Recognition for the pioneer behind ringtones.com and Appitalism.
The sixth annual ME Awards took place at the Royal Garden Hotel in London earlier this evening, attracting over 300 senior professionals from all over the world.
The climax of the event is always the handing out of the Outstanding Contribution to Mobile Entertainment award.
This year it recognised an individual who can claim to be a genuine market pioneer. Simon Buckingham bought the ringtones.com URL for £20 in 1997 on the back of a presentation he saw when he was working at Vodafone UK.
He took ringtones.com into 43 countries and made it the foundation of Mobile Streams, which would eventually comprise 13 worldwide subsidiaries and achieve a public listing.
And it was all built on the back of that inspired URL purchase, which meant that Mobile Streams never had to spend money on search marketing – it was always top of the search results anyway.
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Now Buckingham is focused on Appitalism, his social and loyalty-based app store, which – by volume of apps – is now the largest in the world.
He sold ringtones.com last year for $750,000.
Tim Green, executive editor of Mobile Entertainment, said: "Simon's a one-off – one of the industry's true characters.
"It's been a pleasure to know him, and an even greater one to be able to recognise his contribution to the mobile content business with this award.
"I hope the award is precious enough for him to display it alongside his vast collection of Coke bottles."
Other winners at the ME Awards 2011 included: Samsung, Fetch, Grapple, GetJar, InMobi, Netbiscuits, Cherry Media, EA Mobile, 24MAS, Papayamobile, Saffron, Bango, Spotify, Facebook, Layar, Betfair and Orange Group.
Guests at the event were drawn from companies such as Google, PayPal, Nokia, RIM, Facebook, O2, Orange, OpenMarket and many more.
The winners were decided by a judging panel, drawn from the ME contacts book and consisting of around 400 execs from all sectors of the business.
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