Andreas and I arrived in Barcelona on Thursday. So we had the whole day to settle in Barcelona. We used most of the day to work and to prepare our presentation for the judges.

Saturday we did a run-through.  We all met at Poble Espanyol, City Hall and the Navteq representatives explained to us once again the schedule of events for the big day.  We also had the opportunity to practice the presentation once in front of Navteq staff. At this point, we realized that we were not at all prepared and that our presentation barely presented the ideas that were the focus of the judgment criteria.

Over 250 companies from Europe, middle East, afrika (emea) have submitted their applications. 12 finalists made it to the final presentation last weekend in Barcelona. The judgment criteria were: Commercial Appeal (25%), Indispensability (25%), Innovativeness (20%), Aesthetic Appeal (20%), Effective use of the Navteq maps and content (10%).

The news about Mobilizy winning the Global LBS Challenge - EMEA was transmitted through PR Newswire to the huge Reuters sign in Times Square, New York City (top) on February 15 and to the Clear Channel sign in Las Vegas (above) on February 17

On Saturday evening we took our laptops to a Tapas bar and dove in searching for the right arguments and ideas to support each of these criteria. We also prepared good answers for tricky questions. We knew they will inevitably come up. Also, we tried to address the criteria being judged in the presentation in a non-obvious way. For example we made sure the presentation contains lots of evidence as to why our solution has commercial appeal.

At 1am and after a couple of Kas (a local version of Fanta Lemon) we were done.

On the day of the judging everything went very well. There were 3 groups of 4-5 judges and we had to give our presentation to each group. We chose to do our own so-called “Panoptikum-Style” presentation, which means we switch speakers after each slide. Many people advised against that, but for us it works just great: while one of us is speaking, the other one has a moment to relax. If one of us misses a good point, the other one can jump right in to fill in the blanks.

Here are the judges:

AZO – Thorsten Rudolph, Managing Director
Bing Maps – Chris Pendleton, Bing Maps Technical Evangelist
BlackBerry – Mike Kirkup, Director, Developer Relations, Research In Motion
BMW – Dr. Thomas Muller, Department Manager, Navigation & Connected Services
deCarta – Marc Prioleau, Global Marketing Strategist
Deutsche Telekom – Alexander Landwehr, Head of International Partnerships
DeviceAnywhere – Leila Modarres, Vice President of Marketing
DigitalGlobe – Jim Beckley, Director of Global Account Sales
HTC – Philip Blair, Product Director, HTC Europe
Intel – Pankaj Kedia, Director, Global Ecosystem Programs, Ultra Mobility Group
Samsung – Byongjoo Kwak, Manager, Media Solution Center Group
Tanla – Harri Myllyla, Vice President, Business Development
Telefónica – Igor Gonzalez Martin, Genasys Positioning Platform Manager

One important part of the presentation was a 2 minute movie I made a few weeks ago in San Francisco, crossing the Golden Gate bridge and driving down into Sausalito. I had no idea where I was going, I just entered “Main Street 1, Sausalito,” just to have an address at the opposite side of the bridge. Check out the movie to see where it took me to – it looks scripted.

The presentations were as good as it gets and of course there were some of the usual “in-door GPS issues.”  After each presentation we had to step out to give the judges a few minutes to fill out their forms.  After one presentation, we forgot to turn off Wikitude Drive and we constantly heard a computer voice saying, “Turn right now” through the door.

We spent the afternoon walking around in the area of Poblo Espanyol. I badly needed this walk in order to recover. The presentations were very exhausting. We could not write that, but just for the heck of it: After an hour walking, we were lost. A bit embarrassing for developers of an industry-changing navigation system – luckily we saw a Navteq Shuttle bus that took us back to Poblo Espanyol.

Well, it was really great to be on stage like that. Not only did we receive the Grand Prize we also received an award for the Navteq Best-API usage.

Later in the cab we were laughing with tears in our eyes when we reminisced over our childhoods trying to answer the question: “Did you ever win anything in your life?”  First skiing race – age 4: disqualified. Next skiing race – age 11: 4th. Well, it was really great to win the grand prize!

“We have seen mobile applications, and specifically, location-enabled solutions, play an increasingly important role with consumers and businesses,” expressed Jeff Mize, executive vice president, Global Sales, NAVTEQ. “The quality of judges and sponsors, who are a part of this year’s Global LBS Challenge, reinforces the interest in location-based solutions and we look forward to continued diversification of applications in the LBS space.”

“Wikitude Drive is surely a prime example of disruptive technology. It is a light-weight navigation system which takes a different approach than all the other navigation systems: You see the real street on your mobile phone, instead of 2D or 3D maps.  Wikitude Drive integrates natively with our core product Wikitude World Browser, which gives you access to millions of POIs and your favorite travel guides like Lonely Planet, as well as gives Wikitude World Browser a link to a light-weight navigation system. There is a lot of room to grow in this area when you imagine the possibilities by having access to the huge number of mobile services and points of interest that are already available on mobile devices. Imagine driving by virtual bill boards of your favorite fast food chain, or simply having an alert when one of them is nearby. This is going to happen within Wikitude Drive. The Wikitude platform offers numerous opportunities for monetization. To mention only two: Wikitude Drive and Wikitude World Browser offer a fantastic base to sell premium content or to display location based ads.” – Philipp Breuss-Schneeweis, CEO of Mobilizy.

“Born out of our curiosity to see if the Wikitude framework would also work for navigation, it started as a shaky proof-of-concept and became a sincere example for disruptive technology. We won a once-in-a-lifetime prize, a check physically the size of towel, with a nice number printed on it. We are looking forward to working together with Navteq and Navteq’s partners in the coming months. The mission is to make the most out of this opportunity.” – Andreas Hauser, Wikitude Product Manager.

About the NAVTEQ Global LBS Challenge®

About NAVTEQ:

About Mobilizy:

Augmented Planet asked their readers to vote for the augmented reality applications and demos that have caught their eye in 2009.

Augmented Planet announced the winners yesterday:

Best augmented reality mobile browser
Winner- Mobilizy (www.mobilizy.com) and the Wikitude World Browser, available for the Android and the iPhone. (and Nokia N97/N97 mini!)

“The Wikitude team is proud and very happy to be the winner in the browser category. It shows the broad acceptance of our community to whom we say thank you for supporting our application. 2009 was an exciting year for AR and we are working on our new version Wikitude 4 to be a highlight in 2010.”

One more reason for Mobilizy to celebrate a very successful year! Read more about it here on Augmented Planet!

Picture by cliff1088/flickr

Some Impressions, Puch/Urstein, 2009/10/21