It is no surprise that business information giant Thomson Reuters' mobile strategy is a multichannel approach, since the company already has a WAP site and smartphone apps.

Since early May, when Reuters released applications for Apple's iPhone and RIM's BlackBerry simultaneously, the iPhone app has surpassed 120,000 downloads while the BlackBerry app has reached 70,000. In addition, mobile Web page views are 10 percent of Reuters' total online traffic and are growing at approximately 50 percent year-over-year, and mobile Web ad revenue is growing at 30 percent year-over-year.

"Our WAP site, which is optimized for viewing on mobile browsers, has been in the market for two-and-a-half years, and almost 20 percent of our advertising revenue is coming from mobile," said Alisa Bowen, New York-based senior vice president and head of consumer publishing at Thomson Reuters.

"Mobile is an integral part of our online digital strategy, and it's by far the fastest-growing advertising product we have, eclipsing even online video," she said. "Certainly mobile advertising has been very good for us."

Thomson Reuters' free iPhone and BlackBerry apps provide business news and information for business professionals, and the company is working on a range of premium subscription-based apps.

For example, Thomson Reuters recently launched the Black's Law Dictionary iPhone app targeting lawyers.

Currently, while the smartphone apps are free, they are not yet ad supported. However, given the success of Reuters' WAP site as a revenue generator, selling ad inventory within the apps is only a matter of time.

"We don't have ads in them yet, because we want to prioritize user experience and aggregate a meaningful audience before adding advertising," Ms. Bowen said. "We have sophisticated user analytics, which we introduced in the third quarter, and we're looking to introduce third-party analytics to really drill into what people are doing in the app.

To promote the smartphone apps, Thomson Reuters has leveraged its in-house media, online advertising and an out-of-home billboards featured prominently on the NASDAQ Tower and the Thomson Reuters building adjacent to an AT&T store in Times Square in Manhattan.

"The number of app downloads exceeded our expectations for sure, and it was due to a combination ofan effective promotional campaign that included the Times Square billboard on our office," Ms. Bowen said. "We actually dominate the south side of Times Square.

"We have pretty sophisticated technology that allows us to coordinate animation between the two billboards to create a roadblock effect," she said. "Those two properties really dominate people's view."

Apple has also promoted Reuters' iPhone application via iTunes.

"We've been grateful to Apple for that, because the company has been able to bubble up applications for its audience, to feature the new and latest apps and what's hot, which has proved to be very effective to help people discover our app in the App Store," Ms. Bowen said.

"We've been in the Top 20 apps for many weeks now, and people really use those lists to discover what's hot," she said. "And with the iPhone, there's a huge amount of word of mouth spreading the app virally."

As for the BlackBerry app, Reuters noticed an uptick in downloads once it was featured in RIM's BlackBerry App World.

"The downloads really jumped significantly once the app was live in BlackBerry App World, and although it hasn't gotten the same level of attention as the App Store, it seems to be pretty effective model of distribution," Ms. Bowen said.

Thomson Reuters has partnered with mobile ad networks such as Nokia Interactive Advertising.

"We've leveraged Nokia's ad platform and network, as well their sales arm in mobile advertising," Ms. Bowen said. "We have a really strong relationship with Nokia on a number of different levels, particularly the research and development space."

Nokia and Thomson Reuters are collaborating on a mobile journalism initiative called MoJo.

"We're thinking through journalists' work flow to help people capture and share pictures by uploading via a mobile device," Ms. Bowen said. "MoJo helps people understand how a device like the N97 could fit into a journalist's work flow to assist with the capturing of photos and video."

Nokia has also pre-installed Thomson Reuters applications on its N97 smartphone in Europe and India, and the U.S. isn't far off, either.

Nokia has done a lot of advertising that include its partners, including Thomson Reuters.

"Nokia heavily promoted preinstalled Facebook, Twitter and Reuters apps in the ad campaign for the N97 device itself," Ms. Bowen said. "We developed a picture slideshow app specifically for that device, as well as a news headline app that's like a news ticker.

"We promote all of our apps and the WAP site on our wired Web site," she said. "Wireless is not a replacement for the other site, because it's still only 20 percent or so of the market, and there's still a need for the Web-only displays that you get through the WAP site.

"We see them operating side by side and complementing each other."