Get a firsthand review of the SXSW Web Awards presented at the 2008 festival, as well as the coveted 2008 Josh awards.

In this entry to my SXSW Interactive festival blog, I’m going to take a break from the mobile technology panels and take a look at the nominees in the Mobile category of the SXSW Web Awards. I surely don’t have the charm of Web Awards presenter Eugene Mirman or special guest Ninja (of “Ask a Ninja” fame), but I’ll do my best.

The first nominee in the Mobile category was DialedIn. DialedIn offers some mobile marketing business solutions that don’t really appeal to me. They also offer a free sort of mobile-friendly Evite event invitation service. And they have a small local restaurant and club listing for a handful of cities. Overall, I don’t get why this has been nominated for a Web Award. It’s not particularly attractive. The free services are better offered by existing businesses like Evite, Upcoming and Yelp. It’s possible that I’m missing something, I suppose. Feel free to disagree in the comments.

The second nominee was Kyte, a service that allows users to create their own mobile media channels. Users can put media onto these channels using their mobile phones, webcams, etc., and have that media instantly distributed through widgets that people put on the Facebook or MySpace pages, or straight to subscriber’s mobile phones. They seem to want to be everything at once and thus lack a bit of focus as to what makes this service truly unique - but there is one very clever feature: You can stream live from your phone onto all of these various widgets and onto other people’s mobile phones. And the phone client has a little chat piece, which allows people to chat back to you while you record. Which is, frankly, pretty cool. The demo video and several of their case studies make use of the Nokia N95, so if you’ve got one, you should go check out what they’re offering.

The third nominee was much simpler than the two above: Leaflets. The idea behind Leaflets is quite simple. They repackage a handful of websites and web services for the iPhone using a very sleek, iPhone-ish design and streamlined, low-bandwidth interfaces. Something like this could easily exist for devices like the Nokia N95, as well, and it’s kind of a testament to the awesomeness of open standards and APIs. Blue Flavor, the Leaflets people, aren’t doing anything that’s technically out of reach; anyone could create an interface for Flickr or del.icio.us (for example) and they can share these with their friends and, well, everyone online. If you’re interested in a mobile hobby project or something to get your feet wet with Java Mobile or mobile web technology, make a front-end for some service you use that works exactly as you desire, then share it!

The fourth nominee is Mosio. It’s an easy one and potentially, I think, a very good one. Text a question to Mosio; if any other subscriber knows the answer, they’ll respond. It’s that simple. It’s an Answers service like Yahoo! Answers or ask.metafilter.com - both of which have become very popular in the past few years. The web interface is fairly Twitter-like, though the problem is their competitor isn’t Twitter as much as Google Mobile; most of the questions feel like they could more easily be typed into a Google search box for faster, more accurate results. Many Mosio questions could just as well be questions for search engines. If they could hone in on what sort of unique information a crowd of people like this could deliver - that isn’t better covered by a search on Google, Yelp or something similar - they might have something here. Maybe a lightweight mobile Craigslist: “I’m at 49th and Broadway. Does anyone have a printer I could use?”

The fifth and final nominee: Mozes, another mobile marketing tool centering around bands. You join the “mob” for a group or artist and get mobile media from them - ringtones, wallpapers, etc. And you can participate in some community stuff with other fans.

And the winner was…Mosio. Because of the way SXSW voting works, it’s never exactly clear why one project wins and others lose. But Mosio won. Congratulations!

Now, for the Josh awards. I have three awards to give in this category: Most immediately useful, most interesting new tech and most interesting new social design. And my winners are…

Leaflets for most immediately useful. They are very simple, but do just what they should. And there’s a use for them right now.

Kyte wins for interesting new tech. The mobile broadcasting application for the phone looks very clever, I must admit. Several organizations are fumbling around in the live broadcasting space at the moment , but if Kyte can get some traction, they might be on to something big.

Mosio for most interesting new social design. Again, they’ve got some design challenges ahead of them, but they might be near a really revolutionary idea.

Onward!

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