Vodafone has announced the winners of its Mobile Clicks 2011 awards. The scheme rewards companies who have innovated and produced new concepts for mobile devices that you won’t see elsewhere yet…

The idea is to reward innovation but also to help a young business grow. The sums involved, as you’ll see, are serious and the winner and two runners up have rock solid business plans – they know exactly where their winnings are going and why.

First place: FrogTek

Pride of place in the awards goes to Spain’s FrogTek (above). This company’s chief technology officer Guillermo Caudevilla Laliena explains that it’s a social enterprise which was set up to help businesses in Latin America. “Many micro-retailers in Latin America do not track their sales or expenses because they cannot afford a cash register or other point-of-sales tools,” he says. “Even shop keepers who do record transactions in a notebook and then laboriously transfer the information to a spreadsheet still do not have a clear idea about how to use this information to improve profits. The end result is that most of these businesses do not know their break-even sales, cannot analyse an investment opportunity, nor optimize their purchasing decisions. All of these limitations combine to keep micro-retailers operating in a sub-optimal manner, reducing profits, limiting growth and making life more difficult for their suppliers.”

This makes life difficult universally and FrogTek’s answer is simple to explain – if everyone carries a mobile phone, you turn that into the point of sale system. “FrogTek is a mobile point-of-sales software application that addresses these issues by allowing micro-retailers to record all store expenses transactions and revenues directly on a mobile phone,” explains Laliena. “It also provides micro-retailers with access to financial reporting, personalised recommendations and additional value-added services.”

It’s Android-based and works through barcode reading and Bluetooth.  Frogtek provides the phone and all the technology and the system keeps track of whether the company is owed money, what’s been bought and sold – it’s a complete stock control reporting system. “The other part of the business model is aggregate all the data the shopkeepers generate, and build reports that help big companies and manufacturers (like Coca Cola, Procter and Gamble) perform marketing research.

“Today we are a company based in 4 countries: USA (legal department), Spain (application developers), Colombia (part of the operations team and Mark Pedersen as the CFO/COO) and Mexico (part of the operations team, and David del Ser as the CEO of the company),” said the company in a statement to BizGene. “We started by building a very basic accounting tool for the shopkeepers and start looking for users in Colombia, more specifically in Bogota. We currently have more than a hundred users in both Bogota and City of Mexico, and we’re trying to grow our network of shopkeepers as much as we can,” it continues. “The prize money will be used to help growing our network of shopkeepers.”

And the prize money is significant – £150,000 will help to market to a lot of shop keepers. For that sort of prize you can expect to work hard. “Our impression of the Vodafone Mobile Clicks competition is that it is a very difficult to win one, since your project has not just to compete against some of the best projects of the country you live at, but also against the best Europe’s mobile projects,” says Frogtek. “All the contenders were pretty competitive, with good business models. So we are very happy to be the winners of such a big and prestigious competition.” Laliena adds that the business has already started making new contacts from the publicity from becoming shortlisted.

Second place: ParcelGenie

Second place went to ParcelGenie, which is a UK business aiming to bridge the gap between wanting to send a small gift to a loved one and making it happen through the mobile phone. And it should be stressed these aren’t “you have a virtual sheep on Facebook” type ‘gifts’ – these are solid, real objects. You don’t need the recipient’s address, just their number; they then get a gift alert and select the delivery address themselves.

John Taylor (previously interviewed on BizGene), chief executive officer, is understandably chuffed with the prize and the £50,000 in funding it carries in tow. “Being the runner up in the Vodafone Mobile Clicks competition is a huge endorsement of ParcelGenie’s instant gift messaging platform and user journeys,” he says. “The competition was very strong and so we’re delighted to be a winner. The most important part of the competition is establishing relationships with Vodafone and exploring the ways that we can work together.”

ParcelGenie is another business that will use the prize for marketing. “The prize money from the Mobile Clicks competition will be used to commercialise our new ‘ping’ technology, enabling a real product to be sent from any ecommerce site using just a mobile number,” says Taylor. “The funds will significantly increase the speed of roll-out.”

Third place: Wunderlist

German company Wunderlist goes home with £25,000 for the third prize. Initially the company has released a do-list but that’s not the big game plan. “Wunderlist was a simple task management tool that allowed us to test our technology, see if it scales globally and if we could effectively establish a strong brand.,” explains Christian Reber, founder and chief executive. “However, Wunderlist is actually a small stepping stone towards our major product Wunderkit, which will be launched in November as the world’s first working network.”

The prize will accelerate the company’s development and time to market. “As any young start-up knows, you struggle in the beginning with a tight budget and really feel the pressure before a big product launch,” says Reber. “This prize money definitely lifts some pressure off our shoulders. We plan to put this money towards scaling out Wunderlist onto other platforms such as Windows Phone and Blackberry.”

Each of the companies has received a boost in terms of contacts, publicity and of course the prize money. BizGene would be delighted to hear from small businesses which have won prizes in the past, and how they benefited from it.

Guy Clapperton

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Photo credit: Jane Delser