There’s no one more critical about a plumber’s work than a fellow plumber. The same applies to marketing people; no one is more entertained than I am by watching others’ marketing initiatives.

This week, as a first in the blogging world, I won’t pit the usual contenders against each other: Apple, provider of iShinyThings(TM) vs the biggest mobile player in Europe, Nokia. Rather, in this game, Nokia and Apple will be tagteaming against Motorola and Sony Ericsson.

The game is one of survival: How to create buzz around your products so that bloggers write about your new gadget, consumers talk about it amongst themselves and, ultimately, they buy your stuff. Who’s doing it well, who’s doing it wrong and who’s not doing it at all?

In the right corner, Apple and Nokia, kings of buzz

There’s no debating what the most talked-about mobile device was this year. Yes, of course, I’m talking about the iPhone. Ubiquitous in the press? Yes. Overhyped? Quite possibly. But everyone knows what it looks like and has at least heard about it. I don’t even think people who live in a cave would manage to get away from the buzz.

Similarly, in Europe at least, the rumour mill has been working overtime churning out buzz about the Nokia smartphones. Prototype pictures circulating, guesses at future specs, wondering what will come next in the N-Series line. How can we resist the bait when we’re told that these are prototypes and “not to take pictures too close up”, but then handed the phones to play without supervision?

While Apple barely needs to move a finger for the fan base to get the rumour train going full steam ahead, Nokia has been actively seeding the market with humourous viral campaigns, such as the Jealous Computers, the N81 viral site and, lest we forget, the cheeky ads Nokia posted on Google for disgruntled iPhone users.

In both cases, staff present at events and conferences seem genuinely excited and personally invested in the business, rather than hired booth-monkeys who are counting the hours til they can go home.

And now, the opposition: Sony Ericsson and Motorola

In the other corner, we find Sony Ericsson and Motorola, two other major contenders for the phone market. To say the least, these two have selected an unorthodox strategy. The best way to describe is, hrmm, as the “go away!” tactic.

Last week, Steve Litchfield at All About Symbian described the brick wall he faced when visiting the Sony Ericsson store in London. No matter who Steve spoke to, he was told that taking pictures inside the store simply wasn’t allowed, journalist or not. The fact that Steve broadcasts reviews of mobile devices to hundreds of thousands of phone addicts seemed to completely escape the Sony Ericsson clan.

Motorola behaved in a similar way at the Smartphone Show, shuffling new devices out of sight when cameras were brought out, since “they’re prototypes and the finished hardware will be different.” Poor Steve found himself taking photos of basketball players.

His experience seemed to ring true with a number of readers, both as consumers and journalists, they’ve struggled to get anything blogworthy when attending SE or Motorola events.

Is Buzz the answer to everything?

Of course not. Buzz does not a great phone make, but it sure helps a good product carve a space in our limited mental bandwidth, ensuring we consider it as a possible option next time our phone upgrade comes around.

In practice, Sony Ericsson and Motorola still own a reasonable share, albeit far smaller than Nokia’s, of the mobile phone market, but few people talk or write about them with the same fervent passions that Apple and Nokia stir up. How much of it is owed to buzz and the bubbling community surrounding the products?

[Rock’em, Sock’em Robots picture from JTony on Flickr]

[tags]taptu, taptology, apple, iphone, nokia, symbian, motorola, sony ericsson, phones, mobile phones, technology, gadgets, marketing, buzz, community[/tags]

It’s now two weeks since we launched the Taptu beta publicly, and I’m blown away with the positive feedback we’ve received so far. Here’s a sample of the coverage we’ve received since launch…

• Chris Leonard from PocketPicks raves about how easy it is to get relevant results and send them to friends.
• Dennis at Wapreview said he was “… impressed with both the quality of Taptu’s search results and the mobile site’s very good usability on even the less capable mobile browsers.”
• Peggy Ann Saltz of MSearchGroove reviewed the service in great depth, praising Taptu for “cleverly harnessed the wisdom of crowds to bubble up popular content that computer-generated algorithms tend to ignore.”
• Richard McManus of Read/Write Web describes the Taptu music search engine on launch day.
• Katherine Hannaford from TechDigest says that Taptu will help satisfy her urge to prove that she’s right in a music or factual argument at the pub. Well… you need all sorts of users!

The whole team at Taptu has been working tirelessly since launch to respond to any feedback, deal with bug reports and create future improvements and features - Your reviews and comments are the fuel that keeps us going!

