Prepress
AdStar Announces Agreement in Principle to Acquire Relevantis
Wednesday 02. April 2008 - Agreement to bring complete, end-to-end mobile advertising solution under one corporate umbrella
AdStar, Inc. (BULLETIN BOARD: ADST) today announced an agreement in principle to acquire Relevantis in an all-stock transaction. The acquisition underscores AdStar’s commitment to reposition itself as a full service supplier of mobile advertising solutions and adds important proprietary technologies for mobile advertising applications and infrastructures. Relevantis’ technology includes the Universal Ad Platform, the first unified ad platform to support contextual mobile web and in-application advertising; and the Relevantis Relevancy Engine, a patent-pending system that models user activity and accurately predicts consumer behavior towards relevant advertisements.
The combination of AdStar’s Mobile Advertising Dashboard and the Relevantis ad platform provides an end-to-end solution that will allow publishers to monetize their mobile properties through advertising. Relevantis’ technology also allows developers to integrate location-aware advertising into emerging mobile solutions and environments, such as Apple iPhone applications and Web sites. Relevantis CEO Scott Searle will become senior vice president and chief strategy officer at AdStar, and the companies expect the acquisition, the specific terms of which were not announced, to be complete in early May 2008.
“It is with a great deal of excitement that we announce the agreement in principle to acquire Relevantis,” said Leslie Bernhard, president and chief executive officer of AdStar, Inc. “For more than four years, Scott’s group has developed a reputation in the industry for its innovative solutions. Recently, Relevantis has introduced a number of industry ‘firsts,’ including the first advertising platform to support paid icons for interactive maps and navigation systems; the first to enable highly interactive AJAX advertisements on mobile phones; and the first advertising solution to support Android, Google’s mobile phone operating system.”
Leslie continued, “When we started working with Scott Searle and Relevantis, we quickly recognized the myriad opportunities that we could pursue by combining our two companies and complementary technologies. Our marketing partnership was the initial step. Now, as a single enterprise, we will be better equipped to capitalize on the opportunities, and we will be able to deliver a variety of compelling product and service offerings to the marketplace.”
“We are excited about becoming part of AdStar, and see enormous opportunity to leverage Relevantis’ cutting-edge technologies to expand AdStar into new markets,” said Searle. “As AdStar moves forward in the mobile advertising industry, we can offer publishers, advertisers and developers new ways to monetize their mobile content through relevant and integrated advertising, while also improving the customer experience. Relevantis has worked closely with AdStar over the past year, so we are prepared to immediately bring the solutions to market.”