JumpTap scores 7-country search & ad deal

BARCELONA, Spain--Mobile Internet search and advertising start-up JumpTap said Monday that it will provide search and advertising services for seven TeliaSonera mobile carriers in Europe.

Under the terms of the deal, JumpTap will provide search and advertising technology for TeliaSonera's operators in Sweden, Spain, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Estonia, and Lithuania.

JumpTap is what is known as a "white label" technology provider. It develops the technology and mobile operators license that technology and use it to provide a service with their own brand on it.

Mobile search and advertising are relatively small markets today, but experts expect spending to pick up within the next few years as more mobile users figure out how to access the Internet from their handsets. Market research firm Gartner predicts that mobile advertising will grow from less than a $1 billion in revenue worldwide in 2007 to about $11 billion in revenue in 2011.

This is a major deal for JumpTap, which already has deals with 16 carriers, including Virgin Mobile, Boost Mobile, AT&T and Telefonica.

Still, JumpTap and other white label search and advertising providers, such as Medio, are going head-to-head in this market against Google. Even though, some critics say that Google's success in mobile isn't guaranteed, the company is in a strong position, since it is the most well known search and advertising company on the desktop Web. And since many people around the world associate Internet search with Google, white label providers and the carriers that use them might have a hard time getting consumers to use their search tools.