• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, August 11, 2011

The fundamental concept behind the Human Genome Project to identify the approximate 20,000 to 25,000 genes in human DNA has spurred numerous successful businesses. Take Pandora, for example. The founders of the Internet radio company conceived it from a similar idea, the Music Genome Project -- which set out to identify nearly 400 attributes to describe songs and create a complex mathematical algorithm to organize them.

Analyzing the basic "concept" of business models typically identifies whether a company will survive or thrive. So let's look at what happens when a mobile ad network -- Mobile Theory -- partners with a contextual advertising firm -- NetSeer. Some might call it "concept-based" advertising based on natural language processing or "semantics," which looks at all the other words surrounding the main topic and determines whether the person searching on a keyword wants information on windows for a home rather than a software operating system.

In fact, NetSeer based its technology on the Human Genome Project. The company was co-founded by a UCLA professor, and at the time, a UCLA PhD candidate student conducting research on biological networks. The student had a new idea that was not related to the research being done for the university. That idea applied complex networks to the Web in clusters of topics and communities.

Scott Swanson, Mobile Theory CEO, wanted to build a "polite" mobile ad unit for publishers -- not something "in your face" that would distract consumers searching or reading information on mobile devices, but rather something that would provide links based on the topics in articles or the content on the Web page. On a finance page the link topics might include the keywords "IPO" or "Mutual Funds" that lead to a landing page where they have an option to click on any one of six ads. The ad loads in front of the publisher's landing page, complete with close button, rather than sweeping away the user to another site.

Since NetSeer's technology establishes connections between words across the Web, together with Mobile Theory the two companies developed an ad unit and business model for mobile to compete with Google's AdMob, Apple's Quattro, and a few other small networks delivering AdSense-type paid-search links for publisher sites.

Deploying the technology across ad networks and in new mobile formats such as basic applications and for iPad means the companies will need to build out the platform, so it works on more than just standard HTML5 and WAP sites.

Publishers inset a piece of JavaScript code on their Web page or run it through their ad-serving system to display the ad on their mobile Web site. Swanson said advertising prices for ads are set by the Bing and Yahoo ad alliance. Mobile Theory and NetSeer provide the inventory and the ad unit.

While it's the concept-based ad technology supported by the Genome Project that makes the model interesting, Mobile Theory and NetSeer have a long way to go to compete with the likes of Google and Apple. The partnership will need to be built up. Mobile Theory supports about a dozen publishers on mobile such as Business Insider, Opera.com, Minyanville, and Experts-Exchange, reaching about 35 million unique monthly users. NetSeer supports 500 Web publishers such as Healthline.com.

Okay -- so maybe it's a bit of a stretch, but interesting nonetheless. Long live online ad industry entrepreneurs willing to compete with Apple and Google.