The MEX Mobile User Experience Awards shortlist was unveiled yesterday, and we’re thrilled to bits to hear we’ve been shortlisted in both the Commercial category and the Innovator of the Year one.

We’re shortlisted alongside some very cool companies, like Vuzix, who make virtual reality glasses - which friends of ours have been known to use to marvel at the back of their own heads - as well as Mobyko and Zeemote.

The winners will be officially announced at a special evening reception in London on 27th May, the opening night of the 4th annual MEX conference, and we’ll be there with our fingers crossed!

It’s a big milestone for the mobile internet - At the beginning of this month, Vodafone announced some new consumer tariff plans in the UK market which include 500 MB of flat rate mobile internet access. Previously, mobile internet access was charged at a significant monthly premium. Now it’s included “free” in the standard tariff plan.

Don’t get too carried away with Vodafone’s spin on this. Vodafone users aren’t going to be queueing up to change their existing tariffs just yet. Compare the minutes and texts between these new “Vodafone best-ever value tariffs” and “Vodafone’s most popular price plans” on their UK website.

Vodafone’s “best-ever value” tariffs

Vodafone’s “most popular” price plans

I do think that this is exactly the sort of simplification step that is required to open up the mobile internet for the mass market. Mobile internet pricing has been enormously complicated and confusing for users. People are scared that if they use the mobile internet they’ll get hit with big unforeseen bills - even when they have flat rate tariffs, as one Vodafone UK user with a flat rate data card connection found out when he went to Germany and accidentally downloaded a whole episode of Friends that his wife had previously set running on his laptop in the UK – the world’s most expensive premium download at £11,000 or $22,000USD.

Mobile internet has a bright future ahead of it when operators include a big flat rate chunk of data as a standard feature of mainstream consumer contract tariffs. We are going to see a lot more of this kind of pricing in the US and in Western European markets where there is enough 3.5G infrastructure installed to enable it.

We’re looking for someone to join the Taptu team in Cambridge, as Mobile Internet traffic guru, taking care of PPC campaigns and traffic analysis.

If you can find your way around online advertising systems with your eyes shut, can navigate Excel like a pro and enjoy trying to make sense of web statistics, then have a look at the job spec we’ve just posted and get in touch!

Fascinating comparison from Nigel Bannister at Leicester University (via ShinyShiny)

Text messaging costs four times as much as receiving information from Nasa’s Hubble Space Telescope.

It cost £85 to obtain a megabyte of data from Hubble, 595km (370 miles) from Earth, as opposed to sending a 5p text, which works out at about £375 per megabyte.

Scientist Nigel Bannister, of Leicester University, said: ‘Hubble is by no means a cheap mission – but the mobile phone text costs were pretty astronomical.’

If you’re a heavy texter, it’s worth investigating a variety of tariffs to find the one that suits you best. And no matter whether you’re more of a voice, SMS or web user, remember to check every so often with your operator to find out whether you’re able to change your deal - without necessarily increasing your tariff.

For example, as we’ve mentioned before, Vodafone has added 500MB of free data to all pay monthly contracts but, if you’re an existing customer, you need to call to get this added to your current deal, as your operator cannot change terms and conditions of your contract without your approval. So what are you waiting for? Call your operator and see if you can get a deal that suits you better.

Meanwhile, if you’re not interested in browsing, but just want the ultimate el cheapo phone, how about a phone for £13 (that’s $25 USD!) on pay as you go. Not a bad phone to have around, that way you won’t shed a tear when it meets a watery grave in a pint of beer this Summer!

We’ve all been reading and watching intently the latest iPhone rumours, all with different perspectives on the issue.

Marc, one of our user interface designers is most interested in the size of the device (you know men, always got size on their mind…):

“I find the current iPhone model just a little too cumbersome, so I love the idea of a slender iPhone that I can stick in my jeans pocket and just forget about, as covered by Jeremy Horwitz on iLounge. Sure, the upcoming smaller 2.8″-screen model is just a rumour at this point, but it would be a sensible move from Apple - the iPhone can’t be all things to all users. A product family makes complete sense to me.

