The 2008 MobileMondy Peer Awards recognized 27 companies from 18 countries at its annual awards event held at Telefonica’s fashionable Espacio Movistar facility during this year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain.

Buzzd from New York, a provider of local real-time search information for bars, clubs and restaurants on the mobile device, cleaned the table by winning jury, audience and community awards under the early stage category.

In the Emerging Community category, Taptu a search and sharing engine from London won the award with jury award Funambol, an open source email and messaging company, while local favorite Kimia, a rich media content provider, clinched the audience choice.

Three awards in each category: jury, audience, and community were judged by an expert jury including representatives from Telefónica, Mobile Marketing Association, Vodafone Group, Google, Nexit Ventures, eXtract, Acision, MobHappy, GoMoNews, the MobileMonday global chapter founders and audience SMS voting.

We have created two downloadable PDF documents including slides from all participating companies within each category. The Early-Stage and Emerging Start-Ups presentation slides are currently available for download here. If you are not registered yet, please enter the subscription section to access the documents.

(NOTE: some of the embedded animation’s or video’s have been lost or could not been transferred for PDF document creation).

This year’s winners at the MobileMonday Peer Awards Barcelona will be invited to participate in the MobileMonday Global Summit in conjunction with the World Congress on IT (WCIT) in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, May 18-22, 2008.

We created a MobileMonday Peer Awards Barcelona Flickr Group with event pictures (http://www.flickr.com/groups/peerawardsbarcelona/); anyone who has pictures of that evening, feel free to join and post your pictures in the group to share with us.

MobileMonday has announced its Peer Award nominees. 25 chapters from around the world have chosen companies that have demonstrated exceptionally innovative mobile technologies, products, services and concepts.

The event will be held at Espacio Movistar. Luis Jorge Romero, Director of Standards and Innovation in Telefónica España, will be a keynote speaker together with Pekka Ala-Pietilä, CEO and Co-Founder, Blyk. Mr. Romero will speak about the future of the mobile market and his experience driving innovation in Telefónica España, whose Open Innovation strategy encourages innovation and value creation by partnering with new start-ups.

This year’s nominees are:

Amsterdam – Movels
Bangalore – Mobisy
Barcelona – skuair
Berlin – ViiF
Boston – SnapMyLife
Brussels – Mobixx
Chennai – Mobile-worx
Dusseldorf – Cellity
Helsinki – Fromdistance
Istanbul – Mobinex
London – The 3G Dating Agency / Taptu
Madrid – Kimia
Milan – Waymedia
Mumbai – Ziva Technologies
Munich – hiClip
New York – BuzzD
Oslo – Adactus
Paris – WebWag
Rome – Nanology
Shanghai – DuoGuo
Silicon Valley – Funambol
Singapore – mBit.tv
St. Petersburg – 4Mobi.TV
Stockholm – Momail
Taipei – Toro

This year’s winners at the MobileMonday Peer Awards Barcelona will also be invited to participate in the Innovation Pad activities at the MobileMonday Global Summit in conjunction with the World Congress on IT in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, May 18-22, 2008.

The event is also going to showcase for the first time the new barcelona.mobi mobile urban guide.

Our thanks to our partners Telefónica Movistar, Ajuntament de Barcelona, Nokia, dotMobi, Xtract, Acision, Nexit Ventures, Mippin, 22@Barcelona and Barcelona Media for their invaluable support to this event organised by dotopen.

Additional information is available at http://www.mobilemondaybarcelona.com/peerawards/

Coming to Barcelona for the Mobile World Congress? Don’t miss the MobileMonday Peer Awards Barcelona 2008! Sticking with MobileMonday’s recipe for success, the event will cook up a bunch of fresh innovations mixed with honest feedback and a dash of fun. Served with plenty of juicy networking at the NEW Espacio Movistar in Barcelona on Monday February 11 starting at 2:30PM.

The MobileMonday Peer Awards are recognised by the industry as one of THE interesting events in the mobile industry. Last year’s Barcelona Peer Awards event attracted 23 competitors, the MoMo community award went to Mobile Complete, the audience award to Plazes, and the expert jury award to Realeyes 3D. Check the Peer Awards 2007 Flickr Group pictures and winners’ announcement here.

Mr. Pekka Ala-Pietila, former president at Nokia Corporation and currently chief executive officer of Blyk Corporation, a virtual mobile operator in the UK, will be the keynote speaker.

The event concept is pretty similar as last year: every MobileMonday chapter is invited to nominate one startup to the Peer Awards Barcelona 2008. This year, we’ll divide the start-up finalist presentations in two categories: early-stage start-ups (founded in 2007, early-stage financing) and emerging start-ups (founded in 2005 and after, inbetween Series A & B funding). The organizing committee and jury selects the finalists to present at the awards event. Entrance into the running is free! Check the Peer Awards website for details.

There will be three awards in each category: jury, audience, and community (MoMo chapters). This year’s winners at the MobileMonday Peer Awards Barcelona will also be invited to participate in the Innovation Pad activities at the MobileMonday Global Summit in conjunction with the World Congress on IT in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, May 18-22, 2008.

