The Most Innovative Mobile Application & Content award went to ShoZu for its mobile multimedia delivery platform. ShoZu, with offices in the US, UK and India, provides a service that lets content owners and major brands interact with their consumers through the mobile channel.

Mark Bole, CEO of ShoZu, says simplicity is key. "We have a service called Share It, which enables one click posting of photos or video clips to sites such as YouTube, Flicker and now Microsoft's Life Spaces community," Bole says.

"On the media-casting side we have ZuCasts, where users very simply subscribe to one-off free subscriptions for whatever content or channel they are interested in and we feed it down to their mobile phone."

The service is so popular that Bole says ShoZu adds support for a new handset once every three days.

The award for Most Innovative Technology Development went to Polymer Vision, which has developed the world's first rollable electronic display. The display can be rolled out to a greater size than the actual mobile device and is easy to see, even in bright sunlight.

Karl McGoldrick, CEO Polymer Vision, says: "The technology itself is quite fundamental - it gets a larger display into a smaller device.  But rollable displays will help differentiate mobile-device makers. I'm hoping that this technology will actually generate excitement and people will realize that the industry is not maturing, in fact we're just moving into a whole new era."

The awards are designed to encourage innovation and give small, new companies an opportunity to show their ideas to industry leaders. Kurt Sillén, head of Ericsson Mobility World, participated as one of seven judges.

"Supporting innovation in mobile and converging communications is important to Ericsson," Sillén says. "We are driven by continuous innovation and consumer-service mobility is becoming increasingly important as technologies converge. Supporting innovation is a way for Ericsson to maintain its leading position. This year's winners are great examples of services and technologies that fill a specific need in the market."

The companies shortlisted for the awards were AdMob, Medio Systems, Microimage, Promptu, ScreenTonic, ShoZu, G-Xchange, International EFT Systems, Hani Samuel & Co, In View, Open-Plug, Polymer Vision, and Ubiquisys Ltd.