The ability to precisely identify and target individual users – what the industry calls “addressability”– has long been at the heart of digital marketing. Unlike traditional analog media, addressable media allows advertisers to create personalized experiences that resonate with users on a granular level. But in recent years, the rise of privacy regulations and platform-level changes like Apple’s ATT framework have all but ensured the demise of persistent,…
Tell us a bit about yourself I joined InMobi straight after finishing my master’s degree, it has been six years now and the journey continues. From being a complete fresher to now being a working mother of a toddler, this place has seen me grow professionally as well as personally. Currently, as an SDE IV, I take the role of a backend developer for our Demand Side Platforms. What inspired you to pursue a career in tech? Growing up I knew I wanted to study science and technology, but computer…
10
May
One of the hottest topics in the advertising ecosystem today is Supply Quality. Advertisers have a legitimate concern regarding fraud more specifically: the credibility of supply and where their ads are displayed. However, on the flip side there is another prominent quality issue affecting the advertising ecosystem: the quality of the ads served by Demand Partners. It is reasonable to assume that just as both DSPs and advertisers expect the highest quality of supply from their partners, the supply…
07
May
InMobi Pulse is a consumer insights platform that helps brands find answers to critical business questions by reaching out to their audience on mobile. InMobi Pulse gathers 360-degree consumer insights using a combination of stated in-app mobile survey responses and the user’s passive behavioral and location data sourced from their mobile usage. InMobi Pulse aims to make research accurate, efficient and fast. Mobile penetration has grown leaps and bounds in developed and developing countries…
15
December
InMobi regularly hosts, participates in and contributes to a series of events, meet-ups, webinars, sharing best practices with partners and thought leaders, across the globe. In this edition of the InMobi Event Diary, we are looking at the highlights and developments from “Data Hack Summit 2017,” an event organized by Analytics Vidhya in Bangalore, India. In this edition of the InMobi event diary, we cover our presence at the Analytics Vidhya-hosted event “Data Hack Summit 2017.” Aimed at…
13
December
InMobi regularly hosts, participates in and contributes to a series of events, meet-ups, webinars, sharing best practices with partners and thought leaders, across the globe. In this edition of the InMobi Event Diary, we are looking at our recent visit to one of India’s top business schools - the Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore, where we addressed students of the Big Data and Analytics Certificate Program.In this edition of the InMobi event diary, we cover our visit to the well-known…
13
December
InMobi regularly hosts, participates in and contributes to a series of events, meetups, webinars, sharing best practices with partners and thought leaders, across the globe. In this edition of the InMobi Event Diary, we are looking at the highlights and developments from “TechNEXT,” an event organized by GE research at their offices in Bangalore, India. In this edition of the InMobi event diary, we cover our presence at the GE Research hosted event “TechNEXT.” TechNEXT is a forum at GE that…
11
March
Over the last two years, we sought out and met hundreds of app developers across the world to ask them two simple questions - “How would you describe your app?” and “Who is this app designed for?”While the specifics vary, the responses’ structure was almost always a variant of the following sentences: “Have you used app A? It’s kind of like that, but with X being a key differentiating concept”“It’s an app that lets users do XYZ”“The audience for this app is very similar to…
16
October
Targeting in the good old days used to be somewhat of an art. To know and understand exactly how to position your product to a specific slice of customers used to be a derivative of decades of experience. With every passing digital generation, the ability to sift through consumers and target the one most-likely to consume and engage with your product is more of a science. Mobile is a different beast altogether. At InMobi, we enjoy thinking of this challenge as an interesting yin & yang between art…
26
June
70% of marketers still don't know what it is, but according to projections, native advertising will account for nearly $3 billion in spend by the end of this year. This is a powerful statistic, and one that we explored in depth at the IAB’s Advertising Technology Marketplace in New York. Titled 'What’s Native Got to do With It?', the town hall discussion was moderated by Kaylie Smith, Rubicon Project’s Head of Seller Cloud, and the IAB’s Director of Industry Initiatives, Carl Kalapesi. It…
24
January
This post announces the public unveiling of leveldb based backend for graphite. The background As mentioned in one of earlier blog posts, we use graphite servers for handling our server metrics. The reasons why we love graphite are as follows: Extremely comprehensive data transformation APIs Great ecosystem around data producer libraries & agents Vibrant visualization options over the core data API A natural outcome of liking any tool is that its usage increases to the point wherein one pushed the…
