VentureBeat

I’m delighted to announce the results of our search for today’s hottest mobile technology companies — our MobileBeat Top 30.

We’ll be inviting each of these innovative companies to our one-day MobileBeat2008 conference on July 24.

The MobileBeat Top 30 is a special group, having survived some rigorous screening. For those of you who haven’t been following the selection process, here’s how the choices were made: With help from an independent committee of experts, we put together a list of mobile companies that had 1) a bold idea and 2) a real chances of being a grand-slam hit as a business. We then let readers submit write-in candidates, in case we’d missed some good ones. Our committee filtered these too, rejecting far more than it accepted, and came out with 80 nominees. That’s when we asked readers to vote for their favorites. Your votes were our main guidance, but we tweaked the results ever so slightly to allow in a few of the more promising early-stage companies (we found that the larger, mature companies were able to mobilize more votes).

Our winners are all exciting companies working on the forefront of the emerging mobile web industry. Here they are:

Applications:

• Facebook — despite garnering initial fame via the PC Web, Facebook has emerged as one of the fast-growing mobile applications; clearly a front-runner.
• Jibe Mobile — Jibe makes it easy for people to discover online content and share it with anyone, either from their mobile phone or from the Web.
• Kyte.tv — another live video company lets you broadcast live video from a phone, and keeps it organized on a web site through a personalized player
• Loopt — a company offering location based applications for users of various carriers, including Sprint and Verizon.
• mBit — a P2P search and file-sharing technology for phones, overcoming standard MMS limitations to 300kb.
• Mig33 — a mobile application that’s seeing rapid global growth for its bundle of SMS text messaging, instant messaging and cheap calls.
  
• Mocospace — a US mobile-only social network and one of the industry’s best examples of how to grow off-deck.
• MyStrands — a social recommendation service that wants to steal away YouTube’s music video viewing audience.
• Qik — Robert Scoble’s favorite live video streaming platform, Qik also offers RSS feeds for its content; parent company Visivo Communications just took its first funding in April.
  
• Radar — offers easy photo-sharing and commenting on all phones, and boasts over one million users.
  
• Rearden Commerce — a mobile concierge service, that lets you track your travel plans, calendar, events, reviews all from a single application.
  
• SMS Gupshup — a twitter-like clone seeing heady growth in Asia.
  
• Vlingo — a slick speech recognition interface for the Blackberry.
• Whrrl — its Whrrl service shows you the people, places and events around you, based on what your friends do and Whrrl’s recommendation algorithms.
• Xumii — giving you a centralized way to aggregate contacts and feeds from your social networks and IM, and stay connected by sharing messages, widgets and photos via IM, threaded chat, groups and mobile walls (more here).

Infrastructure/service

• 4Info — wants to change mobile marketing by offering consumers, publishers and advertisers SMS services to distribute content, alerts, news and advertising.
• Admob – a leading mobile ad network, serving billions of ad impressions monthly globally, and doing interesting analytics.
• Dashwire — stores a backup of all your mobile info on the cloud, lets you access on a Web page. Offers one-click photo uploads to Flickr, Facebook, etc.”
• FusionOne — lets you backup pretty much any content on your mobile phone.
• Greystripe — lets developers insert ads on the fly into their mobile games, bypassing carriers and other ad incumbents.
  
• Knowtate Inc. — provides tags on physical objects, which let people with mobile phones find out much more information about them.
• Medio — a mobile search company, available on the decks of carriers such as Verizon and Vodafone.
• Myxer — a product of MVisible Technologies, Myxer helps manage delivery of digital media to mobile devices.
• Numobiq — turns dumb phones into smart phones via a software that sits on top of the mobile phone’s operating system, backed by Benchmark.
• Ontela — offers easy-to-use photo-taking and sharing technology that lets you upload media from cameras to PC; White-labels for carriers.
• TeleNav – hardly a start-up, this nine-year-old private company was early to location-based services, offering mapping, and tracking workforce and other assets.
• Skydeck — lets you analyze your phone calling behavior based on bills you get from your phone carrier, for example showing you the strength of your friendships.
• Soonr — a mobile document reader
• Waterfall Mobile — lets marketers and media owners easily manage mobile campaigns, distribute multimedia mobile content and track results in real-time.
  
• Yap — a mobile voice transcription service.

Congratulations to all of the winners. The culling isn’t quite over yet, though. While all of the MobileBeat Top 30 will be given a presence at MobileBeat2008 to demo their wares, we’ll pick 10 of our favorites to demo in front of the full conference audience. We’ll be announcing these 10 in the next few days, so stay tuned.

In addition to meeting the MobileBeat Top 30 and watching our Top 10 winners demo, you’ll hear and participate in discussions of the biggest questions facing the mobile industry today. We have an excellent lineup of four panels with leading mobile players and the room will be packed with some of the most ambitious, creative entrepreneurs.

We’ve got some other fun in store too.

Sales of our tickets are moving quickly, so go here to get one. Two weeks left.

Finally, thanks to our sponsors, Blackberry Partners Fund, Forum Nokia, Sun Microsystems, Norwest Venture Partners, amiando, and Mippin for making this possible. If you’re interested in sponsoring the event, please contact Jacob Mullins.