VentureBeat

The countdown to the MobileBeat2008 conference continues.

Today we’re adding seven more companies to the list of nominees for best mobile company, or the one with the biggest, baddest idea and that has a decent chance at being a business hit. The top 30 winners will be shortly and invited to the conference. There, an overall winner will be announced.

The latest nominees, and the final ones to be added to our list, are as follows:

• mBit — a P2P search and file-sharing technology for phones, overcoming standard MMS limitations to 300kb
• SMS Gupshup — a twitter-like clone seeing heady growth in Asia
• Vlingo — a slick speech recognition interface for the Blackberry
• Yap — a mobile voice transcription service
• Greystripe — lets developers insert ads on the fly into their mobile games, bypassing carriers and other ad incumbents
• Soonr — a mobile document reader
• Bones in Motion — cellphone GPS tracking for athletes; still a niche, but attractive

We now have a total of 80 on the list. Voting on the list will be extended for one more week, until noon July 2. Then we’ll begin to select the winners, taking into account the late arrival of the recent nominees (we’ll give them appropriate consideration, even if they have fewer votes). We’ll also review signs of gaming our system (which we’ve tried to minimize by requiring people to register with names) and take appropriate measures.

I think this an excellent final nominee list. I’m not sure if any list can be perfect, but we gave our internal selection panel a mandate to take a hard look at the write-in submissions from you, our readers, and to let in only those that have big ideas and a chance to succeed.

The panel let in only a fraction of the dozens that were submitted.

Some themes emerge. There are way too many VoIP companies (up to 300), and so even though a player like Nimbuzz is doing a lot, the panel ultimately decided to reject it in this latest round. There’s also a plethora of location-based services popping up. So while Loopt made it to our original list, in part because Loopt has signed deals with all the major carriers (it launched on Verizon today), other similar companies had to exhibit other forms of excellence in order to make the list. So the panel rejected Brightkite, for example, and Geospot, which makes mobile maps interactive and provides local information. Making the list, however, are new services such as mBit, but also established leaders like DeviceScape. The requirement for submission is that the company be private.

Other trends are clear. Mobile search is hot, because of the very different mobile interface. Even second or third mobile search players — those without a brand such as Google — remain promising on mobile if they are clever enough. And yet mobile search company NearbyNow, which lets you search for items at your nearest mall, was rejected by the panel. Destination sites like this will have a tough time. Like I said last time, I hope these rejected companies can prove us wrong and go on to be huge successes.

The MobileBeat conference on July 24 will follow the release of the 3G iPhone, which is sparking a wave of developer interest. The conference aims to host a high-level conversation about the mobile landscape, including the iPhone’s impact. We’ll talk about how it stacks up against Android, what the Nokia-Symbian move means, and more. We have some great speakers lined up — from Rich Miner, of Google’s Android project, to Matt Murphy, of the iFund.

Sales of our earlybird tickets are moving quickly. Go here to get a $100 discount, which ends Friday.

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

This has been a particularly busy week for remote access software, with SoonR announcing 100MB of storage and better Outlook integration and LogMeIn Hamachi named one of PC Magazine’s best free software downloads.

SoonR, of Campbell, Calif., lets you get to files on your computer via your mobile phone and LogMeIn Hamachi is a free VPN connection. LogMeIn is based in Boston.

If you’ve ever pulled upto your vacation hotel in Hawai, and realized you forgot that presentation you needed to approve quickly for your boss, these tools come in handy. However, no solution has hit the grandslam yet: A service offering remote access, which saves your work, syncs it on all devices, and automatically backs it up. We’re hearing from one company that is coming close to this nirvana, which we hope to report on soon.

Meanwhile, to round out our coverage, take a look at Palo Alto’s Avvenu.

Called Access ‘n Share, Avvenu offers a free service to remotely access files and share them. After installing a small download, you can use any web browser to search through and download every file on your computer. Then, if you decide you want to share something, just type in the recipient’s email address and they’ll be able to download that file or folder. There’s also an application available to download for $20 that lets you copy files between computers.

(Separately, Avvenu’s free music player made news recently; it lets you play your iTunes music collection from any computer or Windows Mobile smart phone. We wrote about it here, and TechCrunch and others have written subsequently here.)

As we covered here, with the remote access service, you don’t need to upload everything you want to share. Files stay on your home computer or laptop. On the one hand, the Avvenu view is immediately updated any time you change a document or save a picture. However, your computer has to be on and connected to the Internet anytime you want to use Avvenu to search it or share anything, which is a significant drawback. Also, the speed at which you share is limited to your home network connection, which typically doesn’t very well support multiple people getting large files at the same time.

There are paid options that give you storage space on the Avvenu servers, from $29.99/year for 5GB to $184.99 for 40GB. This increases sharing speed and doesn’t require your computer to be on.

VentureBeat has looked at a few of the many online storage and sharing companies — Phanfare, Box.net, YouSendIt, MyFabrik, and Omnidrive (which does remote access too), to name a few — here.