If you’re an existing iPhone user you may have spotted a new version of our interface we just released into wild. It was our mission to create a rich, usable experience that is complementary to the iPhone’s native UI. We couldn’t help ourselves from sprinkling in some fancy Apple-style widgets in there. Just go to taptu.com on your iPhone to check it out.”

Meanwhile, I’m most excited about the faster 3G connection (assuming O2 doesn’t mess customers around). I unfortunately live in the middle of nowhere, where EDGE generally isn’t available, which means that I often find myself following a link on Twitter, which leads to a YouTube video, just to get a pop-up telling me that I must be on EDGE or wi-fi to be able to watch it.

On wi-fi, the iPhone’s a total gem, a great browsing device. Not so great on the input, even with my small hands, so the thought of an even smaller iPhone doesn’t appeal to me. On EDGE, it’s quite acceptable, but unleashing full HSDPA speeds in that device would make it even better. I don’t think I’ll be swapping my 6-months old iPhone for the 3G one purely on the speed factor, but if new features which I can’t get through software updates appear, you may find out I’m first in line for the new one.

Are you at all interested in the next iPhone release? Sick of the rumours already? Got your own theory on what’s coming up next?

This afternoon, you may have noticed that the Taptu service, as well as the blog, suffered from a short downtime period. We’ve now chased the gremlins out and have resumed normal service!

Lubna Dajani and David Harper invited me to participate in a panel session at Mobile Monday New York on April 28th. The subject was Mobile Analytics and Social Search. About 100 people attended the event in the gleaming Samsung Experience Center in the Time Warner Building at Columbus Circle, and one of the attendees, David Berkowitz, liveblogged the session.

Several people posed me questions on mobile social search. Here are a couple of them, together with my answers.

Why can’t existing desktop search engines meet the mobile challenge?

Well, they are trying to meet the challenge, because there are 27m searches a day already on mobile. But this is just 2% of the volume of desktop search, something is wrong. There is too great an emphasis on showing PC web results on devices that can’t consume PC web pages very well.

How can marketers and SEOs take advantage of social search?

The truth is that today it is very difficult. But there are a couple of early initiatives underway that will change this. At Taptu, we have recently created a search API for mobile content site owners. Moblr, a European mobile social networking site, have integrated this API into their service, to give their users access to the huge range of free mobile content that is contained within the Taptu search engine index.

At Yahoo, the new open SearchMonkey initiative will let site owners bring in some aspects of social search, which may or may not be applicable to mobile.

While in New York, I couldn’t resist the $20 tourist ride to the top of the Empire State Building. The last time I did this was 29 years ago, during my first visit to Manhattan. This time I visited at night, and the cityscape was just as awesome.

I can’t imagine a chemist walks around thinking everyone else appreciates chemistry the way he does. Yet I’ve grown so used to being surrounded by fellow bloggers, Twitterers and Firefox users, I’ve been known to forget that outside of my fun geek bubble, people are still using Internet Explorer, visiting websites rather than using RSS feeds, and are utterly uninterested by the latest web app’s private beta. Like a massive distortion field, I assume that because all my immediate friends and colleagues have the latest gadgets, it’s fair to extrapolate that everyone else does. It ain’t so!

However, looking into my crystal ball, I can see that things are changing. Sharing is becoming so easy and effortless that, in a NYT article, Nokia said “it surveyed 9,000 consumers last year and concluded that by 2012 one out of every four consumers will create, edit or share entertainment with friends, instead of getting it from traditional media outlets like television or movie studios.”

In the US, according to Forrester’s Groundswell Social Technographics Profile (erk, such a painfully dull name for otherwise pretty cool information!), certain segments of the population are already blowing those numbers out of the water. Already, 39% of 18-24 year olds and 30% of 25-34’s are labelled as content creators, while in the UK, they’re 19% and 10% respectively.

With moves like Vodafone’s decision to include 500MB of data to all new monthly contracts, concerns over data tariffs are going to disappear over time and getting your phone out to capture that unmissable clip to share to YouTube, Qik or Flickr will become second nature! If an image is worth a thousand words, these snap videos will be worth a million, whether you’re just looking to share it with your family or, like yours truly, to hoards of readers.

So go on, pick your weapon and start sharing! Yes, even you, mom! It isn’t just for kids and geeks anymore.