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.

Vlingo, a Cambridge, Mass, speech recognition company, has just launched an awesome voice-powered interface for Blackberry smartphones.

In a recent post about speech-to-SMS provider Yap, we posited that the ultimate mobile interface would let us navigate a phone using a combination of voice and manual input. Yap’s goal was to get there eventually. But Vlingo, which launches such an application today, has left Yap — and even Microsoft’s heavyweight TellMe — choking on dust.

While voice-activated search and directory services have been around for a while — TellMe launched its version last year and the voice-recognition giant, Nuance, has one, as well — Vlingo combines these handy search features with the ability to call and dictate texts or e-mails to anyone in your address book and open applications like your calendar or map.

When I watched the video demonstrating what Vlingo could do (see below), I felt the first pang of phone-related envy to hit me since I defected from Blackberry to iPhone all those long months ago.

Vligno recently raised a $20 million round of funding led by none other than Yahoo, who had previously tapped Vlingo to power its voice-activated oneSearch application. First round investors Charles River Ventures and Sigma Partners participated, as well. All things considered, this investment may represent Yahoo’s single best move over the last few months — though admittedly, that’s not saying much.

Perhaps threatened by Vlingo’s agility and success, Nuance has filed a patent-infringement lawsuit against the young start-up, an all too typical move for big companies who can’t stand the competition.

Blackberry Pearl, Curve, and 8800 users can go here to download the new app, free of charge.

Updated

With just-announced improvements to its mobile service, Yahoo oneSearch gives customers the ability to search the web by simply speaking into their phones. To make this happen, Yahoo is partnering with startup Vlingo and has led Vlingo’s $20 million second round of funding.

Yahoo isn’t the only big tech company to set its sights on the voice market. Google, for example, may be in talks to acquire internet phone company Skype. (Ebay acquired Skype at the end of 2005 but hasn’t been happy with its financial performance.) A year ago, Microsoft acquired voice technology company TellMe, whose services include voice search. And a number of other startups offer voice search, including Promptu and V-Enable. (Read our coverage of Promptu.)

[Update: V-Enable also had a big announcement today: It's partnering with mobile nightlife directory buzzd, which plans to use V-Enable's Mobile411 search tool to help users search its site. ]

Voice search technology is still improving, but we were pretty impressed when we covered Vlingo last year. The Cambridge, Mass.-based startup uses each query to refine its service — as more people use it, the technology should become better and better at interpreting accents and phrases.

Yahoo will be adding other oneSearch features too, said Yahoo Vice President Marco Boerries at this week’s CTIA Wireless trade show in Las Vegas. The focus will be on “instant answers to any query,” not just links to different sites, he said.

I’m hoping to speak to Vlingo chief executive Dave Grannan later today to find out more about how Yahoo’s voice search compares to the competition. Vlingo previously raised $6.5 million from Charles River Ventures and Sigma Partners, who also participated in the new round.

[Update: I just got off the phone with Grannan, and he told me Vlingo won the deal with Yahoo in "a bake off with other speech tech players" last fall.

Vlingo stands out because it has the most unconstrained speech recognition technology around, he said. For example, using TellMe is similar to most customer-service voice systems: Rather than making a general query, you have to navigate through several menus to find what you want. ("What city did you want to search?", then "What business are you looking for?", etc.)

On Vlingo, however, you can say anything you want: You can say a flight number to learn its status, or you can ask, "Where's the best place to play craps in Las Vegas?"

Grannan said he plans to use the new funding to expand into international markets, which means offering Vlingo in foreign languages (including "UK English"), as well as hiring more sales and marketing staff. Vlingo's expansion may be a little limited, because the deal forbids the startup from providing its voice technology to Yahoo's mobile search competitors. But Grannan noted that Yahoo agreed to a similar exclusivity: It won't use anyone else's voice technology, either.

"In the balance of power, that worked in our favor," Grannan said.]

Mobile phone interfaces are notoriously difficult to use — hence, the hype around Apple’s iPhone and its unique two-fingered method of navigating its mobile web browser.

Vlingo has a different answer to clumsy mobile interfaces: speech recognition technology so sophisticated that you can speak what you want into your phone.

This helps avoid having to tap your way through mobile web menus or speak your way through audio menus.

Let’s say you want to do a search for a nearby restaurant using your phone’s web browser. Instead of trying to hammer out “Mexican restaurants in Palo Alto, California” on your phone’s keypad, you can speak those words into your phone while on a mobile search page, and Vlingo will deliver search results.

[Update: We've tested the service and it worked great for Palo Alto, correctly picking up the sample sentence above.]

Note: At least that is the promise — we were excited to test it out for ourselves, but to our dismay the company’s servers were down when we tried. We’ll keep you posted on your progress.

You can try it yourself at www.vlingomobile.com if you have a Motorola Razr or other currently compatible models (list). Or, watch the demo video below.]

The Cambridge, Mass.-based company figures out what you’re looking for based on the meaning and pronunciation of each word you say, and understands your accent and the meaning of your phrase. It compares the information you provide with a corpus of what every past user has ever told it, automatically refining its understanding as more and more people use the service.

The downside to this approach in the short term is that regional accents or foreign words may not get understood the first time, says chief executive Dave Grannan.

Because the technology detects details of vocabulary and speech patterns, internationalization to other accents and languages is a complex task, and a ways down the road, Grannan says.

The company is focusing on working with wireless carriers and mobile applications and is working on deals with more than one carrier, it claims.

It also offers a simple application programming interface, or API, that works on most 3G and multimedia phones so that mobile application developers can integrate its service into their own offerings.

The company has received $6.5 million in funding from Charles River Ventures and Sigma Partners.