Last year we have featured an article titled “Android and the Mobile Advertising Market”, at that time we have asked Millennial Media and Admob (among others) about Android mobile platform and the mobile advertising market. Until today it was not clear for everyone how Google will monetize this huge project, while all the roads lead to -obviously- the mobile adveritising market; we are still waiting.

At that time also there was no Android based handset, only the emulator was available; but there was the iPhone, and Admob launched last year a very big initiative to reach and engage users on iPhone. Admob offered $1Million to iPhone developers to promote their iPhone apps and web-apps. Today after that G1 device was available, it was time to launch mobile advertising on the Android platform and that’s the announcement you will read below. Until Google consider eating its dogfood, other mobile advertising startups will find the time to take a good part from the advertising market share.

Currently some advertisers – not announced below – are already using Admob to deliver their ads and promote their Android applications in the Admob network. We saw link that open directly in the search result of the Adroid market, with the name of the application as search keyword.

Update 1/28/2009 : An Admob SDK demo is available in the Android Market showing Ads placement in the Lunar Lander sample application.

Below the press release :

AdMob Launches Ad Unit for Android Applications

Innovative Ad Network Delivers Monetization Solution for Android Developers

SAN MATEO, Calif. AdMob, the world’s largest mobile advertising marketplace, today announced that it has launched its first advertising unit for Android applications, enabling developers to monetize their applications on this new device platform. The first developers to leverage AdMob’s new Android ad unit in their applications include AccuWeather, Jirbo, and TapJoy.

AdMob’s new Android ad unit will also allow brand and performance advertisers to reach the rapidly growing base of consumers engaging with applications on their Android devices. Advertisers will be able to use these ad units to drive customer actions such as going to the Android Market to download an application.

“Android’s open platform enables developers to build rich mobile applications that provide a great experience for users,” said Ali Diab, Vice President of Product Management for AdMob. “We are already seeing strong interest in developing applications for Android-based devices, similar to what we saw with the iPhone last summer, and are very excited to take the lead in helping developers monetize their applications on this fast-growing device platform.”

AdMob already serves ads on mobile Web sites on the Android platform and received more than 27 million requests in December 2008. Building on the initial success of the G1 device, Google’s new mobile platform looks to become a major force in the mobile industry with several new devices expected to come to market in 2009.

“We’ve partnered with AdMob to monetize our mobile services for several years now and continue to get great results working with them on our mobile Web site and in our iPhone application,” said David Mitchell, Director, Wireless Services, AccuWeather. “We are excited to extend this successful relationship with AdMob and start monetizing our new Android application.”

More than 6,000 mobile sites and 450 iPhone applications are a part of AdMob’s publisher network worldwide, giving the company unparalleled reach.

About AdMob

AdMob is the world’s largest and highest quality mobile advertising marketplace, serving more than 4.6 billion mobile banner and text ads per month. Incorporated in April 2006, AdMob allows advertisers to reach their customers on the mobile Web and enables publishers to increase the value of their mobile sites. AdMob makes it easy for publishers to monetize their mobile traffic and for advertisers to target and reach customers on the mobile Web in more than 160 countries.

AdMob has been named a 2008 Technology Pioneer by the World Economic Forum, one of Wired.com’s 2008 Companies to Watch, and VentureBeat’s Mobilebeat 2008 Best Overall Mobile Startup / Best Mobile Infrastructure Company. To learn more about AdMob, visit www.admob.com.

Award-Winning Recognition Technologies Enable Developers to Integrate Powerful OCR and BCR Functions into Broad Range of Mobile Platforms and Applications

Moscow, Russia – ABBYY, a leading provider of document recognition, data capture and linguistic software,  have just announced its Mobile OCR Engine 3.0 software development kit (SDK). ABBYY Mobile OCR Engine gives developers powerful tools for creating mobile or other compact applications enhanced with optical character recognition (OCR) and business card recognition (BCR) functions.

ABBYY’s small-footprint OCR technology automatically transforms images of text and documents captured with a digital camera into editable and searchable text, eliminating the need to input information manually. Using the innovative BCR functionality, developers can create mobile applications to transfer data from images of business cards directly to the phone address book. OCR and BCR capabilities can be embedded into any camera-based devices including mobile phones, communicators, PDAs, digital cameras and portable scanners.

In addition to the support for many popular mobile platforms such as Windows® Mobile, Symbian®, LINUX® and others, ABBYY Mobile OCR Engine 3.0 now enables developers to readily add OCR and BCR functions to Android-based applications.

“We have been observing an increasing interest in Android among device manufacturers, and we anticipate growing demand for sophisticated mobile OCR applications for this innovative platform,” said Katya Solntseva, director of mobile products department at ABBYY. “Our Mobile OCR Engine is a powerful development kit that allows developers to create a wide range of smart, easy-to-integrate mobile applications, from simple end user programs to complex business solutions.”

