobile game is “truly mobile.” Here’s how the game works: Users need to take care of the contestant they like, poke the one they don’t, and when a girl gets evicted on the TV show, she instantaneously disappears from the cell phones as well. Lesson: The game is not just an adaptation of the TV show for mobile, e.g. by short video clips. The cell phone is the ideal device for a tamagotchi - it needs to be with you all the time.
• The way you consume your information is different. Sportstap lets you consume mobile sports information much more efficiently than going to ESPN homepage.
• The phone knows where you are, what you’re during these times of day. A profile that it builds on you, plus demographic information from carrier — all this can be useful for mobile applications. Also, location technologies are all the rage right now.
• The classic example — almost cliche — is how you might be standing in line at a night club and a mobile alert from Coke would invite you to the front of the line if you respond.
• Mobile is a “lean-forward” experience. On a computer, you’re a surfer, looking for detail, it’s a lean forward experience compared to TV. When you’re on the phone, you’re probably on the go and you may in even more of a “lean-forward” experience.
• Also: You don’t share your phone with anyone. It will be more personalized.

Book your ticket for the MobileBeat2008 event here.

Finally, thanks to our sponsors, Blackberry Partners Fund, Forum Nokia, Sun Microsystems, Norwest Venture Partners, amiando, and Mippin for making this possible. If you’re interested in sponsoring the event, please contact Jacob Mullins.

After being in the US the last few months I attended the Mobile 2.0 Europe conference last Friday.

The Mobile 2.0 events are known for often being early in championing mobile issues that become more mainstream later. They’re also known for giving a variety of folks in the mobile ecosystem a place to meet and discuss things openly, a rare find in mobile. This time, panel discussions covered mobile social media, VCs & mobile, operators and open business models.

The experienced American and European organizers understand the mobile startup scene is global, with no real epicenter like Silicon Valley, yet.

Companies presented in three categories: 1) seed , 2) pre-series A and 3) post-Series A. Congratulations to the winners of those three categories: Rummble, Nimbuzz, and Zipipop, respectively.

Zipipop’s mobile service, called Zipiko, has a neat application, for sorting out your social life. The video is worth watching. And as for Rummble, it is a location-based discovery tool, and I liked it better than Whrrl. We covered Nimbuzz, the mobile communications kitchen sink, here.

Another company from the seed category that caught my eye is the voice-service dial2do. Voice-activated services have a clear value proposition, and CEO Ivan MacDonald has produced a pair of powerpoint slides demonstrating it. The company is a phone service for “hands-free” users. It lets them text, email and perform other services while they are driving.”

I’ve been convinced about the value of these services for awhile. The car is a place where we spend hours each day, but our communications patterns in the car are so primitive. It’s an area waiting to be exploited by a new startup offering a new interface.

Voice-activated services were pushed this year at the industry conferences GSMA and the CTIA. There are already quite a few startups in the field, including: Tellme, free411, Vlingo, Jott, Spinvox and Dialdirections. In the US these services have still seen little traction relative to their potential, in my view. That may change due to legislation for hands-free driving in California and elsewhere.

From the conference’s panel discussions, VentureBeat readers may have found the VC panel most interesting. The chairman of that panel, Tony Fish, sent me the link to his summary remarks and I took the liberty of sorting them, putting them in context and adding a summary.

The panel, which included representatives from Atlas Ventures, Stradbroke Advisors, HP and Debaeque Venture Capital, debated three main areas:

Mobile as an Investment:
Tony Fish confronted the panel with the decline in IPOs and asked them about the reasons. He subsequently dug deeper and asked why there were no notable exits in mobile. While the panel believed the innovation is good — it maintained that the mobile startups are very innovative (”at the product level the innovation is very high”) — it concluded the following:

– VCs cannot make money (in mobile) — the exits are not large enough given the risk and investment.
– Mobile competes with other more attractive investment opportunities.
– The VC industry is struggling with the current conditions on the financial markets.

B2C investments into mobile:
Applications that focus directly on consumers face too many hurdles. They still have a maze of operators to grapple with. Too few examples of large mobile successful exits (sales or IPOs) in the sector holds back investment in the sector. Past returns on investment in the segment are unsatisfactory. Among others, the panel gave two reasons behind the judgment: Mobile is fundamentally flawed — there are too many small channels in mobile right now (”channel friction”), which makes scaling very hard. Also, the VCs argued that they need a way around a revenue-sharing dependence on carriers. Carrier deals can easily take nine to twelve months to complete. This is too long.