Master of Ceremony is once again Mrs. Caroline Lewko, from the Wireless Industry Partnership (WIP).

The jury consists of some of the most recognized mobile industry experts and thinkers, currently confirmed:

• Carlos Domingo, General Director, Telefonica R&D;
• Ann Mei Chang, Mobile Engineering Director Google;
• Bena Roberts, Founder and Chief Analyst at BKI Media / GoMo News;
• Russell Buckley, Managing Director, AdMob Europe / Vice-Chairman of MMA’s EMEA;
• Carlo Longino, Mobhappy;
• Daniel Appelquist, Senior Technology Strategist, Vodafone Group;
• Madamohan Rao, Editor, The Asia-Pacific Internet Handbook;
• Jed Rice,VP, Market Development, Skyhook Wireless;
• Peter Vesterbacka, Founder, Some Bazaar;
• Jouko Ahvenainen, Chief Operating Officer, Xtract;
• Michael Wendell, General partner, Nexit Ventures;
• Sirous Kavehercy, Strategist and Consultant, Market Development Director at Acision;

The MobileMonday Peer Awards Barcelona 2008 are being organized collaboratively by the MobileMonday community and hosted by MobileMonday Barcelona. The event is free but you must register in advance since the 800 places will go quickly.

MobileMonday Global Peer Awards winners were decided last Monday in Barcelona at the Espacio Movistar. The awards were handed out to two European applications and one from the US, MobileMonday previously anounced.

The Audience Award went to a Swiss LBS application called Plazes. The Plazes service adds physical presence to the web. The Plazes website automatically detects your location and connects you to people and places nearby.

The jury’s favorite was a French 3D application that can scan and manipulate real life hand written text. The winner, RealEyes3D, operates at two levels: It runs a mobile copy service for camera phone users, www.qipit.com and sells “handwritten messaging” applications to handset vendors.

Community Award went to an American company Mobile Complete. It offers solutions to manage the user experience throughout the life-cycle of mobile applications, services, and handsets.

This was the third year MobileMonday’s Peer Award winners have been chosen. The competiton presentations were held in the Espacio Movistar mobile entertainment center in Barcelona.

Twenty-two of the most talented, creative, and innovative companies presented 3-minute “elevator pitch” style presentations to a panel jury, the audience, and MobileMonday chapter heads.

All finalists were best-of-breed companies who have demonstrated exceptionally innovative mobile technologies, services and concepts. Micah Gland, head of MobileMonday International Development, described the MobileMonday Global Peer Award finalists as “the foam that rises to the top of the café called 3GSM.”The Carnival of the Mobilists – ‘Host of the Year‘ award went to Rudy De Waele with his blog m-trends.org on Mobile Media Lifestyle.

Congratulations to all winners and finalists! A great networking party followed the event for all attendants.

More pictures of the event can be found on Flickr by Josep Ganyet, Martin Sauter, and Rudy De Waele, or by using a combination of various tags suchs as mobilemonday, peerawards, 3gsm, barcelona or other related.

UPDATE: we created a Global Peer Awards Flickr Group so anyone who has pictures of the events can upload them to the group to be shared by everyone.

The MobileMonday Barcelona team and Barcelona Media would like to thank Telefónica Movistar for hosting the event and to 22@Barcelona and Reitek for their fantastic support as a Premium Sponsor and Nexit Ventures as Silver sponsor. Big thanks also to Ajuntament de Barcelona and CIDEM — Generalitat de Catalunya, for their invaluable additional support.

The MobileMonday Global Peer Awards 2007 in Barcelona is being organized collaboratively by the MobileMonday community. Hosted by MoMo Barcelona, MoMo Italy, MoMo Helsinki, MoMo London and MoMo New York have also taken active roles. Many thanks to the everyone who helped building this great event, especially the whole MobileMonday community, participants, the jury (!), MC Caroline (wonderful job!) and Jari and Micah, without their initial and invaluable support it would not have been possible to make such event happen. Hope to see all of you again next year!

(and now back to normal preparing next months’ MobileMonday, stay tuned!)

All pictures © by 22@Barcelona.

For those of you who can’t make the Global Peer Awards in person, you can still catch the event live and cheer for your favorites finalists. The live Webcast will begin at 3:00 pm (CET), and will be available on-demand following the event.

ComVu Media, last year’s Global Peer Award winner for “Best Consumer Product” is Webcasting the event live using it’s award-winning PocketCaster service.

WHEN: February 12, 3:00-7:30pm (CET)

WHERE: http://www.comvu.com/live/?peerawards

PLAYERS: Windows Media/QuickTime

PocketCaster is the world’s first live video broadcasting service for 3G mobile phones and other portable platforms. With the press of a button, users can instantly post videos to their own Webcast page, blog, YouTube or social networking site. Live video streams are automatically archived on a server for later viewing. ComVu is returning as last year’s Global Peer Award Winner 2006 for “Best Consumer Product”. The Company will be using it’s award-winning PocketCaster service, to Webcast this year’s Global Peer Awards live.