Estonian startup called Fromdistance, has launched a product called FromSMS that enables you to create a totally free mobile gateway with the help of your phone. I’ve worked with SMS brokers and gateways in the past, and I can say that this is probably a very welcome move due to the outrageous service commissions the network operators are collecting.

The FromSMS webserver is connected to your web application through regular HTTP GET/POST and the FromSMS server connects to the mobile phone through few different technologies, the regular phone data connections such as 3G, EDGE, etc. or a WiFi to cut down on costs. Then of course your phone is the last post which sends out and receives the messages to your customers. For more information, have a look at the website.

It’s nice to see innovation like this nourish. I’m sure there are some scalability issues with this, but with a small service - this is a perfect match for smaller startups who want to test their concept online.

Fromdistance Ltd. has won the MobileMonday Global Peer Awards Round Finland, and will represent us in MobileMonday European Peer Awards in Barcelona on February 11. The two other nominees were community-driven live TV streaming startup Floobs, and Intelligent SMS provider BookIT.

Fromdistance is actually registered in Estonia, though founded by a Finn. It was allowed to enter the competition nevertheless. The nomination was based on Fromdistance’s amateur reporting tool called Mobile Citizen Reporter (already available in Finland). The jury found the company to possess the strongest characteristics with an innovative idea, lucrative and high potential market with a global appeal, as well as a good overall presentation. The privately-owned company was founded in 2004, and sells software licenses to large enterprises and media companies.

The participation in the peer awards Finland competition was quite light, though, compared to e.g. Norway, which witnessed the following nominees for the Norway Peer Awards 2008:

• Opera Mini
• Colibria IM
• mBricks
• mobilize by Adactus
• Fluid by Favourite Systems
• Studio1: by Rubberduck MediaLab
• Zizzr
• Dextella by Mobiletech
• SMT Phonename
• Mobile Manager by Touch Mobility
• MobiSearch by ZapDance
• her.no by MobileInfo

According to still unverified news Adactus won with their cross-platform content delivery system mobilize. Interestingly, Adactus also offers a mobile reporter solution, although with not as end-to-end business offering as Fromdistance.

Altogether, despite lacking competition participants, there were some really interesting companies represented in the Helsinki event, which we’ll hopefully have a chance to cover later on.