By all accounts the MoMo Tokyo 2008 Peer Awards held on Monday evening was a fantastic event and we would like to thank everyone involved for making it one of our best gatherings ever. Hearty congrats are in order for the winners and complete respect offered to all of the candidate companies who stepped-up to participate. Honorable mentions for two surprise guest speakers are also in order; Nina Norlund, former biz dev. mgr at HP Bazaar, who helped us get the MoMo Tokyo chapter rolling and Faraz Syed, CEO of Mobile Complete, a past winner at MobileMonday 2007 Global Peer Awards.

We would like to pass along a very special thanks to our esteemed judges; Stephan Burke from Mobile Content Networks, Yurie Horita from Impress R&D, Hitomi Murakami from Seikei University, Masaaki Suga from Cybird Ventures and Martyn Williams from IDG News as well as Patrick Bray from GeoVector who served admirably as our MC for the night. We would also like to offer our most sincere gratitude to the great people at Shinsei Bank who provided an awesome venue, the folks at Infinita who built this groovy mobile voting site and finally, of course, everyone who attended. Yoroshiku!

Academic: Students in an accredited University program

Mobile Krishna Winner!
http://www.mocolab.net
Raju Vijay Anand is a student at the International University of Japan, and a member of the Mobile Consumer Lab, who aims to provide security and information through mobile to tourists in India. It involves hypertags and the creation of a mobile eco-system that includes NGO’s and private security services. It is planning to provide a solution to protect the privacy and safety of tourists in India.

Start-ups: Recently founded with early-stage financing

StarGame’s Corporation Winner!
http://www.stargames.co.jp
StarGame’s is a Start-up company which will feature their service called as J2B translator. With this service, CPs can get a BREW application from a Java application full automatically.

Emerging: Operating between Series A & B funding
J-Magic Inc. Winner!
http://www.j-magic.co.jp
J-Magic is the mobile media company based on Image Sensing technology. Within 10 months, the company’s mobile service called “Kao-cheki!” was used by over 85million users. “Kao-cheki!” is an entertainment service that tells celebrities who looks similar to you. You can only take a photo with camera phone, send it to “Kao-cheki!” by e-mail(MMS) and get the result. Not only faces but logos, buildings, products and various objects can be recognized by J-Magic’s Image Sensing platform. J-Magic is now opening up new way of search!

Our best wishes to these candidates on the road to the Global Peer Awards.