Designed to identify and develop the best, most innovative mobile Internet startups, this year’s Vodafone Mobile Clicks competition has been bigger than ever, involving contests in seven European countries.
Yesterday saw the final jury round take place at the PICNIC conference in Amsterdam, and today the overall 2011 winners have been announced.
The winner has been decided by combining scores from the public voting round with the jury’s score, based on the seven finalists’ pitches yesterday. The jury consisted of Lee Epting, Director of Content Services at Vodafone Group; Peter Barry, Head of VC and Start-up at Vodafone Ventures; Paul Jozefak of German VC firm Neuhaus Partners; Reshma Sohoni, Partner at Seedcamp; Dave Tharp, of one of last year’s winners Cricket Roulette, oh, and Martin Bryant, European Editor of The Next Web (that’ll be me).
The judging process was especially tough given the high standard of the seven finalists, but here are the three startups that eventually came out on top.
First place
Taking the €150,000 first prize is Spain’s Tiendatek, which has the ambitious goal of transforming the way shopkeepers in developing countries do business. Kitting them out with an Android smartphone and barcode reader, the shopkeepers get a point-of-sale system that helps them better manage their inventory and improve their profits.
All information entered is synchronised with TiendaTek’s servers, where it is processed to offer real-time reporting, analysis, and personalized services that help shopkeepers make the most of their business.
Second place
Winning the second prize of €50,000 is the UK’s ParcelGenie, an innovative new way to send low-cost gifts to other people. Using ParcelGenie’s app (currently only available in the UK, but set to expand), users can choose from a variety of gifts, and send them to anyone without needing to know their address.
Simply enter the intended recipient’s phone number and ParcelGenie then sends an SMS to that person, inviting them to reply with their address, allowing the gift to be received. The startup is targeting a market of casual gift givers, mainly female and with an average age of 29.
Third place
Third prize of €25,000 goes to German startup 6wunderkinder‘s Wunderlist, an app that should be familiar to regular readers of The Next Web as we named it one of the top productivity apps of 2010.
Combining good looks with cross-platform support and cloud-based syncing, Wunderlist is a taster of what the company’s far more ambitious Wunderkit product, which is due for release within weeks – although it’s keeping all the details of that under wraps for now.
We’ll have more coverage of Vodafone Mobile Clicks and PICNIC over the weekend on The Next Web.
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