Yesterday afternoon and evening, the Mobile Premier Awards 2013 event was held in a great venue in downtown Barcelona, an excellent excuse to escape the madness of the Mobile World Congress.
The Mobile Premier Awards is basically a mobile app competition and showcase put on by Appcircus, featuring the winners of smaller, local contests held in over 30 countries all over the globe.
Yours truly was one of the jury members of the competition alongside brighter people such as Rick Fant (VP of Apps and Marketplace at Mozilla), Bear Douglas (Developer Advocate at Facebook) and Scott Apeland (Director of Intel’s Developer Program).
Three winners were selected at the end of the evening: one by the audience, one by the Appcircus team and the main one by the jury.
And the winners were …
The jury award went to an Italian startup called Atooma (= a touch of magic).
They aim to ‘make your smartphone smarter’ by automating tasks on your device (Android-only so far). If you would call them an ‘IFTTT for mobile phones’, you wouldn’t be the first (check out GigaOm, TechCrunch and Lifehacker coverage for example) and you wouldn’t be wrong.
Atooma lets you set up conditional events (IF) that automatically trigger actions (DO), based on things like time of day, location, your favorite apps, e-mail, battery levels, movement sensors and more.
There’s also a community aspect to it as you can share your automated tasks with others. It’s also really cool and I’m going to enjoy playing with it and anxiously await the iOS version (which is in development).
The Appcircus award went to Denare, a Brazilian company that aims to make financial management fun and easy through gamification and a good-looking mobile app (Windows-only for now).
The audience award went to the Colombian developer of Grabbity, a really sweet adventure/puzzle game for iOS that’s bound to keep me entertained during my next flight or train ride.
And our (well, my) five favourite apps were …
1) Atooma
See above.
2) Jini
This (upcoming) smartphone app will attempt to contextualize your daily routine, activities and surroundings in order to better understand and quantify your needs – all thanks to the sensors already in your phone.
Like a mobile ‘sixth sense’, Jini aims to become the personal assistant for your life, providing you with contextually-relevant observations, comments, tips or recommendations at the right time.
You can register for the private beta version here.
3) Cooklet
A social culinary app that’s been downloaded more than 650,000 times to date, Cooklet lets you organize recipes, find new ones and get cooking tips. You can get it here for iOS, BlackBerry or Kindle Fire.
4) BlindSquare
BlindSquare is a solution that makes use of the latest features available in smartphones to aid the blind and visually impaired in their daily lives, using Foursquare data, augmented reality and much more.
Some example use cases from their website:
“You can use BlindSquare for example to find the most popular café within a 200 meter radius or to find the nearest post office or the library. Shake your device to hear your current address, as well as information about the location of the nearest street intersection and venues around you.
Track your destination, so BlindSquare will periodically announce the distance and direction while you are traveling. If you use BlindSquare to mark your position, it can help you to find this spot again later.”
The app costs $14.99 and is available for iPhone and iPad.
5) GiveO2
This (upcoming) app aims to incentivise users to live a more sustainable life by tracking your daily moving and letting you offset the carbon emissions of those trips.
The goal is to improve your awareness and reducing your impact on the environment, rewarding you with points and badges that you can trade for products and discounts for your favorite stores.
That’s all, folks.
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