The Future Mobile Awards are given to companies that have made significant progress within their particular sector during the previous year, and who are now poised to make a considerable market impact in the year ahead. This gold award recognises Omnifone for making an outstanding contribution to the future of the mobile music industry.

Commenting on the award, Omnifone CEO Rob Lewis said "We are delighted to win the Future Mobile Award's Gold Award for Mobile Music ahead of Apple," he continued, "The subscription based unlimited downloads model is coming of age; traditional pay per track services are failing to engage the majority of mobile users and failing to generate significant revenue for the mobile and music industries. MusicStation is now live across three continents, providing a differentiated music experience to consumers and enabling mobile network operators to remain centre stage of music whilst substantially increasing revenues over traditional pay per track services."

Dr Windsor Holden, panel judge and Principal Analyst at Juniper Research said, "Omnifone's Music Station is a highly exciting product: it enables users to access unlimited music content at a modest cost, and is extremely "sticky". The fact that those users build up a playlist, which would be lost if they then churned to another operator, will make them loath to unsubscribe. It is a very useful aid both to customer retention and to enhancing ARPU by several dollars per month. A number of operators have already recognised the clear benefits of offering Omnifone's service, and more will undoubtedly follow. An excellent application and associated business model."

The awards were granted by a panel of expert judges based on a number of criteria, including: Innovation; Customer retention; Customer growth; Commercial deployment; Ease of use/user interface; Revenue generation; Pricing (for services/products); and Capability/functionality. From a short list of nominations, the case was made for each nominee, with their relative merits and shortcomings debated and scored. Gold and Silver awards were conferred for each category. The silver award winner for the mobile music category was Apple for the iPhone.

Omnifone
Omnifone's partners include; Vodafone, Telenor, 3 Hong Kong and Vodacom, all of whom have rolled out Omnifone's MusicStation service, with over 25 other operators engaged as partners. The company has also been nominated for Best Mobile Music Service at the upcoming Mobile World Congress 2008.