Venture capitalists apparently want to throw money at companies developing behavioral targeting services -- this time, a company supporting mobile. Apsalar, a San Francisco-based mobile analytics and behavioral targeting platform for Apple iOS and Google Android applications, raised $5 million in its latest funding round.

I am not sure if Keith Piper and the crew he leads at Pretarget are fishermen, per se. But they sure do love to talk about "bass." Not the deep sounds that boom from my surround sound system, and not the stringed instrument, but "bass" the fish.

Companies targeting ads to consumers on TVs based on location, channel surfing activity and more might seem like a futuristic platform to some, but in reality companies offer the service today.

I recently spent time at the Mobile Insider Summit in Lake Tahoe listening to and speaking with mobile marketers who are themselves surprised at the tectonic shift of user behaviors to mobile. Google, Yahoo, Travelocity, Pandora, OfficeMax, and many other brands were there, and almost everyone reported the sometimes-shocking acceleration of mobile use in their categories.

As behavioral targeting through ad exchanges grows, marketers want a method to confirm that they're getting what they've paid for. This trend created opportunities for companies like DoubleVerify to monitor delivery of ads.

So much energy is spent defending, obfuscating and otherwise rationalizing the perceived intrusiveness of behavioral targeting and user tracking online, that less time is spent leveraging the technology with consumers in ways that might impress them.

Online behavioral advertising revenue in the U.S. will reach $4.9 billion by December 2011, and grow at a 9.6% compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) to reach $7.1 billion by 2015, according to Parks Associates.

Sunil Sharma, an independent consultant who was formerly director of trading at Adnetik, the trading desk for Havas Digital before it was spun off, has published a white paper on the state of programmatic ad buying that explains how advertisers and publishers lose out on targeting opportunities, and what the industry can do to mitigate this problem.

"What will it take for you to walk out of here today with this new car?" I recall a dealer asking me years ago after protracted haggling. He had had an opportunity to take my measure, knew that I disliked being "sold" anything, and was smart enough to toss it in my court to give me a sense of control over the next offer. The one thing most difficult for e-commerce to virtualize is this wisdom of the floorwalker, the sharp-eyed salesperson who sizes up a customer and what they are after.

Since it's all about online marketing and targeting ads based on behavior using data, here's a new acronym that DMP industry insiders may want to use referring to platforms managing data. Mark Zagorski, eXelate CEO, refers to his company's DMP as a data marketing, rather than management, platform.