The MobileMonday Mobile Peer Awards Barcelona is one of the most influential events in the mobile industry and, with over 1000 attendants, the point of reference in startup innovation during the Mobile World Congress (3GSM).

It is the first time Israeli startups are able to participate in this prestigous contest since the Israeli chapter, Mobile Monday Tel-Aviv, was formed only last year. In a special MobileMonday event, we had 15 Israeli startups competing to be Israel’s representitive. Our distingushed panel of judges included Yuval Baharav (Sequoia Capital), Ziv Koren (Amdocs), Zvika Rubinstein (Samsung) and Ofer Shmueli (orange Israel). After the judges viewed all presentations and asked the companies various business questions, they had chosen to hand out the first place to fring.

fring is a successful startup which provides a mobile internet service & community that enables end users to access and interact with their social networks on-the-go, make free calls and live chat with all of their fring, Skype®, MSN® Messenger, Google Talk™, ICQ, SIP, Twitter, Yahoo!™ and AIM®* friends using their handset’s internet connection. According to Fring, 400,000 new fring users (”fringsters”) are born every month from 220 countries worldwide. Very impressive.

This year, the Mobile Peer Awards had 163 startups participating and 42 nominees were selected by their respective chapters. An international Jury then selected the 20 finalists to present at the Peer Awards event in Barcelona. The results were published earlier today and I was really glad to find out that fring got to the finals!

This company makes me proud of the Israeli mobile industry and I wish them good luck in the upcoming Barcelona contest. The entire list of finalists to present at the Mobile Peer Awards is:

EARLY-STAGE STARTUPS

• Addict Digital Media - Mobile Monday Buenos Aires
• aka-aki networks GmbH - MobileMonday Berlin
• Babajob.com - MobileMonday Bangalore
• Big in Japan Inc. - MobileMonday Dallas
• bioLocate - MobileMonday Jakarta
• Dial2Do - MobileMonday Dublin
• Fortumo - MobileMonday Estonia
• Mob4Hire - MobileMonday Vancouver
• Orbster GmbH - MobileMonday Munich
• Oxynade - MobileMonday Brussels
• Tellmewhere - MobileMonday Paris
• Xumii - MobileMonday Sydney

EMERGING STARTUPS

• fring - MobileMonday Tel Aviv
  
• Aradiom - MobileMonday Istanbul
• Getjar Networks - MobileMonday Lithuania
• Keynetik - MobileMonday Washington DC
• Mobintech A/S - MobileMonday Copenhagen
• PopCatcher AB - MobileMonday Sweden
• Soonr - MobileMonday Silicon Valley
• Unkasoft Advergaming - MobileMonday Madrid

Mobile Monday is a global community of mobile industry visionaries, developers and influentials fostering cooperation and cross-border business development through virtual and live networking events to share ideas, best practices and trends from global markets. The Mobile Monday community holds events and informal gatherings on the first Monday of each month. Usually the events have a certain theme with some lectures by people from that field, a “launchpad” in which a few startups showcase their technologies and most importantly - networking in a nice atmosphere.

We lunched the Israeli chapter, MobileMonday Tel-Aviv, almost half a year ago and it has been a major success ever since. Although we keep the community exclusive, we already have ~700 members, and 150-200 participants in each monthly event.

Tomorrow we will have our first 2009 event. I have invested much efforts in it so I hope everything works out fine =) The topic is “Mobile Apps & Games Monetization” and the agenda is:

* Introduction and upcoming MoMoTLV 3GSM Activities - Aviv Revach
* Mobile Apps&Games Monetization Overview - Aviv Revach, Co-Organizer, MoMoTLV and Co-Founder, Mo’Minis.
* From Palm through Java ME to iPhone - Tzur Sayag, CEO, Nogasoft.
* iPhone Apps - Barak Ben-Ezer, Co-Founder, ApParty (iFog Application).
* Monetization through the eyes of an aggregator - Doron Kagan, CEO, Rayfusion.

I will probably publish my presentation here soon.

If you wish to find out more about MoMoTLV, visit our website.

My friend Ayelet Noff from Blonde 2.0 recently received a brand new Samsung Omnia phone as part of Samsung’s promotional campaign with McCann Digital. McCann is taking this campaign to a whole new level by giving the Omnia for free to top bloggers to use in their everyday lives and share their thoughts about the product with their friends.

It seems that the Samsung Omnia i900 is a great phone for bloggers. Not only does it come with the Opera mobile browser for easy internet access but it also comes with apps which offer easy access to RSS feeds and podcasts, and the full Microsoft Office Suite so that bloggers can work on posts on the go.

McCann’s decision to target top bloggers was definitely a smart move. By targeting these bloggers, McCann has easily tapped into a large reader base by getting positive reviews from bloggers with high authority and reaching thousands of perspective customers. It’s exciting to see companies like Samsung turning to social media for promotional campaigns.