A fun night at the awards!

Unusually for this blog, which is usually more about things in the wider industry, am unashamedly going to concentrate on our own success today. I hope you will allow me this indulgence!

For those who don't know exactly what Mobile Acuity is all about (and yes we really must update the website sometime soon) the core thing we provide is a mechanism to allow users to interact with a mobile service by taking pictures with their phone, generally as part of brand marketing campaigns. Specifics vary between campaigns but we can then do things like:

• recognise what the picture is of - e.g. specific promo materials etc. User friendly linkage between print and mobile media.
• recognise which particular part of the target the user has "pointed" their phone at - image zoning.
• recognise/extract the colours in the image - colour id.
• extract parts of the image and rework into media (e.g. video) to return to the user - virtual bluescreen.

Each of these can then drive mobile service activity as appropriate for the campaign.

While Mobile Acuity's technologies and services have underpinned projects which have won a number of awards so far this year, and we have even been allowed to talk about some of them publicly like Vodafone "Shoot and Score" which was succinctly summarised by techgutter, Friday night was the first awards we have contested in our own right since I have joined the company. The project we based our entry on was also the first I worked on after joining the company.

The awards in question were the Scottish Software Awards, an annual bash celebrating the best of the industry in Scotland, held in the Radisson SAS Hotel in Glasgow. Usefull and interesting group of people to chat to over drinks beforehand, and then through to the awards.

Was great to see so many companies shortlisted in the wireless / mobile category - good sign for the health of the sector in Scotland! Other than ourselves the shortlist consisted of:

• Mobiqa - mobile barcodes, in particular for airline boarding passes at present.
  
• NXVision - placeshifting and sideloading TV media onto mobile.
  
• Rapid Mobile - mobile apps and the Ad360 interstitial mobile ads platform.
• Real Time Engineering - network services.
  
• Valley Technology - PODFather mobile proof of delivery system.
  

We were delighted to win the category, with our friends over at Rapid Mobile and Mobiqa being runners-up. Left us sufficiently fortified to survive the last train back to Edinburgh on a Friday night which is always an interesting experience!

Update: A good summary with a bit of a twist in the tail over at Fasterfuture with Richard Marshall as guest contributor.

PS. The latest carnival is up over at All About iPhone - though by Steve Litchfield rather than Matt Radford!