Yesterday, our Music Wall application on Facebook hit a new milestone - There are now over 100,000 people currently using the app.

When the idea cropped up that we should use our search engine to create a music app on Facebook, we didn’t know whether it would really fly since there are so many apps out there. It’s exciting to see how users quickly adopted us and started sharing music with their friends, allowing us to hit that milestone. So this is a big thank you to all our users for making this such a fun project!

Go on, what are you listening to these days? Why not share it?

One hundred Carnivals. One hundred weeks of insightful posts and sharp reviews.

Russell Buckley and Carlo Longino of MobHappy who started it all back in Oct 2005. Along with Rudy De Waele they were original the visionaries. Finally Judy Breck and Troy Norcross for keeping the carnival going, week after week.

This milestone Carnival is hosted by Abhishek Tiwari in Santa Cruz, and covers topics from Google Android’s implications for the mobile world to the evolution of 3.5G HSDPA, amongst others.

Here’s a cheer to 100 more Carnivals!

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.

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.

[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.

Another big milestone passed this week – we went live on Facebook with our new Music Wall application.

As a mobile search company, why are we doing this? Well, we prioritised music-related content early on as one of the first types of search that Taptu handles really well on mobile. The Music Wall takes advantage of our huge content index to give Facebook users a great way to express their music preferences to friends. It will also help us promote the Taptu mobile search service to the Facebook community.

Matt and Marc, the User Experience guys, created the look of the app, allowing you to put your top 5 songs or videos straight on your profile. They set themselves the challenge to create the most attractive, cool looking and easiest to use music widget that exists in the Facebook platform. iLike was our benchmark for comparison and Apple’s Coverflow was a big source of inspiration. We hope you like it and have as much fun finding some obscure songs and videos for your profile.

We’re also gearing up for Mobile 2.0 in San Francisco on October 15th, when the Taptu service will go public for the first time. Feedback from our first private beta users has been very good with coverage in the US with Symbian Guru, France and Germany. Between now and the 15th we will be extending more and more private invitations, so if you’ve registered for the early beta service then expect to hear from us very soon!

I’m at the Future of Web Apps in London today. So far, I’ve attended the intro keynote with Om Malik and Michael Arrington, followed by Heather Champ & Derek Powazek on “We’ve got this community: Now what?”. I’m now in Tony Conrad’s “Future of Search”.

The main running thread of all talks so far is quite clear: Nobody knew what would happen next after launching their app. And in fact, few ended up where they expected to go. Someone this morning said that the real work on a web app really begins after you launch (see, I was listening, but didn’t take note so not sure who said this…) You need to listen intently, watch your users and see what they make of it. Odds are you’ll notice that they’ve hacked your app and use it in ways you would never have imagined. That’s your cue to harness their creativity and evolve accordingly.

Sometimes, Web 2.0 big names can get a bit cocky about success, but I think this is one point everyone agrees on: You just don’t know what’s going to happen next when you launch a startup.

But then, that’s why we’re in this business; that’s where the fun stuff happens!

This weekend, a hundred mobile addicts gathered in the Fjord offices in London for the first mobileCampLondon, an event organised by volunteers, headed by Victor Szilagyi and Christian Lindholm. The idea behind BarCamp events is to get people together to share and learn in an open environment. Rather than listening to thinly-veiled sales pitches and being talked at, the emphasis is on collaboration, discussion and demos.

Seeing the developers, designers and creatives get together for the weekend was refreshing. We usually tend to keep the geeks locked in the server room usually, you see, but here they were let out to play, and play they did! While the balance was somewhat in the favour of geekier topics, the talks ranged from techy to social to artistic; Exploiting social network APIs, using RFID on the underground, location-based games and integrating mobile into art - the latter being easier to grasp for my simple mind!

Beyond all the talks, presentations and topics scribbled on the grids, there were random conversations, cozied up in the colourful bean bags area, and the fascinating meeting of ideas.

At the end of the day on Saturday, Terence Eden from Vodafone bravely tackled the seemingly unavoidable topic of the Novarra transcoder and user-agent masking, which has been widely criticised in recent weeks. He gave a very welcome demo and geek perspective, speaking in honest - if not blunt - terms, agreeing that Vodafone has learnt a lot from the firey discussions and experimenting. While I still feel that the user-agent masking is a big mistake, seeing the transcoded results on a much older Nokia phone allowed me to understand how the service might be useful in some conditions.

Overall, mobileCamp led to some unexpected meetings and the conviction that, everyday, more people are taking interest in creating apps, websites and all sorts of wild and wonderful things for mobiles!

[tags]mobile, phone, mobilecamplondon, mobilecamp, london, barcamp, taptu, taptology, technology[/tags]

Following yesterday’s announcement by Apple that they’re dropping the price of the iPhone by $200, Nokia took out ads on Google.com inviting disgruntled iPhone owners to check out its new Mosh social network for mobile.

Cheeky quick thinking, I have to admit! It probably wouldn’t convince me to join the Mosh network, but as with the latest Nokia campaigns (Jealous Computers and NSyndrome), it shows they’re alert and in tune. If anything, it’s worth a giggle and a bit of PR coverage!

[From TechCrunch, incl screenshot]