The National Association of Television Program Executives’ (NATPE) on January 28 announced the winners of the first-ever NATPE Mobile++ Top 12 Awards, which showcase innovation and excellence in the mobile content marketplace. The awards were given in the categories of Broadcast, Social Networking, Gaming, and Location-based Media on January 28, 2008 during an awards presentation hosted by Greg Clayman, Executive Vice-President, Digital Distribution & Business Development, MTV Networks.
All categories have three winners. The winners of the first category – Excellence in Mobile Broadcasting were Local Wireless, InterSport (Sprint Exclusive Entertainment) and MediaFlo. Local Wireless is LSN’s mobile network of over 140 broadcast affiliates. The site is accessible from any mobile handset with Internet access, and is free to users. LSN officials explained that the most asked for on the mobile where weather and news information.
InterSport, which has Sprint Exclusive Entertainment (SEE), is a made-for-mobile network delivering music, sports and entertainment programming to Sprint mobile phone customers. MediaFlo USA’s Flo TV service features full-length programming to mobile phones over MediaFLO USA’s own dedicated nationwide multicast network. Some of the content providers on Flo TV are CBS, ESPN, FOX, MTV Networks, NBC News, and NBC Entertainment.
The winners of the Excellence in Mobile Social Networking are LoopMobile that has the brand name Moko, mPulse and Zannel. Moko is a global mobile social community. mPulse Media provides a solution for TV networks to add social networking features to their mobile sites. Zannel is a free service that allows users to create their own mobile page where they can post videos, pictures, and text updates with the phone to instantly share with your friends and start a conversation.
The Excellence in Mobile Gaming awards were given to Cellufun, Comedy Central and GestureTek. Celluful won the award for ‘The Mobile Ring’, the mobile phone boxing game takes current political heavyweights and pits them against one another, not on the campaign trail, but in the boxing ring. The WAP game allows users to play political candidates ranging from Hillary and Barack to Guiliani and Edwards, but unlike past political boxing games, this mobile version will give each candidate a rating based on their current, real-life position in the polls, as well as the actual performance by Mobile Ring players.
GentureTek Mobile’s ‘EyeMobile’ is an alternative to conventional mobile phone interfaces. With EyeMobile, anything you would normally do with a device is done by moving the phone. Comedy Central won the award for its game ‘South Park’.
The three winners in location-based media category are Socialight, Node and Yojo. Socialight is a content platform that lets any publisher or person create and discover media and information placed in physical locations such as schools, shops and parks around the world. The Node Engine enables customers to manage staff logins and access rights, define interaction zones on graphically enhanced maps, and create and manage location specific content to create enthralling stories. Yojo Mobile’s flagship offering is MizPee.com, which locates the nearest clean restroom based on peer reviews and ratings when users provide a street address.
With the exception of Node, the officials of all companies were present at the ceremony.