The YP Group announced the acquisition of Sense Networks. In an interview with Techcrunch, David Lebow, senior vice president and general manager of YP’s national markets group, stated that this was the company’s first acquisition since it launched in May 2012. YP was formed from the merger of AT&T Advertising Solutions (publisher of the Yellow Pages) and AT&T Interactive, with Cerberus Capital Management holding a controlling stake.
Lebow added that YP’s mobile ad efforts have been focused on search until now, so acquiring Sense gives YP a foothold to expand into mobile display. The two companies had already worked together. In addition, all entire 10 Sense Networks team members will be joining YP, where they will continue to focus on mobile display ads and targeting. Financial terms were not disclosed.
About: Sense Networks was founded in 2003 and backed by Intel Capital, Javelin Venture Partners, and others. It applies big science to mobile location data for predictive analytics in advertising. The company’s technology platform, MacroSense®, builds proprietary mobile user profiles which incorporate over 1,000 behavioral attributes that are extracted from location data. MacroSense receives streaming location data from mobile phones in real-time, processes the data in the context of billions of historical data points, and analyzes it to better understand human activity and apply the insights to mobile advertising. MacroSense currently processes 170 billion location points per month into profiles. More than any company other than Google or Facebook.
Sense’s AdMatch™ real-time bidding ad platform targets and serves the ads through mobile ad exchanges, acting as a Demand Side Platform (DSP) with brand and agency clients. The integration of rich MacroSense profiles provides a built in Data Management Platform (DMP) to deliver extremely sophisticated and effective mobile ad targeting “beyond place.”
Sense Networks, headquartered in New York City’s Flatiron neighborhood, was founded in 2003 and incorporated in early 2006. The founding team is composed of top computer scientists from MIT and Columbia University.
Sense Networks won the 2009 AlwaysOn OnMedia Top 100 Award, was named by Gartner as one of its 2009 Cool Vendors in Context-Aware Computing, and was proclaimed one of “The World’s Most Intriguing Startups” by Business Week. CEO David Petersen has been featured by Forbes magazine in their series of Forbes Insightsprofiles of Thought Leaders changing the business landscape.
Source: Techcrunch.com
