I was thrilled to hear that Fonolo was just nominated for a Mobile Premier Award. We are among 50 winners chosen out of over 250 candidates from all over the world.  Winners will be announced February 25 in Barcelona as part of Mobile World Congress. The list of all the nominees can be found here.

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of presenting about Fonolo to a standing-room-only crowd at Startup Camp Telephony. The event was organized by Embrase and hosted at TMC’s ITExpo event in Miami.

ITExpo was a great show as always: Good sessions on  HD Voice, 4G wireless, the future of call centers, etc. I was on a panel titled Voice Application from the Developer Perspective with Conversif and TruPhone. (I’ll post the slides later.) A boisterous blogger dinner organized by Andy Abramson capped it off (where the menu included celery sorbet — two words I never thought I would see together).

But the StartupCamp was certainly the highlight for me.

From an article on TMC.net …

Startup Camp Telephony was born from the desire to grow the exposure – and ultimately commercial successes – of the many dynamic young businesses being created today in mobile, voice, video, network and other emerging forms of telephony. … Fonolo’s Shai Berger… explained that the call center industry still has the room and need for a service that will help clear the so-called “logjam” that has contributed to an inefficient calling process.

Thanks to Twilio for sponsoring. If you are interested in building a voice application you should take a look at their platform.

The other presenting companies were:

• pebb.ly — A platform to set up interactive SMS-based marketing in 2 minutes. (Quick! Can you name what country has the TLD “ly”?)
• CloseHaul — A freestanding gsm femtocell with game-changing potential.
• SayHired  — Accelerate the hiring process with automated phone-based interviews.

Check out their sites – a lot of promising ideas there.

Some video from the event here. I hope TMC and Embrase make this a new tradition.