However, two arguments were raised that brightened the mood of this rather somber setting. First, Tony Fish used the expression “know your audience before you exploit their data”. B2C companies having smart, sensitive marketing teams have a good understanding of user/consumer data and how it should be used. The panel saw B2C in mobile as potentially the “most intimate marketing channel” there is. Therefore, there’s a lot of promise in the segment, especially if someone cracks behavioral targeting. Second, the panel believed flat rate data and operator charges will give B2C a boost short-term.

Investments into enterprise:
The panel had a much rosier outlook on enterprise models. There was consensus that a clear business model exists: selling to larger companies. In particular, connecting things is of interest — meaning mobile startups with a service that creates an additional sales channel for already established businesses. If I remember correctly, an example given for an “additional sales channel” was a mobile service that lets the user directly print with a HP printer (”the existing business”) after a picture shot was taken.

Summary:
My impression not only from the panel, but from the talks I had, is that in Europe there is less enthusiasm about mobile right now than there is currently in the U.S., specifically in Silicon Valley, home of Apple and Google’s Android project. The conference did a great job of giving an overview of current issues in mobile. However, it put less emphasis on possible shifts in landscape. The Apple iPhone and Google Android projects were only touched on briefly. Also, I heard little of the arguments being put forward by the current-day optimists. So I am still wondering: Is now the right time to make it really big in mobile?

Check out MobileBeat2008, VentureBeat’s conference on July 24, where this is one of several questions we’re asking.

During the voting process for best mobile company (see our MobileBeat2008 voting page), we started to map the mobile landscape.

Led by Matthaus Krzykowski, a consultant at HmmAha, and getting feedback from other experts, we’ve segmented the main mobile sectors. The diagrams below illustrate our conclusions. They highlight the significant trends. We also classify a sampling of start-ups accordingly.

Note that we’ve placed a green arrow by the bubbles where we see the main momentum right now in the mobile industry, i.e., those areas most ripe for pillaging by start-ups. You’ll see the action tends to happen in sectors that are somewhere between their “early adoption” and “adoption” phases.

The diagrams are meant to be a starting point — we hope they’ll spark a debate among Venturebeat readers in the run up to our MobileBeat conference, where we’re commited to asking the larger questions. Specifically, we’re interested in your comments on the following:

• Do you agree with our assessment of segment adoption?
• What are the current challenges to a wider adoption in some segments?

Ringtones, wallpapers etc. represent a large proportion of the mobile data being transmitted on wireless networks today. Personalization has been an undisputed meta-trend for 10 years and therefore scores “off the charts” status. Additionally, ringtones are one of the main drivers of mobile advertising.

However, lately there’s been relatively little innovation in the segment and modest increase in overall traction. Therefore we did not put an arrow indicating a trend here. A notable exception may be Modu, a company that produces a mobile computer module (image left) that can be slipped in and out of different devices. If you want a qwerty keyboard, for example, you slip the mobile module into a device with such a keyboard, etc. It got a lot of press at the last big U.S. mobile industry conference, the CTIA. We agree with Om Malik: If Modu isn’t the company that pulls off this innovation, its efforts nevertheless point to a promising trend that someone else will exploit.

There’s also the possibility of a “personalization trend” for mobile internet interfaces and instant messaging (both of which we deal with below). There are many personalized mobile homepage features, for example.

Mobile Shopping
Mobile shopping services are mostly in the incubation phase, as far as we know and from what experts tell us. The mass audiences have not caught on yet. Keep in mind that we’re downplaying mobile services that are driven mainly from the PC web, such as Amazon’s efforts to push sales on mobile phones from its popular website. Let us know if we’re missing something there.

Mobile Money
Like personalization and other categories on this chart, mobile money has been talked about for years, yet it remains an enigma — it seems compelling, but it’s underused. Perhaps here’s why: In the U.S., where consumers, businesses and banks are comfortable with credit cards, mobile phone adoption has been relatively weak. Abroad, where mobile habits are more advanced than in the U.S., the credit industry infrastructure is relatively behind. However, over the past two years, considerable investments have been made in this segment. Obopay’s funding comes to mind here. Quite a few banks around the world have also been experimenting with mobile payments — but unsurprisingly concentrating on offering mobile banking services. Also, the arrival of mobile billing services like Bango can be seen as a success as they enable mobile billing for the long tail. Before, there were few ways for publishers to bill.