If you want to say hi in person, we’ll be presenting at Mobile Monday Madrid and Mobile Monday Paris on 12th November, and attending Future of Mobile on November 14th.

Julia Palatovska invited me to present on the topic of “Social-assisted search: a new approach to mobile search?” at the inaugural Mobile Monday in Moscow earlier this week. I’ve never been to Russia before, plus this was a good opportunity to talk about Taptu to a completely new audience in a big mobile market (pop = 141.2m, subs = 140.4m, 99.4% penetration). Travelwise, the 9am BA flight out of Heathrow would get me there around 4pm Moscow time. Then I had to get from the airport to the venue near the Olympic Stadium by 6pm.

There were nearly 1000 people in the arrival hall when I arrived, and I joined the back of a 30 person queue. Yet, I was checked through within 10 minutes. What a super-efficient process compared to my San Francisco visit the week before! Russian visas are now machine-readable, and it just took 30 seconds for the officials to check each passenger through.

I met some really smart people at the MoMo event. There is a very active community of mobile developers now in Moscow, with many investments in startups being made mainly by private individuals. There are over 5000 mobile sites in Russia, I learned. Mobile internet infrastructure is still at an embryonic stage with most base stations still plain vanilla GPRS, some with EDGE, with 3G to come in 2008. Yet there are millions of 3G handsets in the market, as consumers buy the latest Nokia models. My presentation on mobile search was well-received, and several people in the audience told me afterwards that Taptu was working fine on the Russian networks, from their own handsets.

Some other first impressions. My hotel, the Marriott Teverskya, was top notch, one of the best I’ve stayed in. Russia has a vibrant economy powered by oil and gas money. It manifests itself in countless cranes, building sites, brand new hotels, shops, Mercedes and Astons. The old GUM department store refurbished with scores of high-end stores, boutiques and cafes. All sitting somewhat incongruously side-by-side with the old Soviet edifices.

It became crystal clear to me after my Moscow trip that we should make the Taptu platform as open as possible to 3rd party developers and other collaborators so that we can offer country-specific versions of Taptu in as many markets as possible in the shortest possible time frame.

This week, the Mobile Carnival is hosted by Rudy at mTrends. There’s tons of interesting posts, ranging from coverage of Mobile 2.0 conference and the Symbian Smartphone show, to some of the week’s news highlights.

Well… What are you waiting for? Go have a read!

Why is it that exciting stuff only happens in airports when Bob, our business dev guy, is there? All I get to do in airports is drink overpriced coffee and count grumpy travellers. He gets to meet celebrities!

Taptu’s launch week threw up some unexpected surprises. On more than one occasion, I’ve typed in the Spice Girls “Wannabe” into the Taptu search page - to show my children of course! - to check out the music results that come up on my mobile.

Passing through LA airport last week, there was the one and only Victoria Beckham no less. As to whether Taptu can Spice up her life I cannot report, but David & the kids are fine apparently.

Bob

[tags]Taptu, taptology, Posh Spice, Victoria Beckham, Spice Girls, Los Angeles[/tags]

[Update 8:32pm: Google Maps also offers its support by showing the state of the fires, as well as the emergency services and evacuated areas. Via Digg.]

Reading about the Californian fires from across the ocean, reading Tweets and looking at Flickr pics, I feel sick and wish there was a way to stop it all. But at the same time, I’m fascinated to see what use people make of technology that’s available.

Chris Messina has been throwing around the idea of hashtags to help identify relevant content on Twitter and other social networks for some time now, and while Twitter hasn’t implimented the hash-based tags per se, they’ve enabled users to track all discussion on any given keyword, whether it’s “NYC”, “Steve Jobs” or “earthquakes”.

In time of crisis, people organise quickly, and this one seems to have picked up. Really, what a useful tool to catch the latest news when you’ve been evacuated from home and want to keep a check on your loved ones as well as the evolution of the situation?

Even Wired’s Compiler blog covers the situation:

Twitter users can enter “track sandiegofire” in SMS or IM and receive notifications whenever a tweet goes out with that tag in it.

Here’s an excellent real-world example of the usefulness of Twitter’s limited scope and feature set — Reporting breaking news quickly. They’re certainly filing updates more frequently than most mainstream media outlets.