ABBYY Mobile OCR Engine enables developers to extend the capabilities of various mobile devices and applications in many ways. For example, using a camera phone with an OCR application, clippings from magazines, books, receipts, ads and other documents can be captured and automatically converted into text, which can then be edited, stored or sent via email or SMS. The captured and recognized text can be further used in other mobile and PC applications including notepads, calendars, libraries and so on. Developers can also easily leverage the BCR functions of the new SDK and expand them to a broader use. For instance, they can create solutions that not only capture and export business card information, but also synchronize the data with other contact information management applications on the PC or server.

Designed with the needs of mobile solution providers in mind, ABBYY Mobile OCR Engine 3.0 combines strong platform support with powerful technology innovations to optimize software performance and accuracy, and minimize the use of hardware resources. The SDK provides powerful recognition technology including a new Document Analysis algorithm to ensure more accurate and faster OCR processing, combined with enhanced capability to reproduce the structure of the original text such as columns and paragraphs. It also delivers improved image pre-processing capabilities including skew correction and image binarization, as well as the capability to detect noise on the original image.

To ensure extensive international reach of mobile OCR applications, the SDK recognizes 58 languages with Latin, Cyrillic and Greek characters. In addition, it provides dictionaries created specifically for BCR in 16 languages including newly added Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Norwegian, Portuguese, Swedish and Turkish.

ABBYY Mobile OCR Engine (previously known as ABBYY Mobile OCR SDK) recently won the Silver Mobile Star Award from MobileVillage® for the Best Enterprise Software: Data Capture/Collection. To learn more about the product, please visit www.ABBYY.com/mobileOCR .

About ABBYY

ABBYY is a leading provider of document recognition, data capture and linguistic software. Its products include the ABBYY FineReader line of optical character recognition (OCR) applications, ABBYY FlexiCapture line of data capture solutions, ABBYY Lingvo dictionary software, and development tools. Paper-intensive organizations from all over the world use ABBYY software to automate time- and labor-consuming tasks and to streamline business processes. ABBYY products are used in large-scale government projects such as those of Australian Taxation Office, Lithuanian Tax Inspectorate, Ministry of Education of Russia, Ministry of Education of Ukraine, and Montgomery County Government of the USA. Companies that license ABBYY technologies include BancTec, Canon, EMC/Captiva, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, NewSoft, Notable Solutions, Samsung Electronics and more. ABBYY OCR applications are shipped with equipment from the world’s top manufacturers such as BenQ, Epson, Fujitsu, Fuji Xerox, Microtek, Panasonic, Plustek, Toshiba, and Xerox. ABBYY is headquartered in Moscow, Russia, with offices in Germany, the United States, Ukraine, the UK, Taiwan and Japan. For more information, visit www.ABBYY.com.

Interested in providing full-text search along with fast, lightweight data management for your Android applications? The new Perst 4.0 open source, object-oriented embedded database system brings native full-text search capability to Android, and builds on this feature to provide a sample search engine application for contact data residing on mobile phones.

To provide search, the database stores an inverse index of keywords, with parsing and stemming of indexed text performed either by user-defined code or by Perst’s default simple parser and stemmer. The feature supports logical operators and calculates relevance of search results to a query.

The new sample application for Android, ContactsIndex, stores and indexes contact information, and could be extended to provide search capabilities for PDF, word processing, HTML and other stored files. The example application is included with complete source code in the Perst 4.0 for Java distribution.

Also new in Perst 4.0 for Android: support for non-native objects, which expands the scope of the embedded database to benefit a larger variety of application types.

The Perst embedded database system helps developers create small-footprint embedded Java applications for Android that are fast, reliable, and cost-effective to develop and maintain.

The complete announcement of what’s new in Perst 4.0 is available at

http://www.mcobject.com/perst_v4_for_mobile_phones

Below some screenshots of the ContactsIndex demo application, running on the latest Android emulator.

Last week we saw a new Android Phone that is available for sales on the B2B marketplace Alibaba.com called the Shining phone. The phone looks exactly like the Kogan Agora, that have been canceled two weeks ago, but with very small differences. According to the chineese manufacterer, the Shining phone – which got another brand also “BRANO” – is powered by Android and include 2.5 “TL 262K QVGA TFT LCD E-Mail, IM, Web Browser, Google map 1.3Mpix camera Bluetooth … and is available for sale for $240 USD with a minimum order of 100 pieces.

Just a reminder that Kogan Agora was canceled due to potential future interoperability issues. The Shining phone which looks exactly the same, if exists, it will have the same issues than Agora.

“I am not aware of this manufacturer and I have doubts that it runs Android OS. It is certainly not what the Agora was going to be or in anyway related to it” said Ruslan Koga,  founder of Kogan Technologies, to Open Handset Magazine.

So is it another fake Android phone ? Or is it the natural result of having an open source mobile plateform that everybody are currently talking about ? We have contacted the chineese manufacterer Shenzhen JoinCyber Telecom Equipment Co., Ltd. for clarifications about their shining phone, but the time we are posting this article we have not yet received any answer from them.