Overall, we’re hearing this segment isn’t seeing much traction in most places around the world. Can anyone clarify this mystery for us?

Mobile Advertising
For some TV genres, SMS is at the core of the value proposition. Also, it’s the main mode of transaction for a lot of mobile content. Therefore we see SMS mobile advertising as “off this chart,” even though other forms of SMS mobile advertising aren’t seeing as much usage. Games/video advertising is also seeing promising signs.

The “ad platforms” segment, however, produced the most intense debate among the experts. Broadly, there are two camps — one arguing that mobile advertising is somewhere between incubation and early traction, the other arguing it’s at the more advanced stage of “acceptance.”

The “skeptics” point to the actual market revenue, which they say is somewhat modest. There is consensus that mobile advertising market revenues are somewhere between $100-200 million worldwide. That’s small, these “pessimists” argue. The sector still needs to take off. The other camp, the “optimists,” point to where usage and mobile advertising has come from. Three years ago, the assumption was that users didn’t want to see advertising on their mobile phones, and advertising was almost non-existent. Since then, ad impressions served have seen “amazing” growth.

Leading ad platform Admob documents its monthly progress in ads served. For us, its growth and the growth of the other ad platforms in the last months is one of the five most interesting mobile trends we see. The growth of ad platforms overall will help more companies monetize their growing “off-deck” traffic, or traffic they get when mobile phone users access them from the browser. Which side of the debate are you on ?

Mobile Health
There are some interesting prototypes being built these days and some trials being run in hospitals. Watching the keynote last month by Apple CEO Steve Jobs at Apple’s developer forum — which included health enterprise apps for the iPhone — we were left intrigued about this segment. Any of you have thoughts on this?

Mobile Entertainment and Mobile News
These two segments are dominated by carriers, and their control of phone “decks.” To a lesser degree, services by established companies branching out to mobile have also emerged (like CBS Mobile or the Weather Channel). Mobile games and video downloads come particularly to our mind. Read the rest of this entry »

Advertising on mobile phones is a trying market. Americans have been slow to surf the mobile web, in large part because dominant carriers have made browsing the web so painful.

But one young company, Admob, is showing impressive results despite all this, according to interviews and an investigation into the overall ad market. Admob puts ad banners on mobile web pages run by companies like ESPN, CBS and Weather Underground. Based on its current performance, the company is getting gross annual revenues of $42 million, according to our back-of-the-envelope math.

The San Mateo, Calif. company declined to comment on our math, but I’ll explain below how I derived it. I’m also assuming Admob keeps only a third of the revenue itself, giving the rest back to its publisher clients. This is a conservative assumption. Its rate card says it keeps 40 percent, but market analysts say Admob cuts its larger clients a better deal. That gives Admob about $14 million annually.

Why is $14 million something to get excited about? Well, in part, it’s because the industry is by most accounts about to embark on break-neck growth. The U.S. market for mobile display advertising is expected to more than double each year through 2011, exploding to $1.2 billion by 2012, from about $100 million this year, according Yankee Group analyst Linda Barrabee. She prepared one of the better analyses of revenue data I’ve seen to date (she drew on multiple sources of data in an industry where there’s no really good data). I don’t have a link to her report, but hope to post it here in an update. Her numbers do not include ads displayed by your phone’s search engine results.

So Admob has a sizeable chunk of the market. And it’s got exposure in foreign markets where the mobile web is seeing stronger growth.

Now on to the math. Here’s how I approximate the $42 million for Admob’s annual run-rate:

1) Costs: Admob has about 80 employees. The cost of a fully loaded employee is somewhere between $150,000 and $200,000 in Silicon Valley, once you consider salary, healthcare, laptops, their share of server costs, etc. Let’s assume $180,000 for Admob, as it’s backed by the respected venture firm Accel Partners. That gives you a cost of about $1.2M a month. Now, we’ve also heard on solid sourcing that the company has just “broken even.” That suggests the company is making about $14.4 million for itself, and making $42 million or so in topline.

