DialPlus won the Smaato Mobile Advertising Award 2008 for convincing a jury with an application that shows visual information from the Web for a phone number before, during and after a call.

The winner was chosen from 108 companies that participated in Smaato Inc.'s contest for the best ad-enabled mobile application.

"We think the award shows a clear renaissance of mobile application developers," said Harald Neidhardt, chief marketing officer of Smaato, San Francisco.

"Innovative new solutions from startups worldwide provide a positive vibe in this mobile economy," he said. "And more mobile advertising innovation is shown around telephony and local-based communities as the winning companies indicate."

DialPlus wins a free booth at the GSMA's Mobile World Congress conference in February in Barcelona, Spain.

The San Diego-based company also wins an introduction to four venture capitalists at firms nationwide and in Europe: Innovacom Venture Capital in France and San Francisco; Draper Fisher Jurvetson in Menlo Park, CA; aeris Capital in Switzerland and San Francisco; and August Capital in Menlo Park.

"Really what it most means to us is it's a tremendous validation," said DialPlus founder CEO Lisa LeVasseur.

"We've been working really hard with the carriers and getting a lot of feedback from them," she said. "But as you know, that process is really long.

"So this is an objective player in the ecosystem recognizing the value of this platform and the power of what it can provide to contextual advertising. This platform can really turn mobile advertising into valuable content."

Ten other companies made the final round. That list covered Buzzd, Fishlabs, fring, FunkySexyCool, Peperoni, Qeep, Skout, Tourspot and Vayyoo. Runner-up Aka Aki won a special prize for participating with a free booth at the M-Days show next month in Munich, Germany.

Smaato organized the award with vator.tv and Inmobile.org. The jury comprised executives from a mix of media and venture capital firms and mobile caucuses as well as Smaato.

DialPlus clearly sees the benefit of participating.

The company's model is predicated on automatically providing contextually relevant visual information about the called or calling party before the call is answered, during the call and after the call is completed.

Consumers can opt into this technology through off-portal sites, wireless carriers or at http://www.dialplus.net. They can then configure and create a DialPlus account.

So, if an opted-in consumer checks Facebook as the visual option, each time someone calls another person who is in Facebook and signed on, that latest Facebook page will show on the phone screen.

In essence, this is a rich caller ID device.

Such demographic and psychographic information is valuable for advertising, per DialPlus' Ms. LeVasseur.

"We do envision this as ad-supported," Ms. LeVasseur said. "Ads to us are content and they're relevant content."