Tech entrepreneurs are changing the world through their own creativity and passion. To celebrate Europe's thriving developers and the entrepreneurial scene and honor the most promising tech companies, in 2016 we founded the Digital Top 50 Awards, in association with McKinsey and Rocket Internet.
The 2018 edition of the awards are now open for applications and companies with a digital product or service from the EU and from EFTA countries can apply on the Digital Top 50 website until April 1, 2018.
All top 50 companies will receive free tickets and showcase space at Tech Open Berlin on June 20-21 2018, where the final winners in each category will be announced. The winner in the Tech for Social Impact category will be granted a cash prize of 50,000 euros, and all five winners will be provided with support from the founding partners to scale their businesses further—through leading professional advice, structured consulting and coaching programs, as well as access to a huge network of relevant industry contacts.
Helping people embrace new digital opportunities is at the heart of our Grow with Google initiative in Europe. With the DT50 awards, we hope to recognize a new generation of startups and scale-ups, and help them grow further and realize their dreams.
We recently partnered with Awwwards, an awards platform for web development and web design, to launch a Mobile Excellence Badge on awwwards.com and a Mobile Excellence Award to recognize great mobile web experiences.
Starting this month, every agency and digital professional that submits their website to Awwwards can be eligible for a Mobile Excellence Badge, a guarantee of the performance of their mobile version. The mobile website's performance will be evaluated by a group of experts and measured against specific criteria based on Google's mobile principles on speed and usability. When a site achieves a minimum score, it will be recognized with the new Mobile Excellence Badge. All criteria are listed at the Mobile Guidelines.
The highest scoring sites with the Mobile Excellence Badge will be nominated for Mobile Site of the Week. One of them will then go on to win Mobile Site of the Month.
All Mobile Sites of the Month will be candidate for Mobile Site of the Year, with the winner receiving a physical award at the Awwwards Conference in Berlin, 8-9 February 2018.
In a time where mobile is playing a dominant role in how people access the web, it is necessary that web developers and web designers build websites that meet users' expectations. Today, 53% of mobile site visits are abandoned if pages take longer than 3 seconds to load1 and despite the explosion of mobile usage, performance and usability of existing mobile sites remain poor and are far from meeting those expectations. At the moment, the average page load time is 22s globally2, which represents a massive missed opportunity for many companies knowing the impact of speed on conversion and bounce rates3.
If you created a great mobile web experience and want it to receive a Mobile Excellence Badge and compete for the Mobile Excellence Award submit your request here.
Google Data, Aggregated, anonymized Google Analytics data from a sample of mWeb sites opted into sharing benchmark data, n=3.7K, Global, March 2016 ↩
Google Research, Webpagetest.org, Global, sample of more than 900,000 mWeb sites across Fortune 1000 and Small Medium Businesses. Testing was performed using Chrome and emulating a Nexus 5 device on a globally representative 3G connection. 1.6Mbps download speed, 300ms Round-Trip Time (RTT). Tested on EC2 on m3.medium instances, similar in performance to high-end smartphones, Jan. 2017. ↩
Akamai.com, Online Retail Experience Report 2017 ↩