However, to be sure, let’s triangulate the costs with what we know about revenue.

2) Revenue, based on public data, and conservative assumptions: Admob publishes its monthly impressions. In the U.S. they’re at about 1.5 billion. Also, we know that the overwhelming majority of impressions are direct response, that is, paid only if someone clicks through, not on a CPM basis. Let’s assume a click-through rate of about 0.75 percent, which is a fair assumption in the U.S. Let’s estimate a revenue per click (CPC) of 18 cents, which is also ballpark considering U.S. norms. That gives the company about $2 million a month in revenue. However, there’s a caveat. A portion of those AdMob impressions are paid on CPM, and that does tend to pay better. I’ll assume, based on what I’ve heard, that Admob gets about 20 to 30 percent of its U.S. business on this basis. So you do some subtraction and then some addition back in, and we’re at about $2.2 million in the U.S. give or take. Meantime, the U.S. only makes up 45 percent of total impressions. To achieve the annual $42 million topline estimated above, Admob would need to get global monthly revenue of $3.5 million, which is quite conceivable. We’re hearing rates in the UK are actually better than in the U.S., although Asian rates are still a fifth or sixth of the U.S. (The company’s latest stat report provides notable perspective on global trends: U.S. impressions for Admob grew a meager 1 percent in May compared to April, while impressions in Indonesia soared by 46 percent as Admob turned on ads for Friendster, the largest social network in Asia.)

Conclusion: I might be off a million or two on the annual figure, but it’s clear Admob has gotten itself a nice little business, despite the bearish comments made by some people about a weak trend in mobile advertising. Indeed, we’re early in the game. With mobile advertising about to grow so quickly, Admob looks headed to IPO-type revenues within three years.

[Update: This piece has sparked a debate. HipMojo has a different, more critical point of view, while Mukund is more supportive of my piece with his look at the Indian market. Separately, consider coming to Mobile Monday this evening, where I'll be moderating a panel including Admob's head of marketing, Jason Spero in San Francisco. We'll be focused on measuring mobile web traffic and where it's coming from.]

Admob is a nominee for best company at MobileBeat, our mobile conference on July 24.

Voting for the best mobile companies has ended as of noon. We’ll be announcing more details about the winners after the holiday weekend.

Winners will be invited to MobileBeat, our conference on July 24 about the tectonic changes happening in the mobile industry.

Mippin, a mobile service which lets users more easily interact with content on mobile phone, is sponsoring martinis for the closing cocktail party event.

We also have a few more speakers to announce:

Michael Arrington (pictured left): Editor of the popular tech blog TechCrunch, was formerly a corporate attorney at O’Melveny & Myers and Wilson Sonsini, working with technology companies, where clients included Apple. Prior to founding TechCrunch in 2005, he worked various start-ups, including RealNames, Achex, Zip.ca, Pool.com and Razorgator.

Deep Nishar (pictured left): As Google’s Director of Product Management for Asia-Pacific, Nishar runs Google’s mobile efforts there. More broadly, he develops Google’s entire Asian product strategy, manages development efforts and guides key strategic partnerships for greater China, Japan, Korea, Australia, India, as well as other countries in the region. Previously, he served as Google’s Director of Wireless Products, where he oversaw the development of innovative products like Google Maps for mobile and Gmail for mobile devices and the formation of partnerships with industry-leading mobile operators, device manufacturers, and software providers. Prior to joining Google, Nishar worked at Siebel Systems, Patkai Networks (a company he founded), The Boston Consulting Group, and Cummins Engine Company.

Om Malik (below): Founder of the GigaOmni Media blog network, and a leading writer on the telecom industry. Malik has more than 15 years of experience as a journalist covering technology and business news, including writing for the Red Herring, Forbes.com and more recently Business 2.0 magazine. His contributions have been published in The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, and MIT Technology Review. Malik wrote the book Broadbandits: Inside the $750 Billion Telecom Heist. GigaOmni publishes blogs GigaOM, NewTeeVee, WebWorkerDaily, Earth2Tech & OStatic.

We’ve already announced several speakers. More coming soon.

Here’s a look again at the 80 nominees for best mobile companies.

Tickets are selling quickly. You can get them here.

[Photo of Arrington by Brian Solis]

Earlybird tickets to MobileBeat, our conference focused on the tectonic changes happening in the mobile industry, are on sale until tomorrow — so move quickly.

