Apple is buying mobile ad company Quattro Wireless for $275 million, reports the Wall Street Journal. Apple is likely to utilize it to enable mobile ad delivery for its iPhone and Apple tablet.
Google recently paid $750 million for AdMob, a Quattro competitor, which Apple had also made a bid to acquire.
Both start-ups are aimed squarely at the fast-growing market to advertise on smartphones, such as Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android devices.
The Quattro Network offers a full spectrum of mobile marketing solutions, including display advertising, SMS/MMS/shortcodes, rich media, video and custom programs, across thousands of mobile web sites and applications.
In other news, Apple announced today that more three billion apps have been downloaded from the App Store for iPhone and iPod Touch users.
The share of Web traffic from mobile devices increased 110% in North America in 2009 over the previous year and 148% globally, according to Quantcast. While only 1.3% of all North American pageviews in December were accessed from mobile devices, it’s growing rapidly, says the research firm.
