InMobi Ropes In Sandeep Deshpande From Alibaba As India Head

Bangalore and San Francisco-based mobile ad network, InMobi has appointed Sandeep Deshpande as the country general manager for India and Vishal Nongbet as business head of brands.

Their mandate will involve helping the company to grow both sides of the business – adding publishers and application developers to increase supply (advertising inventory) and also to bring advertisers and brands on board.

These developments indicate InMobi's (then mkhoj) interest to scale up business in home market after having made a strong presence internationally in the mobile ad network space.

Till recently Deshpande was with Alibaba.com as country general manager. Nongbet was general manager - brand (Mumbai Mirror & Times Of India - West).

An MBA from Pune University, Deshpande has almost two decades of experience business operations and marketing. Earlier he has worked with Draft Worldwide, Birla AT&T, Rediff.com, Level Up! Games Inc and Yahoo! India. An Alumnus of IIM Ahmedabad, Nongbet has previously worked with Pepsico India, Bennett Coleman & Co. Ltd, Kodak India Private Limited, Mahindra & Mahindra and Webaroo's SMSGupShup.

InMobi, which rebranded its logo, early this year had struck the largest deal in the mobile Internet space in India till date with $200 million commitment from Japan's Softbank Corp.

InMobi has also been in the news for other reasons including acquisition of a US-based ad software developer Sprout, bringing on board Anita Swan as regional marketing director for Asia Pacific and striking a mobile ad sales partnership in Africa with digital sports media group Perform, for its football news website Goal.com( the world's largest football website which claims to have over 20 million monthly unique users).