20
December
A colleague was recently telling me that in the rural Indian village she comes from, nobody builds big, beautiful homes without putting a scary-face mask outside the door to keep demons away. The custom is believed to have originated several centuries ago and is still in vogue since a flourishing home is automatically expected to attract bad omens, spirits or even the odd thief. Hanging up the scary mask serves as a warning and protects inhabitants from a potential miscreant. It’s a similar situation…
19
August
At InMobi, we have an internal Hadoop based system to support ad-hoc analytics needs of users. This system gives users a unified conceptual interface to the data collected from several sources, without burdening them to know about the schema, location, or the granularity at which data is stored. In the background, this system runs Hadoop jobs which can do map side joins, aggregations, and also have support for custom UDFs.Currently the system described above uses a custom query language which allows…
Background/Motivation At InMobi Conduit is used extensively to move data in a streaming fashion from applications to grid. The appetite for consuming data is growing within the company as we deliver significant scale (more data aids in creating smarter and richer user experiences). Previously most consumers used to leverage Apache Falcon for consuming data with jobs getting triggered at pre-defined times and have capabilities to gate on data arrival at grid at predefined locations. Then arose use-cases…
InMobi has been using big-data technologies (Apache Hadoop and its family) for well over 2.5 years for storing and analyzing large volumes of serving events / machine generated logs. InMobi receives in excess of 10 billion events (ad-serving and related) each day through multiple sources/streams originating from over ten geographically distributed data centers. Background As we have come to realize, just using the right serialization / storage format or processing technology is not adequate in managing…
Tuning the garbage collector settings is a favourite pastime of many site reliability engineering teams as sub-optimal settings result in awkward response time behaviours. The first rule of trying to tune anything is to try and understand the existing behaviour of systems before tinkering around with it. Trying to be data driven when it comes to performance tuning also requires us to demonstrate correlation between the dependent variable (some perf related metric) and an independent variable (the…
When technology works people dont think about how it works, they focus on its use and enjoy the experience. However, there are some of us who wonder what goes on behind the scenes; how the œfeats of magic are performed and what is required to provide state-of-the-art technology experiences. Weve decided to share more about the great technology and insights we develop here at InMobi. To do this we are launching a series of blog posts that provide a behind-the-scenes look at some of our efforts…
02
April
InMobi has been using big-data technologies (Apache Hadoop and its family) for the last 2.5 years for storing and analyzing large volumes of serving events / machine generated logs. InMobi receives in excess of 10 billion events (ad-serving and related) every day through multiple sources/streams originating from over ten geographically distributed data centers. In a typical day we process tens of terabytes of data. In the beginning, we had a single central data center where all the processing took…
Data collection is the starting point of Big Data lifecycle capture, curate, store, analyze and visualize. At InMobi data is generated by online serving systems. This could be impression, click, download or other kinds of events. This data is used for different Business applications like Billing, Reporting, Business Intelligence, Machine learning, real-time Analytics, and real-time feedback loops. This blog post is about Conduit, a system to collect the huge number of events data from online systems,…
The engineers at Nokia Seimens Networks have written an excellent article about the level of traffic signalling in mobile apps which use advertising. Around the world, people pay varying amounts to access data. You can't assume that your customer is on an "unlimited" plan. Even if they are, you don't want to waste their battery or congest the mobile network with needless requests. With our mobile-web platform, it's easy to reduce the amount of requests you send to us: // Use the MkhojAd.php…
This August has been quite eventful for us. First we re-branded ourselves, as InMobi. Secondly, we fulfilled part of our aspirations to be a global company by setting up a distributed ad server in a US data center. This move has catapulted InMobi in to a different league altogether. It also showcases our commitment to defy all barriers and overcome various technological challenges to serve our customers in the best possible way. The thought of having distributed node arises with a problem that started…
