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Smart devices have fundamentally changed how people interact with the world. Users now have information on tap, everywhere at any time. That has correlated into a shift in how consumers react with brands online, in retail stores, what products to buy and when to buy them. When consumers' brand interaction change, it is a sign that advertising is going to change as well. According to Google, that shift has started to take place.

Google posted five trends to watch in mobile advertising that evolved in 2011 and will continue in the next couple of years. Google is targeting its mobile ads solution not only at developers and app publishers but also towards its traditional market of brands and retailers. The growth of mobile ads will be important in how publishers monetize mobile endeavors. How will it evolve?

Mobile advertising platform Nexage is releasing a private exchange to enable premium publishers and developers to optimize advertising that best fits their businesses. Nexage believes it can help premium publishers make the most money off their mobile apps and games and by taking first-party publishing data and making it available to advertisers to help broaden the targeting and reach of its real-time-bidding platform.

Nexage's private exchange is about monetizing app data straight from the publisher. The company's goal is to make advertising the dominant form of application monetization by the end of 2012. Yet, Nexage is only shooting for the large publishers (it has Rovio's business for ads in Angry Birds) meaning that the app publisher middle class will not be able to benefit from Nexage's private exchange.

Mobile advertising is exploding. The opportunities for developers and publishers to make money through mobile advertising has grown exponentially in the last couple of years. There are a lot of options to market and monetize apps, but when it comes to advertising, there is still just one company that dominates the ecosystem: Google.

We write a lot about mobile advertising companies. Nexage, Tapjoy and JumpTap have all made significant news recently. Yet, as Nexage president and CEO Ernie Cormier told us once, "it is a Google Market." Yet, there has been confusion between what developers and publishers are supposed to use, AdMob or AdSense? Google clarified what each service is for last week.

The Google offices in South Korea have been raided by police on the suspicion that Google's mobile advertising service, AdMob, has been illegally collecting location information, according to a report from Reuters.

"We suspect AdMob collected personal location information without consent or approval from the Korean Communication Commission," a South Korean police official said in the report. Google has issued a statement that it is fully cooperating with the investigation. South Korea is one of the most technology-forward countries in the world with one of the highest adoption rates of smartphones on the globe.

Mobile analytics and tracking firm AdMob has just released its latest mobile metrics report, a monthly snapshot of the smartphone industry based on data generated by ad requests within its network of 23,000 mobile websites and mobile applications. This current report, the last of its kind, notes the company who plans on reinventing the report to make it "more useful going forward," focuses on long-term trends across the industry.

Not surprisingly, the company found that Android has seen rapid growth thanks to the launch of new devices, Apple is still the top manufacturer and iPads are having an impact on mobile Internet traffic worldwide.

Earlier this week following the announcement of the iPhone 4, Apple revised the terms of service (TOS) for advertising within applications due to the impending release of its iAd mobile ad service. Apple's new TOS only allows ad networks whose sole business is delivering mobile ads to collect data from those ads, effectively cutting out larger competitors like Google's AdMob. Today, AdMob's founder Omar Hamoui responded to Apple's revisions, which he believes will stifle innovation in the space.

InMobi, one of the world's largest independent mobile ad networks, just announced that plans to enter the U.S. advertising market. The company - which already has offices in San Francisco and has currently served about 2 billion ad impressions in the U.S. following a soft launch in January - is currently one of the strongest mobile advertising players in the Asia Pacific market and also has a strong presence in Africa and Western Europe. In the U.S., InMobi will go up against entrenched players like AdMob, which was recently acquired by Google, and relative newcomers like Apple's iAd and Quattro Wireless.

AdMob, the mobile advertising platform that was acquired by Google, just launched a new software development kit (SDK) for the iPad that will make it easier for developers to integrate AdMob/Google ads into their iPad apps. This is an extension of AdMob's unified iPhone OS SDK. Currently, the iPad SDK supports text & tile, as well as image ads, but AdMob also highlighted that it will soon support HTML5 and allow developers to create more interactive ads.

The Federal Trade Commission just cleared Google's acquisition of mobile advertising network AdMob. According to the FTC, the acquisition raised "serious antitrust issues," but these were ultimately overshadowed by Apple's move to start its own mobile advertising network and the fact that Google has numerous other competitors in the mobile advertising space. The FTC voted 5-0 to close its investigation of Google's acquisition.

ad network AdMob has released its March report. Surprisingly, perhaps, the report notes that advertising traffic on the Android phone has surpassed that on the iPhone.

Android ad traffic in the U.S. was 46% in March of this year versus iPhone's 32%.