VentureBeat

Updated.

The judges have just finished awarding the Mobile Peer Awards here at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain.

I wrote earlier about the competition. As mentioned, I was on the jury of the early stage startups (with a second set of jurors looking at so-called “emerging” companies).

I should note that the juries felt the standards were very high for the early-stage companies in this competition, but merely okay for the so-called emerging companies. With “high for the early-stage companies” the jury felt that the quality level of early stage companies was much better than the year before. “Okay for the so-called emerging companies” means that the jury evaluating these companies thought that some of the companies were not “emerging”, yet. This is mainly a reflection of the various mobile categories which have not seen much traction, yet.

There were two other sets of award categories. The Community Awards were picks based on voting from all International Mobile Monday Chapters. The Audience Awards were based on text voting from the audience.

Here are the winners:

Babajob.com won the Community Award for early-stage startups (the word “community” being a reference to the fact that nominees came from various chapters of MobileMonday’s worldwide community). Babajob also won  the Jury Award for very early-stage companies. Being part of that jury we felt comfortable to disclose that our choices came down to a Top 3 of Babajob, Mob4Hire and Aka-Aki (in that ranking order). Amongst the three we all agreed that Babajob’s business model has the highest upside. We eveluated the companies on the criterium “whether we would be investing our own money” in them.

Orbster won the Audience Award for early-stage companies.

Fring won the Community Award for emerging companies (companies slightly more advanced in stage).

Popcatcher won the Jury Award for emerging companies

Unkasoft won the Audience Award for emerging companies.

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