MobileBeat 2010 Startup Competition — Vote for your startup!

Today, we’re announcing the startup competition for our MobileBeat 2010 conference.

We’re looking for the top 20 companies with the coolest mobile ideas, now that we’re poised for exciting new developments in the mobile world.

The top 20 companies, once they’re selected, get to present in front of MobileBeat’s executive-level audience in SF on July 12-13. Like last year, we’ll have key press, major carriers, mobile handset manufacturers, mobile ad networks and publishers and top investors.

We’ve reserved two spots for companies that are nominated by you, our readers.

Here’s how the overall competition work.

1) VentureBeat will select 18 of the 20 startups ourselves. We’re taking submissions from interested companies through June 7. If you’d like to submit your company, click here. We’re giving special consideration to companies launching new products. If you prefer to remain in stealth until the competition day, just note that in the form. We’ll notify companies of their selection by June 14. We’ll publish a list of 18 finalists shortly before the event, but will keep the confidence of those companies that prefer to remain stealth. We’ll aim to select nine application companies, and nine infrastructure/services companies.

2)  Readers will select the remaining two companies. You can go to vote for company on this page. You get two votes. We’d prefer if you could vote for one application company and one infrastructure/services company, but it doesn’t matter. On June 7, we’ll tally the votes. The most popular app company and the most popular infrastructure/services company to join the other 18 on stage. On June 14, we’ll announce the two companies.

All finalist companies will get five minutes on stage.

We’re interested in companies that have great technology, but also that have a realistic chance to be a marketplace grand-slam. Aiming big is a key criterion for our selection process: We’ll be asking ourselves which companies are poised to exploit the emergence of the 4G world. Better networks are are able to deliver bits faster than ever, faster phone processors and slicker user interfaces will allow us to digest this mobile information more efficiently too.

Finally, at the day of the event, a panel of expert judges will pick the winners of the bunch. They’ll pick 1) the best app company and 2) the best infrastructure company. There will also be a crowd favorite, making for a total of three winners. These winners will get our Tesla award, pictured right, named in honor of Nikola Tesla, the scientist who discovered early mobile communication.

Two years ago, a little company named Admob won the competition at MobileBeat 2008, and it went on to do incredibly well: Google plans to acquire it for $750 million.

Check out our MobileBeat event page and themes. Early-bird tickets are still available until May 15. Book now, because it’s going to be a big conference — we’ll have the latest shiny mobile startups in one room, and we’ve blown this up into two days of action and networking. It all comes after Apple’s World Wide Developer’s Conference too, which is when Apple releases iPhone OS 4, which brings multitasking and “hundreds” of other features. Apple is dashing madly ahead to try to lock into its lead of the superphone revolution, but Google and others are close on its heels. With fireside chats and keynotes, MobileBeat 2010 will also ask who else will profit from the revolution and how.

*So far, we’re thrilled to have the support of gold level sponsor GetJar, silver level sponsor OpenMarket, and event sponsor Offerpal Media. There are many sponsorship opportunities still available.  Please contact sponsors@venturebeat.com for more information.

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This year, we’re also partnering with the mobile appstore company Getjar to host the GETTIES, a brand new award ceremony meant to showcase the most successful and innovative mobile applications in the market. This is a separate competition from our MobileBeat Startup Competition, and will culminate on the first day of MobileBeat (July 12). It will award the best apps across the various mobile platforms.

There will be one award per platform, plus a final category open to popular vote — called the GETTIE Award. The platforms are as follows:

• Android
• Blackberry
• Java
• iPhone
• Symbian
• Windows Mobile

More information to come!