Outgoing Google SA country manager Stephen Newton is joining mobile advertising specialist InMobi, several separate sources have told TechCentral.
Google announced on Thursday that Newton would leave the company at the end of May.
Newton, an American national who moved to SA in 2009 to take on the Google job, isn’t commenting. All he’ll say is that he’s “looking for a more pan-African role” and that he plans to be in SA “for quite a while”.
But sources say he plans to join InMobi, which was founded in India in 2007, in a senior management role. InMobi describes itself as “one of the fastest-growing global mobile advertising networks” that allows advertisers to “target audience on mobile Internet sites in a measurable manner”.
The company, which competes with Google, allows publishers to offer contextual advertisements to the users of their mobile websites.
InMobi CEO Naveen Tewari said in a recent interview that the India-based company was keen to expand in Asia-Pacific and Africa. “In both of these regions there are lots of people coming online for the first time, and for most of them mobile is the only means of access,” he said.
“This is the group we would like to target, although in the short term the value of these markets might not be appreciated.” — Duncan McLeod, TechCentral
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