This morning Cambridge-based mobile ad targeting company Jumptap announced moving into the leading mobile market in the world – Japan.

Japan is known as the “king of the mobile web” and leads the world in 3G penetration, hovering at around 90 percent of mobile handset owners as compared to around 40 percent in the US and Western Europe where Jumptap currently operates. 83 percent of Japan’s mobile subscribers use mobile data services (that’s 93 million people), and much is used for m-commerce, a still nascent market here in the US. (Mobile Web shopping exceeded $10 billion in 2009 in Japan vs $1.2 billion in the US.) Given this highly developed mobile web, advertising expenditures in 2009 in Japan reached $1.14 billion – a 12.9 percent year-on-year growth (hindered only by the recession with the previous year boasting 59 percent growth).

Jumptap plans to capture much of this growing ad spend in coming years, today announcing an exclusive partnership and strategic investment from Japan’s leading media representative company, cyber communications inc. (cci). cci is a Dentsu Group company, one of the largest advertising agency’s in the world. Dentsu produced the first newspaper ads and television commercials in Japan, and today the company realizes more than double the sales of its nearest competitor.

According to the press release this morning, cci and Jumptap will be combing technology forces to unveil a “break-through advertising opportunity.”

“This is a leap forward for Jumptap’s global market presence,” said Jumptap CEO, George Bell. “Our relationship with cci, a Dentsu Group company with significant influence and expertise, will greatly accelerate mobile ad penetration in Japan, one of the largest and most influential markets for the development and adoption of smart devices.”

Jumptap is one of the flagship mobile companies here in the Boston area. It was founded in Cambridge in 2004 as SpringRight, changing its name a year later. The company raised $21M in a Series A and B in 2005 from General Catalyst, Redpoint Ventures, and Summerhill Ventures. The following year they raised an $22M Series C round from current investors and Valhalla Partners. Their Series D round came in 2008 and also included AllianceBernstein and WPP.