In our 5 minutes with profiles, MEF members talk about their business, their aspirations for the future and the wider mobile industry. This week Ashay Padwal, CTO & co-founder introduces mobile ad exchange vserv.mobi, and be sure to check out the MEFTV interview with Ashay recorded at Appsworld Europe.

What does Vserv.mobi do?

Vserv.mobi is an Award Winning Mobile Advertising Exchange across Emerging Markets, that maximises value of mobile media for advertisers, developers, publishers and telecom operators. Powered by the award winning AudiencePro™ and AppWrapper™ platforms, Vserv.mobi has delivered mobile advertising experiences for leading Fortune 500 brands & digital media companies, across 200 countries. AudiencePro™ leverages privacy compliant Telco subscriber data and user profiling, to enable credible audience targeting capabilities on the Vserv.mobi advertising exchange. AppWrapper™ is an independent platform that brings “One Click” integration of SDKs for App Developers across Advertising, In-App purchases, Analytics, Bug Tracking and more.

When did Vserv.mobi launch and what growth have you seen?

Vserv.mobi was founded in 2010 in India, with a 5 member team. In the last 4 years, Vserv has grown to a 150+ team and has a global presence, with offices across USA, UK, South Africa, India, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia & Vietnam. Vserv has witnessed a significant Y-o-Y growth in revenues.

What are your main goals?

Our goal is to become the #1 Mobile Ad Exchange across emerging markets. We are rapidly expanding our services across more countries in regions like Latin America, the Middle East and Africa. We will continue to roll out innovative platforms and products that will help push the mobile ecosystem forward.

Where do you see your business in three years’ time?

Vserv.mobi aims to be a $100mn company by 2015. As mentioned earlier, we will continue to expand to more countries and increase depth in existing countries. We will also continue to ramp up our technology innovation engine.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azHlSV-xjX0&w=500&align=right&rel=0]What aspect of mobile is most exciting to you right now?

Mobile advertising is undergoing a lot of changes and advertisers are continuously scrambling for innovative advertising solutions to reach their audience. One of the many exciting aspects of mobile advertising is physical context turbocharging location based advertising. Today, user information defines mobile advertising as their location and other physical context helps advertisers display the right ad to the right user at the right time. Marketers will use context to connect with consumers based on who they are, where they are and what they may actually want at that specific time and place. Physical behavioural context such as driving, walking, etc, will help brands engage customers through personalised ads.

Mobile advertising will utilise geo-aware and geo-fencing techniques to send different messages to different users based on their position and movement. Location-based advertising utilising real time and historic data can deliver ad campaigns based on insights derived from consumer behaviour and will enable brands to roll out special deals that users can quickly check out.

What’s the most critical issue that will hit mobile within the next 12 months?

Today, the mobile app ecosystem is growing at a rapid pace. App developers are required to speed up the app development cycle while integrating multiple SDKs for crucial services like bug tracking, analytics, app monetization and in-app purchases. This integration process takes away valuable time and effort, that the developer could have utilized in building the core functionality of the app instead. In the coming months, with the demand increasing as the ecosystem grows at a faster pace, developers will struggle to get the innovation cycle going due to time constraints. We at Vserv.mobi have kept this crticial issue in mind and are addressing this through our platform AppWrapper.org.

Apart from your own, which mobile companies are the ones to watch in the year ahead?

In a dynamic ecosystem like ours, there is a new breakthrough almost daily and various promising entities to watch out in the year ahead. With accelerated growth in the ecosystem, we need to look ahead for companies that can foresee the upcoming trends and utilize them to their maximum capability.

Ashay Padwal is CTO & co-founder of vserv.mobi. Follow them on Twitter.