Now, on with the expert opinions…

Which company do you think has done great things in mobile this year?

Sarah Watson, group mobile manager at The Net-A-Porter Group

It’s incredibly hard not to pick Uber. The UX is exceptional and it works simply and efficiently in almost every country I visit.

The in-app marketing campaigns, incentive scheme and use of brand ambassadors are very compelling and will get anyone hooked.

However, Apple still leads the pack when it comes to mobile. The continuity features, like Handoff, in iOS 8 mean I can write an email on my iPhone on my way to work, finish it on my Mac and send it from my iPad.

The lines between devices are blurring across the board but the transition within the Apple ecosystem has been notably easy and seamless, and soon my watch will be joining the club too.

It also brings many new innovations to streamline the user experience and create new opportunities for brands, in particular with “extensions”.

We’re already seeing great extensions like View Source, which allows developers to pull up the source code for any website they’re viewing or LastPass, which enables one-click password input on websites.

It’s just a matter of time before retailers begin experimenting with extensions and I’m really excited to see what they come up with.

Carl Uminski, COO and co-founder at Somo

Facebook. It’s continued to transform the mobile media landscape, shifting from a publisher to a true ad tech company with the Atlas cross-device launch and has helped the ecosystem with its mobile development tools.

Not to mention the Oculus and WhatsApp acquisitions and Instagram overtaking Twitter in audience size.

Matt Hobbs, mobile product lead at Just Eat

Uber, just by being focused on creating a transformative mobile product/service that – for the most part – just works.

I’m still trying to work out if Foursquare deserves a booby prize for splitting its app into two parts for discovery & checking in – Foursquare & Swarm.

It’s a bold move and I’d love to see some real stats, but everyone I know who was used to the old, bundled Foursquare hates the split.

Theo Theodorou, General Manager EMEA at xAd

This is so broad – but I love companies that can disrupt and if you look to China there is amazing example of a company less than three years old called Xiaomi, which has reinvented the smartphone market in the largest smartphone market in the world.

In 2013 it sold over 18m devices and its revenue was $5.2bn. Today, it’s the third largest smartphone maker in the world.

It’s achieved this by not only having incredibly clever marketing, but by building few products, all of exceptional quality and at low price points.

The company has made a conscious decision to focus on future revenue through software and services.

Which campaign that you’ve been involved in were you most proud of this year?

Sarah Watson, The Net-A-Porter Group

It has to be the launch of our first global print publication, Porter.

This really was a magazine launch like no other. In February our first issue hit stands around the world and simultaneously became available on iPad.

However, unlike other fashion magazines, it was unique in its conception as a physical/digital offering from the start.

Every printed page, whether editorial or advertorial, can be scanned with a mobile device via the Net-A-Porter app and shopped from, even if we don’t stock the products.

And unlike other magazines, our iPad edition wasn’t just a print copy turned digital. We re-thought the digital magazine and made it intuitive, creating new formats that ensured ease of use and shopping.

Carl Uminski, Somo

The connected world experience we created for Audi at the Goodwood Festival of Speed.

Using the latest tech including Oculus Rift and Google Glass, we delivered a truly interactive, immersive experience for thousands of car lovers at the annual event.

Matt Hobbs, Just Eat

We’ve been making numerous iterative improvements all year so our apps have been evolving solidly.

Adding an in-menu food search was one of my favourite new features, with the added bonus of emoji search.

Theo Theodorou, xAd

We actually ran some trials in Q3 to measure store visitations as a result of a consumer seeing an advert on their mobile and to answer the question, ‘can mobile advertising really drive action into a store?’

Mobile has been held back as a marketing channel as previously trying to measure these types of actions has been very difficult.

We were proud to work with ASDA and Starbucks with some really encouraging results.

ASDA for example was able to show a 67% incremental lift of foot traffic into store after consumer exposure to one of its mobile ad campaigns for ‘Home’ or ‘Back to School’.