Smaato announced the winners of the 2009 Mobile Advertising Awards at the Mobile Web 2.0 event in San Francisco recently. The winners included Aloqa, Flirtomatic, SPB TV, and Waze.

Selecting from a pool of approximately 250 entries, the judges picked winners in 5 categories. The winners in each category are:

Overall iPhone category winner: Waze

Waze is free crowd-sourced navigation software. A mobile navigation application that allows drivers to build and use live maps, real-time traffic updates and turn-by-turn navigation to improve their daily commute.

Waze also has a social element that gives drivers the ability to actively update one other on traffic, police traps, construction, speed cams and more.

Waze launched in Israel in January 2009 and in 9 months reached 20% smart phones users, 91% map coverage and best real-time traffic with 180,000 active drivers.

Overall Mobile web category winner and
Winner M-Days award: Flirtomatic

Flirtomatic is a real time, high capacity, multimedia, messaging platform that currently has more than 1m registered users with more mobile than web-specific users, making it Europe’s leading flirting service on the mobile and web.

Flirtomatic is targeted at young adults (75% of users are 18 – 30 years old), and gives users the ability to discover members on the basis of their preferences, interests, location and other information stored in their multimedia user profile.

Overall Apps category winner and
Motorola Android category winner: Aloqa

Aloqa gives you constantly refreshed, live information about people, places and events based on your location, profile, preferences and social relationships.

When you change locations, Aloqa refreshes itself automatically and notifies you of the relevant set of services, points of interest, events, and friends close to your new location without every having to search, browse, or type into their phone.

It also gives advertisers, coupons providers and anyone with location-relevant content to reach their target audience with the right, relevant promotion in real time.

Microsoft Phone category winner: SPB TV

SPB TV can almost replace a common TV service. It is designed to make watching TV on the mobile device as simple and comfortable as on TV. Just like watching regular TV, users can bring up more player options by single-tapping on the screen: change the playback quality; set sound and screen brightness, exit a channel.

In 2008 Skylink carrier released its new device AnyData ASP-505, where SPB Spb Mobile Shell and Spb Online were already installed. SPB TV is available on Windows Mobile, Android, Symbian and Blackberry.

Winner M-Days Award: Yoose

YOOSE is an affiliation platform for mobile location based couponing. YOOSE replaces paper coupons from brick & mortar retailers and delivers them directly to the mobile phone of the consumer through any mobile website or application. YOOSE helps retailers to generate more revenue through successful local client acquisition and greater client retention.

YOOSE is live in Berlin/Germany, with plans to expand internationally.

Key Trends

Smaato also identified 5 key trends that they have seen in this year’s awards competition.

• Location, location, location
  Location based apps finally seem to have generated public enthusiasm.
• Brand building with apps
  Many brands have stepped into the arena, extending their reach to involve the app hungry audiences around the world
• Profitable Fun
  App developers are paying increasing attention toward how to build sustained growth and profitability with different monetization options.
• Apps are the new fashion accessory!
  Pop cultural media is increasingly paying attention to what apps fashionable people are downloading, and often feature interesting apps that are on-trend.
• Beyond the app
  Increasingly, mobile publishers are building social networking and other conversational features to add value either within apps or on the mobile web.