TechColumbus announced today it has led a $650,000 investment round in inmobly, Inc., an early-stage technology company focused on innovative mobile content distribution solutions. TechColumbus committed up to $500,000 from its Pre-Seed Funds.

inmobly has developed a patent-pending technology platform designed to overcome the bandwidth crunch challenge currently experienced by mobile networks. Consumption of mobile multimedia content is increasing faster than network infrastructure improvements can keep up. It is projected that by 2014 users' data demand over cellular networks will be 40 times the available bandwidth. The high speed requirements of multimedia content, combined with increasing proliferation and adoption of mobile devices, is straining underlying cellular networks, thus resulting in intolerable congestion and delay which ultimately erodes the user experience.

inmobly's disruptive Predictive Automated User-centric Loading (PAUL) technology overcomes the bandwidth crunch by predicting user behavior based on past usage behaviors and content interests, then schedules "content caching" on a user's mobile device during off-peak hours and subsequently recommending locally cached content highly likely to be of interest to the user.

"The next phase of mobile content must create a personalized multimedia experience for users rather than the user needing to create it for themselves," said Hesham El Gamal, co-founder and president of inmobly. "The recommendation algorithm in PAUL will guide users to multimedia content they will enjoy. The scheduling algorithm can even enable users to consume more high-bandwidth multimedia without significantly increasing their data costs. Our platform will also make micro-targeting possible for multimedia advertising and cross-promotions."

El Gamal is a professor of electrical engineering at The Ohio State University. He co-founded inmobly with Dr. Nayer Wanas, the chief technology officer of the company. Founded in 2011, inmobly has already developed the award-winning Arab News app, and was recognized as a front runner in the 2012 Silicon Valley Global Tech Symposium. The PAUL platform is based upon technology developed at and licensed from the Ohio State's Office of Technology Commercialization and Knowledge Transfer.

"We are excited by this pre-seed investment in inmobly," said Ryan Helon, Investments Leader with TechColumbus. "Its technology, which was developed at Ohio State, has great promise in the fast-paced mobile solutions market."

TechColumbus, through its Pre-Seed Funds, makes investments in the region's most promising startup companies. The investment is intended to enable technology startups to make the meaningful progress necessary to attract follow-on funding from venture capital firms, angel investors and other sources.

About TechColumbus

TechColumbus is the public-private partnership whose mission is to accelerate the advancement of Central Ohio's innovation economy. It is distinguished by its comprehensive breadth of services, including membership, advocacy, venture acceleration and seed funding. Through its services and programming, TechColumbus supports the innovation initiatives of all companies within the region from the newest entrepreneurial startups to the Fortune 500 companies that call Central Ohio home. TechColumbus measures its impact through increased economic growth and the creation of high-paying jobs. With thousands of companies served, and hundreds of millions of dollars directly or indirectly invested, TechColumbus champions the region's world-class technology-enabled companies and is the driver of the entrepreneurial ecosystem in the Columbus region.