Google has named Joshua Spanier its first director of media. Spanier was previously director of communications strategy at Goodby, Silverstein & Partners.

Social targeting platform 33Across has named Matt Arkin president and Allie Savarino Kline vice president of marketing. Arkin was most recently chief revenue officer at Sojern, but previously served as senior vice president of sales at AOL/Platform A, headed sales and operations for TACODA and filled the role of vice president of sales at MarketWatch.com. Kline was last seen overseeing brand development, marketing, and athlete and celebrity relationships for Brand Affinity Technologies, but also ran the global marketing shop at Unicast for 10 years prior.

Arnold Worldwide named Dave Dugan its first-ever chief commercial officer. Most recently, Dugan had served as president of word-or-mouth marketing company BzzAgent.

Gerry McGoldrick, former senior vice president of marketing at GSI Commerce, has grabbed the CMO role at group-buying/social commerce firm BuyWithMe. GSI was acquired by eBay earlier this year.

Digitas has brought Sarah Montague and Brooke Skinner, formerly senior vice presidents at DraftFCB, to Digitas Chicago and Robert Guay, last seen serving as group account director at Fallon, to Digitas Boston. As senior vice president of marketing, Montague will lead the Kaiser Permanente and Kraft accounts. Skinner will serve as senior vice president of account planning, while Guay will lead the Aflac account as senior vice president of marketing.

Multimedia studio Electus has found a new CEO in Shine International President Chris Grant. Grant will report to founder Ben Silverman, a former NBC bigwig who will still oversee all Electus operations. In addition, COO Drew Buckley’s role has been expanded to all operations, including digital, advertising, finance, mergers and acquisitions and managing the company’s Yahoo, Microsoft and Google relationships.

The Inter/Media Group of Companies announced that Jody Slater has been named senior vice president and managing director of digital unit Inter/Media Interactive. Previously Slater served as executive vice president and managing director of the digital unite of U.S. International Media.

In addition to opening new offices in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago and a sales headquarters in New York, mobile rich media advertising platform GoldSpot Media has appointed Matthew Bryant, former president of Media Buying Services International, to its board of directors.

• The only two mobile devices that are still on the list of the top 20 phones are the iPhone and BlackBerry Curve.
• Apple has increased their market share as top manufacturer by almost 20 percentage points, growing from 11% in March 2009 to 30% in Q2 2011. Previously Samsung was the top manufacturer.
• Between Q210 and Q211, six verticals experienced triple digit growth or greater year-over-year.
• While in the first S.M.A.R.T. report only 27% of the devices were touch screen, 60% of the devices on Millennial’s network now use a touch screen.
• The local market made up 44% of all targeted audience campaigns in Q211, compared to less than 2% in the first S.M.A.R.T. report.

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Interestingly, Condaptive’s platform is aimed at developers, assisting them in building location- and context-aware apps. It’s not hard to see how such technology could come in handy for ad targeting, but this is the second acquisition Millennial has made that seems aimed at the supply side. Last February, the company acquired TapMetrics to offer developers an intuitive dashboard for managing sales and revenue.

“Condaptive has a unique algorithmic approach to building audiences, and are able to deliver data driven insights that we believe will prove valuable for both advertisers and developers,” wrote Millennial Executive Vice President and CTO Chris Brandenburg. “Additionally, Condaptive has built a suite of tools for their internal usage that will now be exposed to our developer community, opening up new opportunities for improving the mobile experience.”

All of Condaptive’s staff is joining Millennial Media in its Technology and Innovation Group, while Condaptive founder and CEO Hemang Gadhia, has been named senior vice president of audience intelligence.

In 2010, 514 companies achieved liquidity for a net of $39.3 billion, the best year since 2007 when 613 exits netted $69.1 billion. Way up from the eight IPOs of 2009, 46 venture-backed companies went public in 2010 and raised $3.4 billion. In addition, 445 mergers and acquisitions garnered $33.9 billion, a 17% increase from the year before.

Venture-capital backed companies raised a median of $69 million (compared to $43 million in 2009) before launching an IPO and $20 million in funding before ascending to liquidity through a merger. Dow Jones also noptes that 44 companies are planning to go public so far this year, far more impressive than the 25 lined up last year at the same time.

All this has fueled speculation that 2011 will be the year of “blockbuster IPOs,” particularly in the social media sector — Facebook and Groupon and Zynga, oh my — but don’t cross your fingers yet. These companies don’t seem to have any interest in going public and continure soaking up venture capital — Facebook was the recipient of $500 million from Goldman Sachs and Digital Sky Technologies (which boosted its total Facebook investment to $700 million) while Groupon will soon announce a $950 million round of funding.

