We've been waiting for this moment at Crisp for a long time. Mobile advertising has long been recognized as having the greatest global potential for delivering reach and scale for brands. It was not, however, until recently that we at Crisp started noticing something great. Big, full-screen Crisp ads that had always been in English started showing up in Chinese on our test iPads here in our Midtown HQ in NYC.

Yesterday's post in TechCrunch about Crisp’s new round of funding, led by a new investor, EDBI of Singapore, was a great reminder to us all that Crisp is ready to help its publishers bring great brand experiences to a lot more iPhone, iPad and Android devices around the world, starting right now.

Crisp, together with the other ORMMA.org pioneers, is working together closely with IAB and MMA working groups on bringing the necessary standardization initiatives and best practices to the attention of agencies, ad tech companies and publishers.

That means that as more publisher and ad network ad servers become compliant with some key standards (like IAB’s MRAID), brands will be able to run ads like they do in desktop advertising, without friction and with an even wider geographic distribution than ever before -- especially since the iOS and Android platforms are growing globally much faster than any other platforms ever have. Starting now, the model of competition in mobile advertising is about what it should be, creating the most dynamic advertising possible.

Stay tuned for news about Crisp Engage next week. Crisp Engage is launching its Charter Program, and we are calling on creative agencies who’d like to show off their HTML5 skills, or play with some of the templates we’ve been building over the past two years to create brand experiences for mobile apps and browsers.

And BTW, for those of you making the trip to Singapore next week, meet Boris Fridman and Xavier Facon in Singapore at the Mobile Marketing Association’s MMF Forum on the 3rd through 5th of May!

Personally, I wish I wasn't asked to write anything about Android. I tend to be more interested in technology the consumer is actually waiting for, rather than announcements that are simply hyped by this huge corporation. But I’ve been surprised by Google a couple of times. First, Chrome on Windows. Next, Chrome on Android. I can summarize my surprise as follows, "Google, Apple work towards mobile content platform homogeneity!" Now, we have something to blog about. 

In the very fragmented mobile space the amount of development platforms that developers are recruited to use has always been a problem. There are enough mobile operating systems and mobile device models to keep a small army of developers busy with simply porting code for one device to another. Having been involved in those types of projects, I can say that the porting ends up being a very large part of the cost of the whole production. --end rant-- 

Let me clarify my observation. The iPhone web applications that we have developed run as good on Chrome as they do on the Safari iPhone browser. Both browsers use the WebKit browser engine. And, both Chrome and iPhone Safari can provide solid ways to bring important features to these web apps. For example: off-line browsing, AJAX, and rich media. If you look back at mobile technologies over the past eight years you won’t find this “accidental” agreement between phone platforms happened very often. 

To repeat myself, I'm not someone that's anticipating HTC's Dream T-Mobile announcement. In fact, I'm almost more interested in when the next Android based phone is launched after the Dream. As a company that mobilizes and monetizes mobile content, we like to see real numbers on consumer adoption – not predictions. As far as we can tell, we'll be waiting on adoption of Android by consumers for a while.  

So how important is Chrome on Android? I believe it is very significant to see a next generation web application capability which is similar on all new and popular mobile devices. It is important both for the successful distribution of content to a wide audience and for the development of a powerful advertising channel to monetize that content. Google ... Ads ... Anyone?  

Crisp Wireless has created SDK based downloadable applications and web applications for a long time and we believe the content publishers who work with us, have seen much more benefit and revenue out of web applications than the downloadable applications. Google gets that. It is no wonder they look to build on top of the iPhone's success rather than to fragment the mobile internet.

The other day I got involved in a conversation with some members of the mobile software engineering experts at Crisp Wireless. They were reacting to my blog post about iPhone and Android. The sentiment of the developers was that the open source community is supporting Android and developers in general prefer the more open nature when writing software. Furthermore, the iPhone SDK is limiting compared to Android and a lot of interesting application ideas require capabilities not currently included as part of the iPhone SDK and UELA. For instance, letting the application run in the background is something the developer may need.

Since Android is less limiting, then that’s better? Both to the benefit of the end-user, the mobile operator, the manufacturer and the developer, there are arguments against that. Respectively: Do we want to run concurrent applications on our phone to drain the battery as quickly as possible? Do we want an application to mess with the network when you’re in the middle of a call? Do we want to allow applications that compete with the manufacturers built-in applications? Do we want an insanely complex certification path before the applications are deemed safe enough to allow distribution?

Android is supported by the open source community, so developers must like it a lot? Well, there is no single open source community. Developers are collaborating on other mobile software projects besides Android and I would be surprised if they are willing to drop whatever has been achieved and focus instead on something that Google just kind of threw over the wall. Gnome mobile and GPE Phone Edition comes to mind. Limo Foundation is another. The point being that those new mobile platforms are great for innovation but you can’t pick just one out, build your app for it and think you’re done. Porting to many platforms is expensive and it is in the best interest of Google to realize that being a good citizen of the open source community is helping with avoiding fragmented efforts.

Some of the developers that currently have the iPhone SDK in their hands and are able to have a compelling application written by this summer can likely avoid any porting and make a good enough of a return through iTunes alone. That’s not to say they shouldn’t port their app on Android or any of the other platforms, but at the end of the day, will they still like Android better?Crisp Wireless is interested in hiring talented mobile developers to work at their offices in New York. Please send your resume to jobs@crispwireless.com