There are just 10 business days between now and the 2011 Effective Mobile Marketing Awards Ceremony, headline-sponsored by Upstream.

Today, we continue our preview of the finalists in each category with a look at the entries shortlisted for the Most Effective Mobile Application – b2c.

The Awards Ceremony takes place in London on 3 November. If you havent yet booked your place at the event, theres still time – but tickets are selling fast. Right now though, lets take a look at the companies and campaigns vying for the honours in the b2c app category, in alphabetical order.

AKQA/Random House – Nigella Quick Collection iPhone App
This is a mobile app that makes enjoying Nigella Lawson’s recipes a simple, stress-free, social experience. Including more than 70 of Nigella’s mouthwatering recipes, the app features voice navigation – a world first for a cooking app – to guide the user through the cooking instructions. You can also personalize recipes with voice or text annotations as you go, tell friends what you’re cooking on Facebook, and invite them to join you for dinner – all direct from the app.
Add to this a collection of ‘how to’ guides, beautiful photography, and it’s perhaps no surprise that publisher Random House regards this as its most successful iPhone app ever.

Debenhams – Debenhams iPhone, Nokia and Android App

Debenhams drew on the collective wisdom of the Debenhams Design Team – an online panel of over 15,000 customers – in creating the Debenhams app, which enables customers to shop the retailer’s complete range, for delivery to their door or collection from store. Customers looking for inspiration can watch and shop videos from Debenhams TV and share Wish or Gift Lists with friends and family for a second opinion.

Using the barcode scanner, customers can check pricing and reviews and buy larger items in store for home delivery, while time-poor customers can use it to quickly look up products on their phone and add them to their Wish or Gift List.
Location also features heavily, with a store locator, store layout guides, and the ability to send push notifications to app users within a certain radius of a Debenhams store. 

In the six months since launch the iPhone version of the app achieved over 500,000 downloads, and generated over £1.5m in sales, across a total of 2.4m shopping sessions.

Future Platforms/Orange – Official Glastonbury App
The only official app for this year’s Glastonbury festival, Glastonbury 2011 from Orange aimed to genuinely help festival-goers get the most from the event. Built by Future Platforms, the app featured a customisable schedule section, with full stage time listings, allowing attendees to plan which acts they wanted to see. The planner alerted users to any clashes, and reminded them when their favourite acts were about to appear on stage. Users could also share their schedule with friends via Facebook. The app was also able to send live festival news, such as stage changes, special guests and safety messages straight to users’ handsets.

A map feature was fully Assisted-GPS-enabled, and displayed live information on who was playing now and next on each stage. Sharing your feelings on the map created a ‘mood map’ of the festival – showing users where the buzz was on site.

Grapple – Premier Inn Mobile
Premier Inn Mobile is the first cross-platform app from the UK hotel chain. It is available free for iPhone, Android, BlackBerry and Nokia devices.

Created by Grapple Mobile, the app enables customers to search for their nearest Premier Inn based on their location, and make real-time enquiries into room availability, and then book a room. The app also features exclusive offers and discounts. It was built in response to an upsurge in traffic to Premier Inn’s website from mobile devices, and aimed to streamline the customer’s journey on mobile devices, with a view to converting the mobile traffic into more bookings.
In the app’s first three months, the app was downloaded over 250,000 times, and accounted for 50 per cent of Premier Inn’s same-day bookings. In the same period, it generated around £1m worth of additional revenue for the hotel chain.

PizzaExpress/2ergo – PizzaExpress iPhone App
PizzaExpress wanted to bring something new to its app, rather than just create a mobile presence for the sake of it. The popular restaurant chain identified the customer desire to speed up the process of paying the bill, and enlisted 2ergo to create an in-restaurant mobile payment system via an iPhone app. The app allows customers to pay and leave when they want.

The launch of the app and payment system was made possible by a company-wide roll-out of wi-fi from The Cloud. PayPal was also an enthusiastic project partner, and the system was aligned with PizzaExpress’s Torex till system.
In the app’s first week, it was downloaded 100,000 times, and took 15,000 table bookings, and payments worth £100,000 in its first month.

Poynt – The Poynt App
Poynt is a free local search app that connects consumers to businesses. It offers consumers a wide range of information on local places, such as shops, cinemas, restaurants, events, people, and local weather information. For advertisers, Poynt offers the chance to engage with consumers at the point of purchase decisions.

The ad model is focused on contextual, hyper-local content within the app. Advertisers can offer deals and discounts via the app, making the ads genuinely valuable to the consumer.

Poynt has been downloaded and used on almost 10m unique devices. On average, 88 per cent of active users return month over month, each performing an average of 33 searches each month.

To book your place at the Awards Ceremony, please email [email protected] or telephone +44 (0) 77696 74824. The event is strictly limited to 250 people. Tables of 10 cost £2,050, while individual seats are priced at £225.

And dont forget theres a native iOS app, a hybrid Android app, and a web app for other platforms, for the event. More details on that here.