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MobileMonday Barcelona anounced the first series of finalists for this years MobileMonday Global Peer Awards.

The Global Peer Awards finalists are best-in-breed companies who have demonstrated exceptionally innovative mobile technologies, services and concepts. Most finalists have reached this point by prevailing in a local selection process organized at the local MoMo chapter level.

Here are the 1st series of winners, more will be anounced the next days at mobilemonday.net. (in alphabetical chapter order)

• Barcelona - MyStrands
• Beijing - Silk Road Telecommunication
• Brussels - Ontrack Navigation
• Geneva - Plazes
• Helsinki - UpCode
• London - Reporo
• Delhi - Wirkle
• Paris - Realeyes3D
• Singapore - Tagit
• Tokyo - Naviblog
• Ukraine - Nival Online

Stay updated at MobileMonday Barcelona website for more news on the event!

The MobileMonday Global Peer Awards 2007 during the 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona is being organized collaboratively by the MobileMonday community. Hosted by MoMo Barcelona, MoMo Italy, MoMo Helsinki, MoMo London and MoMo New York have also taken active roles.

Mobile Dreams Factory, a Spanish company dedicated to develop and manage mobile content, is nominated in two categories at the second edition of the MMA Awards. The Mobile Marketing & Advertising Awards will be held in Los Angeles, USA at November 28.

The Global Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) will host this awards to recognize the best mobile marketing and advertising campaigns of the years. The event gathers advertising agencies, media central and technology companies from all around the world. You can view a full list of the nominees here.

The MMA awards feature 13 categories such as Branding Campaign, Direct Response Campaign, Promotional Campaign, Relationship Building Campaign, Product/Services Launch Campaign, Search Marketing Campaign, Cross Media Integration, Innovation Award, Innovation Award for Creativity (Technology), Innovation Award for Creativity (Media), Outstanding Individual Achievement in Mobile Marketing and Mobile Marketing Association Award for Overall Excellence.

Mobile Dreams Factory is nominated in 2 categories: Innovation Award for Creativity (Technology) with CEPSA’s videoblog and Best use of Mobile Marketing - Cross Media Integration for the Vodafone’s videgoals.

Mobile Dreams Factory has clients such as Telefonica, Coca-Cola, Vodafone, Renault and Cepsa.

Despite the excellent program at Mobile Monday Barcelona, I will attend the Villes 2.0 conference on November 6 in Paris, together with Ignacio Mondine, R&D director from Daem Interactive.

One can easily imagine how big cities will become more difficult to manage in the near future. The evolution of technology in general, including those of the internet and the mobile phone might bring some solutions in new urban practices and might find some innovative answers to the challenges that cities currently encounter.

The internet goes with and accelerates urban transformations. City is the main laboratory of different kind of uses : Wireless and Fixed Broadband, trade and logistic issues, home services, mobility issues (working, security, privacy,…), CCTV (security…), smart transport, on-line communities ,local democracy, public internet access ..

I’m looking forward to this conference, organised by Fing and Tactis.

The same evening I’m going to attend Mobile Monday Paris and meet team and organisers Marie and Véronique. They have been doing a wonderful job setting up MoMoParis nearly a year ago and bring the French mobile industry together, I heard the monthly event is really popular and highly attended, it’s going to be interesting to exchange experiences and opinions.

Ignacio from Daem Interactive will present Daem’s latest innovations in mobile image recognition, the same day, they’ll be anouncing a major campaign in Spain using image recognition and MMS. After all these years of struggling with MMS, will image recognition finally lift MMS? More about this and the campaign next week at m-trends.org.

If anyone would like to meet with me and Ignacio, please do get in touch by clicking my name in the sidebar.

Barcelona has always been pretty pioneering with new technologies… The Barcelona City Council has been experimenting for a while now with mobile services and recently launched a “Barcelona Mobile” campaign to sensibly citizens and tourists on public services to be accessed from your mobile phone. (check out the video here, it’s great fun!)

Barcelona City Council offers you a new service which allows you to have all the information about the city on your mobile:

• MERCÈ 06 City Festival program (ended last week)
• What’s On: the Grec festival, your team’s match, children’s activities, the theatre, exhibitions and concerts.
• Directory: a guide to restaurants, hotels, etc.
• Barcelona city map -> exists already online and is excellent!
• How to get there: a tool how to get somehwere in Barcelona by underground, bus or just walking.
• Usefull numbers: firse service and emergency numbers

Now I’m happy all these services are becoming available on the mobile phone, in the end that’s what we all want, however I tried some of the services and the information is very poor. For example only 7 hotels were mentioned and the places I was searching for didn’t appear… well probably more time is needed to index everything. The map thing is pretty cool and advanced, connecting this to a LBS system with services is going to be peanuts later on.
The SMS service costs only 0,30 Euro/sms which is reasonable but knowing about my mobile web browsing bills from last months, I’m not attracted to use the Barcelona mobile web service a lot.

However, walking through the city and checking for (public) available WiFi acces points in Barcelona learns me there are currently a lot of these public acces points available a bit everywhere, so… Martin, isn’t this something to connect to with FON? Also, wouldn’t all these services be quicker and easier to build and be found through tools like Plazes.com once their mobile beta goes public? With a bit of promotion and marketing the best ‘plazes‘ in Barcelona can be tagged easily and become accessible through the mobile as another valuable option.

What about other cosmopolitan citizens? How are the mobile services in your city? It would be great to map some of the coolest urban mobile services…

I am pleased to announce, as a co-founder of the Spanish Mobile Monday Chapter, the first MobileMonday event of Spain to be launched in Barcelona on July 3. Thanks to partners like Barcelona Media and Alcatel we can kick-off with a very interesting speakers program.

The event is free of charge; you only need to subscribe to reserve your seat. Don’t wait last minute to subscribe here, there are 150 seats available for this event - more monthly events are scheduled after summer!

Topic is set to Mobile Marketing & Advertising. We invited some of the most experienced people in this area to present us an interesting cocktail of history, experience and future on this topic.

Ricardo Baeza-Yates Director of Yahoo! Research Barcelona, Spain and Yahoo! Research Latin America at Santiago, Chile will talk about “Search and advertising in the Web and their implicancies in the mobile world”.

Ana Caralt, CEO of McCann Interactive Spain will explain us about the experience of the agency with clients such as Volkswagen, Coca-Cola, Amstel… and how the brands are reaching their marketing objectives by intergating the mobile channel in their media mix.

Russell Buckley, from MobHappy and now recently also at AdMob will explain his view on “Mobile Advertising… The Story So Far”. Russell draws on the lessons of 6 years of Mobile advertising, he looks at successes and failures and draws some important lessons for the future.

José Luis Jorge Marrasé, Director of Alcatel’s Mobile Solutions Division in Spain will explain us about Mobile TV as a potential solution for Mobile TV advertising.

Vicente López, CEO of Barcelona Media and Jari Tammisto, CEO of MobileMonday Headquarters in Helsinki, Finland will do the introductions. The whole evening will be moderated by Hernán Rodriguez, CEO of Aecomo.org (Asociación Española de Comunicaciones Móviles) and followed by a networking cocktail.

The first MobileMonday Barcelona will be held at the Auditorium University of Pompeu Fabra in the famous Estación de Francia.

Full details at www.mobilemondaybarcelona.com