To fully grasp the prescience of Mihael Mikek, a co-founder of Celtra, the advertising technology company, requires an exercise of mental time travel.

Return, for a moment, to 2005. The iPhone is still two years away and most of us are talking on BlackBerrys or flimsy flip phones. The biggest money to be made in mobile is in the sale of ringtones and screen wallpaper.

But Mr Mikek, then a first-year MBA student atBabson’s Olin Graduate School of Business, sees an industry with enormous potential. Although it would be a few years before he and his co-founders — his wife, Maja Drolec, also a Babson MBA and the company’s chief financial officer, and Matevz Klanjsek, Celtra’s chief product officer — begin to focus on ways to make mobile advertisements more effective, they all saw the budding power of mobile.