Our first meeting of the day finds us sitting with a very bullish Amobee. The mobile ad company tells us it is working with nine operators in 10 markets, including one in the UK, though the company says its sworn to secrecy as to which one. Investors in Amobee include Vodafone and O2s parent company Telefonica, so that probably narrows it down a bit at least. According to Amobee Chief Marketing Officer Patrick Parodi, mobile is now a real, grown-up channel. Theres been a huge opportunity in mobile, but everyones been waiting for the operators to get engaged in the business, says Parodi. That has now happened, he says, opening the door for Amobee to sell ad inventory, not just on the mobile Internet, but across a variety of mobile applications, including games, video and SMS. There is a tremendous inventory opportunity with SMS, says Parodi. When you consider there are 5,000 texts sent every second in the UK, you start to get a feel for the potential. Parodi says that 2008 is the year that network operators have woken up to mobile advertising. They recognise that it is one of the few places they can generate new revenue, he says. They also know they have to do something to counter the threat posed by Google, Yahoo! and MSN. Amobee CEO Zohar Levkovitz is equally enthusiastic. With a global advertising market worth around $500 billion (250 billion), he points out, if mobile can take even 5% of that, youre talking about a very big number. He says Amobee is not interested in the so-called long tail. Instead, it wants to attract Tier 1 advertisers by brining the networks together and offering a cross-network media buy. If you want to get the likes of Coca Cola and General Motors interested in mobile as a channel, you have to deliver the inventory, he says. And he believes that Amobee is the company to do it.