On Thursday night, Rishi and I had the pleasure of attending the Silicon Valley Telecom Council‘s SPIFFY Awards.

The SPIFFYs recognize the most outstanding telecoms start-ups in Silicon Valley, as judged by the members of the Service Provider Forum (SPiF) of the Telecom Council of Silicon Valley. We were really honored that Qik was nominated for the Edison Award for Most Innovative Start-Up, and delighted that we came in as first runner-up. Many thanks to the Telelcom Council members who voted for us, and to the Telecom Council for inviting us to live stream the event.

You can see the presentation of the honors at the SPIFFY Awards event page. There are also some interesting remarks from venture capitalist Tim Chang on the state of the wireless market for entrepreneurs and VCs. Thanks again to Stephanie, Liz, Adam and the gang at the Telecom Council for putting on a fantastic event and to Council members for recognizing Qik!

Earlier today at the Mobile World Congress, Nokia announced their new Ovi Store (press release) with Qik as a featured application.

The Ovi Store consolidates the best experiences from the current content services including Download!, MOSH and WidSets to a single channel, and expands upon Ovi Services to deliver content influenced by the people and places that matter to you. The content will range from applications, games and videos to widgets, podcasts, location-based applications and personalization content for Nokia Series 40 and S60 devices.

Ramu Sunkara, CEO of Qik was also quoted in the press release by Nokia saying:
“Qik is excited to be a part of this significant move by the largest handset manufacturer in the world. Inclusion in Ovi Store enables us to leverage the global scale of Nokia and get our application in the hands of hundreds of millions of Nokia users worldwide. We are really pleased to progress our relationship with Nokia by being a featured application provider in this important new marketplace.”

Moconews says: Content on board: Some of the biggest names have already signed up, including Qik, Rough Guides, MySpace, Lonely Planet, Fox Mobile group, Facebook, Electronic Arts and Shazam.

Many of our Qik users are also on Twitter, which has spawned the global Twestival in aid of charity: water. People in more than 175 cities around the world are taking part in this global tweet-up for a good cause. How cool is that?

If you’re attending Twestival in any city, join the Twestival event on Qik to add your Qiks from the festivities. I don’t think we’ve ever had an event on Qik which was taking place in so many world cities simultaneously, so this could get very interesting!

(Oh, and if your Twestival is in reach of one of the 85,000+ Boingo Mobile hotspots, you can Qik over wifi! Get 30 days free via Qik, and live stream your videos over high speeds all Twestival long with our new partner, Boingo.)

Happy Twestival!

Qikking over wifi is a pretty neat experience; on a good network, your Qik videos will appear as live as possible, with as little as half a second delay from your cell phone to the web.

So we’re all truly excited today to announce the establishment of a longterm partnership between Qik and Boingo, which offers you faster wifi access from more than 85,000 hotspots around the world. Working with Boingo, we can offer all our users a better, faster Qikking experience from tens of thousands of locations globally.

Even better, Qik users can get 30 free days of Boingo Mobile by signing up here. (NOTE: Requires a credit card.) Try it for yourself and see how much easier and faster it is to Qik – and surf – with Boingo Mobile. I think you’ll appreciate the difference, and it’s an affordable $7.95 per month. (Yes, this is the price for non-US as well as US customers.)

Valentine’s Day bonus: We’re giving away THREE free year-long Boingo Mobile accounts (a $95.40 value) for the best proclamations of love on Qik. Just entitle or tag your Qik video “Boingo love” to be entered to win. We’re looking for great creativity, style, humor, and/or the most ardent declarations of love. As always, keep it clean.

The alpha version of the Blackberry client was upgraded to 0.0.10. With this release comes alpha support for Blackberry Javelin 8900 and BlackBerry OS 4.3. This release also contains quality, performance improvements and numerous bug fixes including carrying over Privacy setting from one session to another.

This version can be downloaded by going to http://d.qik.com from your mobile browser.

As usual, if you have any issues, comments, questions – drop us a line at blackberry@qik.com.

We had so many cool Qik videos from you guys on Super Bowl Sunday – including Ashton Kutcher’s “sniper cam” live from Tampa Bay – that it made picking a winner for our Super Bowl challenge rather difficult!

We finally chose legend107‘s brief but powerful video streamed live from Carson Street in Pittsburgh right after the final whistle. What atmosphere!

A prize pack of Qik swag and a $50 Sports Authority gift card is on its way to legend107. We also will send some Qik swag to MsJennyJen, whose Qik of her friends and family watching the big game in the front yard, all wearing their 3D glasses, cracked us up at Qik HQ.

Thanks to all who participated! Watch out for our next challenge…