Four Nordic and Baltic Startups were selected to Mobile Peer Awards 2009 Finals in Barcelona by the international virtual Jury from the 42 semi-finalists.
- Fortumo – MobileMonday Estonia
- Portal for setting up free and extremely fast web-based mobile services and monetizing them, offering billing in 11 countries and expanding.
- Getjar Networks – MobileMonday Lithuania
- One of the world’s most popular mobile application distribution and developer communities with over 14 million downloads per month.
- Mobintech – MobileMonday Copenhagen
- Offers small digital display glasses, through which the small screen of mobile phones will be transformed into an experience similar to viewing a 30” flat screen TV.
- PopCatcher – MobileMonday Sweden
- Provides technology and products for stripping out talk and commercials from recorded radio music into plain music MP3’s.
The firms will be presenting their final pitch in Barcelona on February 16th.
(See the full list of the 20 selected companies on Mobile Peer Awards web page.)
Congrats all four!
MobileMonday Peer Awards 2009 mobile innovation contest semifinalists have been chosen. From the Nordic and Baltic area, the following firms were selected by their MoMo chapters.
One might ask, however, where are the Finnish, Swedish, and Norwegian participants?! There were some interesting startups applying in of those chapters as well, but none are on the semifinalist list (at least on Monday evening) – the chapters didn’t select anyone? Either way, it is good to see the newly-launched Estonian MoMo chapter sent their nominee this year (last year the Helsinki chapter chose Estonian Fromdistance).
Nevertheless, as explained before, there will next be a further selection round by an international virtual jury to select the 20 finalists to the February 16th Barcelona MobileMonday event. Anybody from our readers in the jury?
As the new year soon starts, the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain will only be a few weeks away. Similarly to last year, MobileMonday in Barcelona will be organized the same week of the congress, on February 16, 2009. Also as last year, the event will focus on MobileMonday Peer Awards finals, the largest mobile startup innovation competition on the planet as the tagline says.
It’s now time to register your startup to the competition to your local MobileMonday Chapter (the one in your city, or the nearest one). Hurry up, the registration closes December 31st, midnight your chapter’s local time!
Each MoMo chapter will select their nominee for the finals using their preferred method of choice (email voting, local event voting, founder’s voting, jury, etc.; check your local chapter for more details). An international jury will then select the Peer Awards winner from 20 finalists in Barcelona based on 3-minute pitches.
Each chapter will announce their nominee by January 16, 2009 midnight local time. Notice that if you want to be eligible for the finalist nomination, you must be willing to travel to the Peer Awards in Barcelona at your own expense.
As there are altogether 67 chapters (!) participating this year, there will be an international virtual jury pre-screening the nominees, and selecting the 20 finalists. MoMo is trying to make the selection as transparent and open to the industry as possible. They are thus accepting applications to the finalist-selecting jury from individuals, to select the finalists among all the chapter nominees by online vote during mid-January. The virtual jury members will not need to travel to Barcelona. If you’re interested to become part of the online jury email jury AT mobilepeerawards DOT com with a short bio, your LinkedIn profile, and personal blog and twitter name if you have one.
Mobile Summit 2008 will be organized in Stockholm on October 28-29th. The event will be big; so far MobileMonday chapters from almost 30 different cities have confirmed to take part. Lots of the industry’s main players will be present and there should be plenty of chances to network and find business opportunities. See conference agenda for details.
Mobility @ Otaniemi is sponsoring the event and they offer Finnish companies one speaker slot at the main stage, and one speaker slot in front of the VC panel, and also four regular tickets to the event. Regular price for the tickets is 450€ (including VAT). The companies with speaker slots will also be invited to the VIP dinner. If you want to participate, send an email to artur.surov (at) technopolis.fi and explain why you should get one of the tickets. Attitude counts!
Mobility @ Otaniemi is a microclustering project which aims to bring the Finnish mobile indystry together through events, joint activities and concrete actions. It’s organized by Otaniemi Marketing, which aims to promote the 600 firms operating and 40-50 new startups being founded each year in the Otaniemi area. Involved parties include, among others, TKK Helsinki University of Technology, VTT Technical Research Center of Finland, Technopolis Ventures Ltd, and the City of Espoo.
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:
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.
Next week there are two interesting events, MobileMonday Global Peer Awards Round Finland, and the second annual StratMark seminar.
MobileMonday Helsinki will select a company having the best mobile application or service to represent Finland at the MobileMonday European Peer Awards on February 11 in Barcelona. The European winners will then continue to Global Awards Finals in Malaysia in May. Admission to tomorrow’s Helsinki event is free, just do it now.
StratMark program (all material in Finnish, though, except research publications) on the other hand is focused on improving the strategic marketing know-how of Finnish companies, along with creating an academic research paradigm on the subject. The seminar on Thursday is second of its kind, and unfortunately fully booked by now. There will be lots of interesting people from top Finnish companies, and academic highlights include marketing professor Rajendra Srivastava from Emory University, Atlanta.
I’ll be participating both events, so you can look forward for a report.
Arch Red Oy
Lumi Group Oy
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