According to Kara Swisher of All Things D, Apple is on the cusp of buying mobile ad company Quattro for $275 million.
No surprise here: Apple was just outbid on mobile ad company Admob by Google for $750 million. Apple is obviously interested in entering the mobile advertising space.
Optimistically, that’s because they recognize that owning the ad network that power all of their App Store apps would make them a killing… although given how poorly the App Store is maintained, one wonders if Apple has the customer service chops to run their own advertising network.
Pessimistically? Apple’s been flirting with some alarming patents for mandatory advertising within OS X. It’s hard to believe they’d go that route, but just the existence of such patents is enough to cause you to arch your eyebrow when Cupertino drops $300 million for an advertising company.
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
