Google ties up with Indian mobile startup to drive mobile adoption among publishers
As part of its global initiative 'Let's Talk Mo', search engine giant Google has announced a partnership with Bangalore-based mobile startup Mobstac to drive adoption of mobile platform among media and publishing firms."It is a great validation for Indian startups as global companies are aggressively looking at our startup market. This will help us scale up our offering and reach out to more enterprises in and around India," said Sharat Potharaju, co-founder and CEO, Mobstac, a provider of mobile interface to media and publishing firms.
"Google's business basically depends on two groups – advertisers and publishers. This partnership provides a win-win situation to both publishers and Google," he said.
Mobstac, which has around 1,000 publishers as customers across the globe, is now planning to take its mobile platform to over 100,000 publishers in the next two years with this partnership in place.
The company, which raised an undisclosed funding from Accel Partners and Mumbai Angels last November, has already tied up renowned newspaper designer Mario Garcia to help publishers design the mobile version of their newspapers.
Potharaju said a significant portion of the works of Garcia in the last few years is based on mobile, with a growing number of Indian news papers and publications looking to go mobile.
"What we think is that mobile (web) version should not be limited only to design. From a publication's perspective, mobile is vastly different from other platforms and the time is not too far when publishers start providing a mobile-only content to their readers," according to Potharaju.
He sees mobile emerging as the most preferable platform for publications and news papers to provide content three years from now.
"A mobile strategy is no more optional, but is crucial in engaging with customers," Potharaju said.
Through this partnership with Google, Mobstac is bringing to publishers in India MobStac's HTML5 mobile-first platform that is capable of delivering mobile websites and mobile apps across a wide-range of mobile devices.
MobStac claims its platform currently serves mobile websites in over 40 countries and 11 different languages.
Google has also partnered with two more startups from India --- Neuron Mediatech and Srishti Technet --- as part of the 'Lets Talk Mo' initiative.
(Edited by Prem Udayabhanu)
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