The mBillionth South Asia Award 2011 concluded last Saturday, 23rd July, 2011 at Hotel Eros, Nehru Place, New Delhi, with more than 600 delegates attending the marathon 12-hours long International Summit on the theme “Linking masses with 3G”.

It has been a great privilege to be part of the execution team of the entire mBillionth Award process for the second consecutive year. Six months of intense effort went in reaching out to innovators and implementers in the eight South Asian countries and engaging various stakeholders to ensure successful compilation of nominations, rigorous screening, research about the projects, execution of a high-powered Grand Jury (in Sri Lanka) and finally managing the logistics of inviting 2000+ fraternity to the final event.

The process culminated in a mammoth full day event with 10 sessions, including parallel sessions of Mobile Application Developer’s Community (M@D), with about 100 speakers. A copy of the final agenda is here.

The winners include Babajob.com, which connects workers in the Bottom-of-the-pyramid (BOP) to potential employers; Intex V.Show – India’s first projector phone – literally a projector in your pocket; Pharmasecure – battling counterfeit medicine with an SMS; mPustak – creating an ecosystem of vernacular language applications and many more exciting winners.  See the complete list of winners and finalists at http://mbillionth.in/ and http://mobile.techsparks.com/.

It was an honor to meet and work with all the Jurors in Sri Lanka – see their profiles here. Some inspiring comments by Jurors’ are here.

It was exciting to work with all the Partners and Sponsors -complete list here. Vodafone supported in a big way and Vodafone India Foundation, its CSR arm, took a great leap of faith in the India Mobility ecosystem by constituting the Vodafone Mobiles For Good prize of Rupees ten lakhs each to two winners. NOKIA was generous in supporting five categories of the award, the entire Mobile Innovation Haat and the six parallel sessions of M@D – Mobile Application Developer’s community. OnMobile, One97, IAMAI, Mint and Govt. of India’s DIT continued to provide to their solid and consistent support.

See a compilation of tweets by Dr. Madanmohan Rao here: http://www.techsparks.com/mobile/?p=237.

Photograph links:

• Inaugural Session
• MAD Sessions Part 1
• M@D Sessions Part 2 & Mobile Innovation Haat
• Vodafone Mobiles For Good Session
• mBillionth Award Gala

Media coverage links:

• Video coverage by Mint is here.
• Hindustan Times
• Times of India

Some glimpses of the event:

List of Winners and Finalists: