Cheetah Mobile, perhaps the least respected large-scale developer of mobile apps, is partnering with the truly world-class computer science and engineering programs at Carnegie Mellon University to show them how the pros shove ads into everything. Yep, this is not a drill, Cheetah Mobile is in fact teaching a course in mobile advertising at CMU's Silicon Valley campus to students paying over $40,000 per year in tuition to get graduate degrees in software development and related fields.

In the press announcement, Cheetah Mobile describes itself as "the leading developer of mission-critical mobile utility and security applications," which stretches the definition of more of those words than it would be worth listing. Following up on a previous course offering—yes, this is not the first time—Cheetah Mobile will lead a new course of their design on Mobile Advertising. Working with CMU on a contract basis is Cheetah's Business Director, Kevin Wei, who will lead the course.

The focus will be on implementing ads in apps and then evaluating their performance, culminating in an analysis judged by Cheetah Mobile and other invited guests.

While the PR aspect of the partnership for Carnegie Mellon is really pretty dubious, we might have to consider that Cheetah Mobile's executives may indeed be some of the foremost experts on ad-based revenue generation. After all, it is a shockingly valuable company in spite of an app portfolio that adds little if any value to the world of mobile software.

Let's hope, for all of our sake, that the young talent over at Carnegie Mellon can put their own, productive spin on the insight they get from the world's best bloatware developers.

PRESS RELEASE

Source: Cheetah Mobile (PRNewswire)