The 2011 Effective Mobile Marketing Awards Ceremony, headline-sponsored by Upstream, is just two days away. Today, we continue our preview of the finalists in each category with a look at the entries shortlisted for the Most Effective Mobile Publishing Solution category.

The Awards Ceremony takes place in London this Thursday, 3 November and is a sell-out. So lets take a look at the companies and campaigns vying for the honours in the Publishing Solution category, in alphabetical order.

Mippin App Factory
The Mippin App Factory aims to give anyone the tools to build an app in just five minutes. The culmination of six years and $12m worth of investment, the Mippin App Factory is an app creation platform that creates simple native mobile and web apps, and is available at low cost to businesses large and small.

No development skills are required when using Mippin – users simply add their branding, content source (based on an RSS feed), and then choose how the app should be distributed. The company offers various packs, priced depending on distribution.

The system has been used to create the app for The Daily Star newspaper, as well as by Dennis Publishing for its Auto Express app, which has been downloaded over 250,000 times.

Rippll – Appsplash
Appsplash is a technology platform for publishing smartphone apps using pre-built templates. The web-based interface allows agencies and brands to make iPhone, Android, BlackBerry and Windows Phone apps just by dragging and dropping features on a web page and picking colour schemes.

Once built, an Appsplash app can be populated with data through a web-based control panel. Alternatively, XML feeds can be plugged in so that the app will update itself automatically. Photos, audio files, video, and Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn feeds, can all be added to the app, as can location-based venues lists and maps. You can even add event calendars, nearby people lists, and AR features.
In its first month, 10 retail brands published Appsplash apps, including The Tanning Shop, Mori Sushi and Zebrano Bars. Appsplash apps are now downloaded 500 times a day.

Vodafone/AMVG – vRead
Vodafone teamed up with AMVG to create vRead, a distribution platform for next-generation publishing in Turkey. The vRead app provides consumers with a way to discover, purchase and download content, as well as a library for users to keep their publications for future reading.

The app, which is designed for iPad and iPhone, works on top of Apple’s own In-App Purchase API, so users can use their AppleID and password in the same way that they do for apps and music on the iTunes Store.

To date, over 107,000 publications have been downloaded on the iPad version of the app and 39,000 on the iPhone. An Android version is due soon.

Wapple – Canvas, Architect and Exhibit
Wapple offers a trio of tools for easy building and publishing of mobile-optimised websites. Websites are constructed in chunks in the Canvas and Architect applications, while Exhibit is a profiling tool that ensures each element of the site optimises perfectly on each device.  The aim is to enable developers, regardless of size or budget, to build optimised mobile websites and join the mobile web revolution.
The Wapple ecosystem for creating web apps is currently in use by many clients, including Microsoft Advertising, Ford, and Unilever, as well as agencies such as Mediacom.

WoodWing – WoodWing Tablet Publishing Solution
The WoodWing Tablet Publishing Solution helps publishers go mobile using plug-ins for Adobe InDesign. This approach means publishers can embrace the production of tablet magazines and newspapers with their existing teams and skills.

The solution leverages Enterprise – the company’s cross-media publishing system. This includes the content-management application, Content Station, which ensures an efficient multi-platform tablet publishing workflow.

Reader apps are available for all major platforms, and WoodWing also handles worldwide distribution though its Content Delivery Service, which supports various subscription models. Over 6,000 issues of daily, weekly, and monthly digital tablet issues have been published through the WoodWing Content Delivery Service to date. The solution has been used for newspapers, commercial and customer magazines, annual reports, and books.

The  Awards Ceremony is a sell-out, but for more information on all the finalists, theres a native iOS app, a hybrid Android app, and a web app for other platforms, for the event. More details on that here.