While 2009 was a tough year for some companies, “mobile marketing was on fire.” From 2008 to 2009, brand budgets for mobile marketing tripled, said Paul Palmieri, Millennial Media CEO, in accepting AlwaysOn’s “OnMedia” award for the top private company of 2009.

AlwaysOn customarily releases a list of the top 100 media-related private companies, heralded as the most successful disrupters of the digital media ecosystem, in conjunction with its OnMedia conference. The show is at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in New York City through Feb. 3 and is being streamed live.

Past winners, judged on such qualities as growth rate, return on investment for seed capital, size of potential market and overall likelihood to make their investors money, have included BlueLitium, Gaia, Twitter and The Rubicon Project, and represent major investments from the venture capital community, all looking for the next “big thing.”

Hear what Palmieri, whose company was judged the best of a stellar class, had to say about the iPad (“it’s a large mobile device, not a small computer,”) Millennial Media’s prospects (average yearly growth of 350%, served 10 billion ad impressions in January in the U.S. alone), and where to expect the next wave of mobile media (PSP?)

Click the upper right of the DAILY today to watch, because soon it will be available only to DM2PRO.com members (along with hundreds of videos from our digiday conferences.) We’ll be profiling some of the most promising media/marketing companies over the course of the week. Follow our tweets @dm2pro.