Eyeballs Mobile advertising delivers high-resolution, targeted graphical advertising directly to recipient's mobile phones.

• These ads are seen during the normal use of the phone when making and receiving calls and SMS’s
• Recipients are profiled by Age, Gender, Location and Interests with matching ads sent to their phones
• Ads are changed and updated regularly according to rules set by the advertiser
• Ads can also include enhanced actions allowing direct recipient engagement through call centres, websites and SMS
• Impression information (ads seen by recipients) is recorded on the phone and sent to a central database
• Detailed reporting information is provided to advertisers

Our client is a start-up, majority-owned by a listed Telco. The solution has been commercially implemented since early 2010, with a subscriber base growing by more than 1000 per week.

The technology platform includes a back-end administration system to supply and manage advertisements and the rules applied to each one in terms of geographic, gender, age group and interest-based targeting. It also stores ‘impression’ history and enables exact reporting of ads seen by user and date/time. This part of the solution is Microsoft technology based and consists of SQL Server for data storage and C#/ASP.Net for the web-based user interface. Currently in development is a BI solution that includes data cubes and just-in-time reporting using SQL Server 2008 BI/data warehousing tools.

The meat of the service is a  mobile application installed on recipient’s (user’s) phones. Alchemy has built the solution to run on Symbian S60 3^rd edition and later, application platforms. This includes the 5^th edition, touch screen versions. Cell phone vendors using this OS and development platform include Nokia, Samsung and Sony Ericsson. Code is written in C++. The application responds to ordinary phone-use triggers such as making a call or receiving an SMS. On such a trigger event, alongside the usual info such as sender details, the user sees an image-based advert. These are rotated and changed regularly with viewership statistics being recorded. Further ad-specific functionality is available through a local application that facilitates enhanced actions such as click-through competition entries or downloads via the phones web browser or SMS service.

The back office and handset applications are linked by means of a Recipient Server component. This service sends images and other content to handsets and receives impression (ads seen by user) details back. The recipient server uses a custom internet standards-based protocol for communication and applies multiple business rules to determine ad ‘playlists’ on an individual user basis.

Our project team of five (5) resources including three full-time developers. In addition, the team has access to specialist architectural skills on a consultative basis as necessary. All team members are multi-skilled in terms of the  solution components they work on, but do tend to focus on specific areas.

Technical areas of growth for the application include diverse mobile platforms such as the Microsoft mobile, Java, Android and Blackberry.