UPDATE: The deadline for nominations is now Friday, March 9th, 2012!

Every year fans gather to watch the society’s most famous, talented, beautiful people walk down the red carpet. It’s an honor to be nominated, they all claim. “Who are you wearing?” the paparazzi ask. “Where are the best after-parties?” the on-lookers wonder. The Oscars…nope – the Wireless Achievement Awards at the annual BlackBerry World™ conference!

That’s right, it’s Wireless Achievement Awards season once again, and the nominations are open for a short period of time. A mainstay of BlackBerry World, these coveted honors have been garnering increased attention over the past six years. But for those who aren’t familiar with the program, I thought I’d provide a bit more background.

The Wireless Achievement Awards are something we do to give our customers some well-deserved recognition for their innovation and creativity in contributing to their organization’s success.

Back in 2006, we started the program in response to the volume of interesting mobile projects we heard our customers describe. Sometimes customer success stories don’t get much attention beyond the organization that has implemented the change, so we decided we needed a way to showcase these stories – so began the first awards, six years ago.

Since then, we’ve seen hundreds of amazing stories about our customers achieving business value through their BlackBerry® deployments. Remember, this program started back in the days before the BlackBerry App World™ storefront or the BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablet – and, given all the evolution in technology, I can’t wait to see what this year’s nominees bring to the table.

To address the variety of submissions, we created a few different categories of awards: Innovation in Private Sector, Innovation in Public Sector, and Business Impact. To be selected as one of three finalists in a category from hundreds and hundreds of entries is really quite an honor. Additionally, to deal with the number of great nominations, we recently added a fourth category: Attendee Choice Award. For this award, people registered to attend BlackBerry World, can log in and cast their vote – the audience is in control! This category focuses on B2C applications: applications that businesses create to service their end users. These might touch on mobile marketing, customer service delivery, customer engagement, or any number of other areas. They represent high value to the organization, and are part of a new area of mobile application growth.

The Wireless Achievement Awards are all about achievement and innovation. The most compelling entries are those that are high value, high impact, and novel. The selection committee is typically comprised of executives or senior leaders from RIM®, past award winners, and industry analysts. The committee looks for entries that demonstrate how BlackBerry solutions have helped organizations achieve their business goals, whether the goal has improved customer satisfaction, cost savings, increased efficiency or helped achieve higher sales.

So, if you think you’ve got what it takes (and I know you do), why not submit a nomination? Just visit the Wireless Achievement Awards page on the BlackBerry World website or dive straight in to the web entry form. Follow the step-by-step instructions to submit your information – additionally, you can attach supporting material (we love screenshots!). And for the perfectionists out there, the form allows you to save your entry and come back later to finish it off. Just remember, the deadline – March 5th, 2012 March 9th, 2012 – is coming up fast, so submit your nomination now!