We’ve got a great lineup of speakers shaping up. I expect the most valuable part will be the networking in the hallways between sessions. The mobile industry has long been fragmented: Developers have largely been shut out of the platform discussion, because of regulations that have resulted in a quasi-monopoly among carriers. Two worlds have existed, remotely.

But now that’s changing, as Google and the iPhone, together with new open wireless spectrum, are forcing the carriers to slowly change their tune. Developers are now focusing more energy on mobile apps.

We’ve finished selecting 80 nominees for best mobile companies, and readers are voting on them now — and the winners will be invited to be part of the event. We’ll have a cocktail party afterward for people to schmooze. A more exact agenda will be released shortly, but mark your calendar for July 24. We’ll start late morning, and will keep this a jam-packed half-day event.

We’ve already announced several speakers. We’re happy to announce the latest additions: Dan Farber, CNET’s editor-in-chief (top left), and Tim Chang, a partner at Norwest Venture Partners, who specializes in wireless investments (lower left). More to come.

Early-bird tickets here. The discount ends tomorrow.

Location-based app maker Bones in Motion is looking to take a bite out of Garmin and other GPS manufacturers, offering up a service that lets runners and bikers user their GPS-enabled cell phones to track distance, speed, and how their training is progressing. Based out of Austin, Texas, the five-person outfit currently has deals signed with Sprint and Verizon, and is in talks to bring the service to other major carriers.

Founded by Andrew Graham and John Warner in 2003, the duo originally envisioned a location-based app for tourism that would trigger relevant content when a visitor passed a certain location. But realizing that GPS on cell phones was still very much in a nascent stage, and that out-of-towners are not among the earliest of adopters, they shifted their focus to a demographic that is always eager to adopt new tech: Athletes.

The application, launched in February of 2006 and dubbed BiM Active, is purchased by an over-the-air download and costs a monthly subscription of $5.99 to $9.99 depending on the carrier. Once purchased, BiM Active tracks a runner or biker via GPS and calculates distance, speed, caloric burn, route, elevation, weather, degree of difficulty and allows you to wirelessly upload all this content all the data a central server, so you can show off your monster run to fellow enthusiasts. The program can also be used by snowboarders, hikers, rowers — pretty much any activity where it’s helpful to know how far you traveled and how quickly you did it.

The program gives some easy branding opportunities for companies in the same space. Currently, the program can be found at the Runner’s World website with the Runner’s World brand slapped on top. The company hopes to reach out and strike further sponsorships deals with other athletically-inclined brands.

Bones in Motion was, according to co-founder Andrew Graham, “one of the first LBS apps to go up on Sprint and Verizon. The carriers were looking for a very friendly face to put on location-based technology, something not so Big Brother.” The program has also garnered a couple of awards, winning the Navteq Global LBS Challenge in 2005, and the Brew Developer’s Award in 2007. The company has received only angel funding up until this point, with no institutional support, though Graham says that the company has been offered term sheets. However, Graham says, “Our next big carrier deployment will mean we’ll be able to cover 75 percent of the US subscriber base, so we’ll be getting to the point where it makes sense to get institutional support.”

Compared to what’s already on market, the most obvious advantage of BiM Active is price. A basic GPS unit for bicyclists from Garmin starts at around $250, or around 41 months of service from BiM Active. However, there are several things that may give hardcore athletes pause. BiM uses United States Geological Survey data, supplemented by GPS, to track altitude which is accurate to 10-20 meters. Garmin and others use barometric pressure combined with GPS to give altitude readings, which are accurate to about 3 meters. BiM Active also doesn’t have support for via Bluetooth heart rate monitors such as those put out by Alive Technolgies or Polar, which any athlete in training is going to want to see (though the application does support imported heart rate data from third-party applications). While runners probably won’t mind keeping their phone on an arm strap or pants pocket, bicyclists like to mount GPS units on their handlebars for easy viewing, something that may be difficult with a cell phone. Also worrying is that traditional GPS units are weather-proofed; cell phones, as I can personally attest to, are not.

Still, as GPS continues to appear on more and more cell phones, location-based apps that help track fitness training are going to become more popular, and Bones in Motion is well-positioned to be at the forefront of that particular niche.