The myriad funding announcements from digital ad tech firms hitting my inbox certainly suggests there’s a helluva lot of entering going on. I’ve already written about social targeting platform 33Across raising $9 million, and major investments in Centro and AdKeeper, but here are several more funding announcements from the first week of the new year:

• After noting its revenue had tripled in 2010, mobile ad network Millennial Media boasted it had just received $27.5 million in growth equity funding from Bessemer Venture Partners, Columbia Capital, Charles River Ventures and New Enterprise Associates. Millennial, which for a while had caught RIM’s eye as an acquisition target, has raised $65 million in total equity funding and will use the new funds for new acquisitions — the network acquired mobile analytic firm TapMetrics last year.
• DSP Turn left a Series D round of funding with $20 million. The round was led by Greenspring Associates, and all of Turn’s pervious investors — Norwest Venture Partners, Trident Capital, Shasta Ventures and Focus Ventures — put in their fair shares as well. Turn plans to use the capital in bolstering its technology infrastructure and expanding international operations.
• Dachis Group raised $30 million in a Series B round of funding led by Austin Ventures. The social media consultancy went on a bit on a bit of an acquisition binge at the end of last year, purchasing Powered, Archrival and Stuzo during November and December.
• Targeting platform [x+1] secured $10 million in a Series B funding round led by Intel Capital with participation from existing investors Advanced Technology Ventures, Blue Chip Venture Company and Hudson Venture Partners.

So is 2011 the year of the exit? With so much venture capital flooding in, it doesn’t seem so… But if there’s one thing I’ve learned in the digital space, it’s that everything can turn around at a moment’s notice.

Android and iOS devices both took 37% of U.S. smartphone ad requests from Millennial’s ad network in October. Android’s requests grew 65% month over month (2,182% year to date) while iOS jumped by only 12% (32% ytd). The biggest grower for iOS devices was the iPad, which shot up 112% over the previous month.

Millennial, which claims a reach of 81% of the U.S. mobile web users, also noted that ad requests from RIM devices had a 20% share of impressions. Smartphone impressions in general increased by 3% in October, compared to a 1% gain for feature phone ad requests.

On the device front, while Apple devices claimed a quarter of all Millennial’s ad requests, Samsung appeared in second with 17% followed by Motorola with around 15%.

Apple mobile devices (iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch) beat out all other devices, accounting for 30% share of impressions. The iPad in particular witnessed a 156% growth in impressions and a 316% growth in revenue during the third quarter.

Interestingly, the iPhone itself took home a little more than 19% of impressions for all phones, well ahead of the second place Motorola Droid (about 10%) and the BlackBerry Curve (around 8%).

According to the company’s latest findings, which included a month of iPhone4 availability, 32% of people who bought a smartphone device went Android, compared to 26% that chose the iPhone and 25% who got a BlackBerry. However, Android still makes up only 19% of smartphones; boasting 28% of all smartphones, the iPhone is quickly gaining share on BlackBerry (a declining 31%).

In its Mobile Mix report released last week, Millennial Media noted that Android impression share increased across its mobile ad network by 7% month over month, growth of 39%. With growth since the beginning of the year nearing 1,000%, ads served to Android devices now make up 26% of the Millennial network, compared to Apple’s leading 29% share.

Even when combined with the share of recent acquisition AdMob, Google’s mobile ad share is estimated to drop from 27% to 21% year over year. Yahoo will also take a tumble, from 12% to 9%, alongside Microsoft (10% to 7%) and Nokia (7% to 5%).

But pray tell, why does this suggest iAd is actually a success? Well, Quattro Wireless, which Apple acquired in January, boasted only a 9% share in 2009; the iAd was introduced back in April and launched in July (with well-publicized hiccoughs).

Besides Apple’s momentous entrance into the space, IDC also sees prominent gains for indie mobile ad networks in 2010: Jumptap is expected to take a 13% slice this year compared to 10% in 2009 while Millennial Media is estimated at 11% versus 9% last year.

– Compete.com has teamed up with the Fox Audience Network (FAN) to provide Audience Profiles, which will give publishers access to the data of more than 150 million consumers broken down across 20 categories and 1,800 audience attributes.

– In its quarterly review of paid search spend, WebVisible reported that Bing grabbed 10% more share while Google took home a modest 3% raise. Yahoo!, which has been losing share like Lady Gaga’s fading novelty, slipped another 9%.

– The new joint venture Ignite B2B integrates demand creator Technekes’ capabilities with incentivizer Xceleration’s RewardStation technology. Pickett Yon has been brought on board as director of marketing services.

Certainly the most missed at the party is Flash, but video advertisers have found another animal to circle around in HTML5. mDialog has launched an HTML5 adaptive streaming video service with dynamic ad insertion it claims were previously only available with Flash-based solutions. Users of the video as a service solution can insert geotargeted ads seamlessly, avoiding interrupting streaming video content using the mDialog iPad/iPhone video players and all other HTML5-enabled browsers.

And you wouldn’t expect Millennial Media, mobile advertising’s “silent giant,” to miss out on all the iPod fun, would you? The independent mobile advertising platform has released an SDK along with the PadMedia Creative Suite, which features new ad formats designed specifically for the iPad. These include the floating canvas, which allows an advertiser to choose the space where a rich media ad will expand when clicked; return-to-play, which allows a consumers to pause the application while responding to an ad; motion creative, which rotates the ad with iPad movement (like the pour-the-beer-in-glass app); and everyone’s fave, the full-page interstitial.