Social networks and mobiles form such an ideal way to quickly organise vast numbers of people, a Twitteresque emergency service should exist everywhere, as some universities have started making compulsory. Some will shout and scream about privacy and Big Brother, but personally, if it means I get advance warning and can pick up my husband and my cats before the fire’s on my doorstep, the SMS will be a very welcome one.

It’s Friday afternoon, and we’ve all had a fantastic week, thanks to all the amazing feedback we’ve been getting about the Taptu search since we launched Monday. So why not slack a little by reviving an old meme.

We spend over 1,700 hours in our working environment every year, so our desk ends up reflecting who we are quite a bit!

Simple task: Take a picture of your desk and describe what’s on it. The more things, the better!

1. David Tennant action figure, cozily laying back in a yellow foam chair
2. Drawing of my two soon-to-be-adopted kittens, by Chloe, age 6
3. The Taptu WordPress blog
4. Skitch, the best Mac screenshot application
5. My to-do list for the day, almost completed
6. The #mobitopia channel
7. Juhu, the Mac client for Jaiku
8. The iPhone, my current favourite device on the planet
9. A Unix Command line reference guide, because my brain blanks when I look at Terminal
10. Simon’s head popping above the divider. He’s not on my desk, per se, but he’s in the picture. Good enough.

What’s your desk like?

I’ll be tagging Tarek, Carlo, Steph and Rudy. If your desk is less than usual, just join in!

Just arrived back from Mobile 2.0. Some quick impressions:

• The mobile internet scene is very active in the US. Several neat new services announced at Mobile 2.0. The US mobile internet startups are very well linked in to the blogging community here in Silicon Valley.
• Despite this, the US mobile Web community frets about its lack of visibility compared to the Web 2.0 community: “we’re still here in the basement of the Hyatt”.
• 3G coverage is very limited in the US GSM networks. If you want mobile internet to work fast you only really have 2 choices today:
  subscribe to Verizon or Sprint on CDMA, or use WiFi. Sadly, these are the carriers that have been most restrictive about off-portal mobile browsing.
• Off-portal traffic only represents 10-20% of all mobile Web traffic here in the US, compared to 40-60% in Western Europe, but the percentage is growing steadily quarter by quarter.
• The iPhone is everywhere in the mobile early adopter community: maybe 50% of the audience at Mobile 2.0 were carrying one.

During the after-event drinks, I had the chance to talk at length with Oliver Starr and Russell Beattie. Russell had some great tips for growing Google Mobile referral traffic. Oliver put me onto Yubnub and ShareThis. He shares our enthusiasm for the concept of mobile search and share. It also turns out that he was a former professional road and world cup mountain bike racer… cool!

Today at the Symbian Smartphone Show, Nokia presented S60 running with a touch interface.

To get more details, I listened to the Voice of S60 podcast, hosted by Phil Schwarzmann who interviewed Minna Karvonen, Product Marketing Manager for S60 UI and UI Customisation.

Minna explained that the touch interface would support finger and stylus input, mulitilingual applications and is backwards compatible with the existing S60 3rd Edition platform.

While this is great news and will most likely change the landscape of mobile browsing, the cynic in me struggles to see how S60 will make this in any way as smooth and usable as the iPhone. (What, did you really think I wasn’t going to make this comparison immediately?) Regardless, it’ll be a very interesting space to watch once it is released in 2008.

And finally, here’s a video of the Nokia presentation, taken by Rafe of All About Symbian:

After many months of working away on crawling millions upon millions of web pages, creating as many music and video samples and checking them for the Groove Factor*, we’re now releasing Taptu into the wild!

By visiting taptu.mobi on your phone, you’ll now be able to search for any artist or band you can think of and listen to it in a snap. Whether you listen to The Kooks, Beyonce or MC Hammer, we promise not to hold your taste in music against you.

We’d love to get your feedback so drop us an email at hello@taptu.com or leave a comment, and let us know how you’re using Taptu. Since we’re in beta, the wheels might need a little bit more oiling before everything runs perfectly smoothly, so if something’s squeaky, again, let us know, and we’ll get the can of WD-40 out to fix it.

Don’t forget, there’s also our Facebook app, the Music Wall, which uses the same powerful music search engine to let you adorn your profile with your favourite tracks.

To be sure you don’t miss out on any future feature releases, subscribe to the RSS feed or get our posts via email by putting your address in the box on the right.

[* You think I’m joking, don’t you? But I really did discover a whole lot of new music through the Taptu search!]