This morning, I woke up to find that Robert Scoble posted his review of our mobile search engine. I was convinced that Robert would enjoy using Taptu, but the review is simply glowing!

James Q. Pearce at MocoNews points us to a report by The Age which claims that Australian youngsters are having to declare themselves bankrupt due to overspending their meagre revenue on mobile bills.

“Fair Trading Minister Linda Burney said a survey conducted by the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) had highlighted concerns about “premium” mobile phone content and the massive bills being racked up - often unknowingly - by users.

“Suddenly they have got bills of $3,000 to $4,000 AUD because they thought services they were getting in term of downloads and ringtones, and voting on Big Brother, were free,” Ms Burney told reporters.”

Normally, my attitude would be that someone should give them a dollar to go buy a clue and that these teens should get themselves out of the trouble they got in. Learning responsibility, character building and what not.

But when it comes to mobile, there are some very grey zones. In theory, providers of mobile services are obliged to clearly explain cost of use in plain English. In practice, they’ll often use convoluted terminology and small print to pass a quick one while the user isn’t paying attention. With no experience in escalating issues with customer service in a telco, the teens find themselves backed against a wall and declaring bankruptcy crops up as a potential way out.

In my ideal world of rainbows and unicorns, every service would be morally correct and would not attempt to fool consumers. There would be no headline shouting “Only £1 for the ringtone” shadowing over small print whispering that a minimum of half a dozen ringtones a month must be purchased.

As James suggests, “surely a little flag saying ‘hey, this person has spent $200 on mobile content, we should let them know’ isn’t that hard to implement?” This should be a requirement where any service provider is required to update customers regularly on their spending.

For example, T-Mobile UK sent me a free SMS every Friday at lunchtime to let me know how many of my monthly minutes I had left and how long I had to use them up. After a few weeks, I stopped the automated SMS since I had a pretty good idea of my phone use, but it was extremely useful in the early days. Networks are also taking a step in the right direction by notifying you of roaming charges via SMS when entering a new European country.

To the suggestion of widening the net to all paid-for mobile services, the default reaction for operators would most likely be that it’ll cause users to hold back on using their services - having realised how much money they’re blowing on Crazy Frog ringtones - promptly eating into their high profit margins.

That being said, I’m convinced that for nine out of 10 users, it would have quite the opposite effect. The most common reservation we continually hear during user testing sessions for Taptu is that most consumers have no concept of how much a song download or a quick browse of the mobile web is costing them. As a result, they choose to avoid using it altogether for fear of racking up immense bills. For these users, I’m willing to bet my place in the iPhone queue this Friday that they’d be pleasantly surprised at the low cost of their mobile web use.

Do other services offer this kind of triggered courtesy notices to let you track your spending? Would you welcome such a service?

If these automated messages were sent to the teens The Age reported on, they couldn’t claim innocence when the bills start rolling in, forcing them to decide to either pay up, shape up their habits in the future or disconnect and find a different hobby. Maybe knitting or paperclip collecting.

This week, Michael Mace of Mobile Opportunity hosts the Carnival, filled with tricks, treats and loads of good posts. As one would expect, the buzz last week revolved very much around Google’s announcement of the Gphone which, as it turns out, is a mobile platform with Android at its core. Plenty of interesting posts, so go have a read!

We’re just going through our next major design revision for Taptu, and it reminds me of just how important to us the whole topic of ‘click-distance’ is.

What is ‘click distance’? It is the sum of the number of clicks and the number of scroll actions that a mobile user must make when navigating to a specific item of content. It’s the critical measure of usability for mobile search.

Back in 2002, Professor Barry Smyth of University College Dublin carried out an experiment on the O2 mobile portal. For a sample of 150,000 users accessing the portal via the mobile browser, he measured their navigation behaviour. Specifically he measured the number of clicks and the number of scrolls that they would make on their phone keypads as they navigated the menu structure of the portal in their search for content. From this experiment came a very simple but incredibly important insight: the motivation of most users to continue navigating for content falls off a cliff when the click-distance exceeds 12.

Back at the end of 2005 we carried out our own research study into click-distance performance of mobile search engines. We asked a panel of users which 100 typical searches they would most like to do on a mobile phone, and which search words they would start with. We then selected the most popular mobile search engine, ran the 100 searches and measured the average click-distance. Shockingly, the average result was 36 clicks. It’s not hard to see why mobile search has yet to go mass market when you see a ‘usability gap’ of this magnitude.

When we design a mobile user interface for a device, or for a device family, the desire to minimise click-distance is always at the front of our minds. It’s become the central proposition of Taptu: how to deliver relevant mobile search results in 10 clicks or less. Needless to say, setting the objective of 10 clicks or less is the easy part. For a universal mobile search service, it is a very tough target.

We’ve just set up an internal research project to update our 2005 findings. This time around we have a lot more data on what mobile users actually search for, so our test database can be much more realistic. In the last couple of years, we’ve seen some improvement in the performance of the existing mobile search engines. We’ve also seen new kinds of devices like the iPhone which can do full Web search on a mobile using the desktop versions of popular search engines.

What effect will this have on click-distance performance for mobile search? Keep you posted.

All About Symbian points out this morning that the Nokia Music Store is now live for UK users. Or some UK users anyways. Those with an N95 8GB, N81 or Internet Explorer only. Not me*.

When I visited Nokia in September, I asked the PR person whether purchasing music would be widely available to existing devices, as well as Mac users - since the demo clearly worked fine on Windows in Internet Explorer. She skirted around the existing devices question, but seemed perfectly confident that the store would work happily on a Mac. Not so just yet.

I appreciate that Internet Explorer represents a fair chunk of the population, but Firefox, Safari and other non-IE users probably make up most of the gadget-using crowd they’re targetting - ie. those who use their phones for more than just banal calls. It’s also early days and things will evolve, but universality and ease of use regardless of what device you’re using is something we treat as essential here at Taptu, and I’m surprised it wasn’t a priority for Nokia.

That issue aside, the store looks reasonably good, but is only differentiated from other online stores by the application which comes pre-installed on the new N95 8GB and the N81, as the transfer to mobile needs to be done from a computer on any other Nokia device.

Music on mobile is clearly an area where we’ll see a lot of activity in the next few months, and I’m thrilled to be here to watch it all happen!

[* Yes, I could launch Parallels but that’s not the point… ]

From the archives, this is an impromptu video of the Nokia Music Store beta, taken back in September at the Nokia offices in Finland.