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!

Next week on Monday 28th, Mobile Monday New York has invited us to join in on a panel on the topic of “Optimizing the Mobile Experience and Increasing Visibility with Social Search and Mobile Analytics”. We’ll be in great company, on this panel moderated by Bryson Meunier of Resolution Media.

Panelists:

• Dean Collins, Amethon
• Joe Cuccinelli, Quattro Wireless
• Dan Mason, ESPN Mobile Web
• Adam Kerr, Bango
• Greg Harris, Mobilytics
• Stephen Ives, taptu
• Stan Wiechers, TigTags

For more details on the event venue, have a look at the MoMo NY post on the event. We hope to see you there!

On Monday night, a few members of the Taptu squad attended MoMo London where Steve presented, talking about user interface design and the process through which we develop it. Some of you have asked for a copy of the slides we used, so here they are. (Tip: Set the presentation to fullscreen if any of it goes a bit fuzzy)

| View | Upload your own

For more multimedia of the evening, check out Alex Craxton’s blog for the nerdiest sword fight you’ll ever see!

Having been in Austin, Texas for a few days now, I’ve witnessed one of the greatest social gathering of tech-minded people to ever happen, once a year at South by SouthWest Interactive.

The killer app this year is undeniably… the same as last year. It’s Twitter through and through. In the context of a conference where thousands of people are milling around between panels, looking for each other and the Next Big Thing, Twitter is the killer app. It’s assumed and expected amongst all attendees that, just as we have a little heart pumping on the inside of our ribcage, we all have a Twitter username.

However, the observation that I found most interesting is the energy everyone put into communicating what they were hearing. The Zuckerberg keynote got the room buzzing and, in no time, even bloggers who were nowhere near the event were getting the echos of a poorly led interview. In previous years, it would have at least taken a few hours until someone did a write-up of the keynote, but with these social devices and the perfect system to communicate short snippets of information, it was broadcasted as soon as the sentiment arose amongst the crowd.

I’m at risk of pointing out the very obvious here but the Blackberry - probably the most common phone here at SXSW - is mindblowingly business-focussed. Even the font is dry, harsh and doesn’t make the faintest attempt at being visually pleasing. It is a stark, utilitarian device in contrast to the iPhone’s soft, rounded curves and swish user interface - the other baby of the conference. While each device has its pros and cons - attempts at typing while walking on an iPhone very much results in an epic failure - it’s fascinating that this geekfest brings together the two polar opposites, the functional and the creative, in one place as the two most used devices.

What they have in common is that they bring people together socially. From Ballroom A to the depths of Room 19-B, and from Austin to the rest of the world, they make communication easy. Comforting to know that even geeks need to be social too, no?

Following Mobile World Congress, everyone’s got a lot to say about what they think is the Next Big Thing in mobile, so the VisionMobile-hosted Carnival of the Mobilists is a busy one this week.

Go ahead and have a read here, but make sure you also polish up your best entries for next week’s Carnival, which will be hosted right here on the Taptu blog!

We’re now all home after an eventful week at Mobile World Congress, spent meeting new and interesting people who love the mobile web as much as we do, looking out for new phones and services, and eating great Spanish tapas.

Since launching many new features on Monday, we’ve made the news a few times.

TechDigest says “We’ve been getting excited about Taptu for months now, so it’s fantastic to see they won the Global Community Award at the MoMo Peer Awards last night at the Mobile World Congress, rewarding our confidence in this small English start-up to no end.”

Mike Butcher from TechCrunch UK agreed that “if the future is social search - as many think it is - then the future must also be mobile social search, since the mobile is such a social device.”

Fritz Nelson from Information Week writes about MWC and the lack of innovation since last year. However, he highlights Taptu as one of the mobile service that have caught his attention. “Taptu, a startup based in the U.K., also has a compelling story — perhaps even more so. It builds not only relevance into its results, it brings those results to within a click of accessing. It presents results based on a ranking of social popularity, provides categories (like blogs, news stories, videos), a nifty little summary of the item, and then a one-click way to share it.”

Susi Weaser from Shiny Shiny, writes “It’s good to see that there are people out there who haven’t just accepted Google as the only option when it comes to internet searches. In particular, Taptu have vowed to take on mobile searching, with their easy peasy service.”

Peggy Ann Salz from MSearchGroove posted an article on the new features we launched at MWC, but also interviewed Steve, our CEO, in a podcast about where he thinks mobile search is heading.

The Dutch Cowboys interviewed Steve at the stand, also capturing a bit of the atmosphere of the conference in their video, and Heise Online congratulated us on the Mobile Monday award we received and are very excited about!

Here’s a translation of the Dutch Cowboys’ text for those who, like me, may be Dutch-impaired (kindly provided by Raimo from Mobile Monday Amsterdam)

“The readers of Dutchcowboys know that Search is one of our favourite things. Moreover web 2.0 and Social media play more and more an important role in things we are involved in. For this reason it is a pleasure to hear an entrepreneur and visionary talk about all this even more so that it is happening on your mobile. Closer it cannot get.

Some will think that this is however the millionth promise that search on a cellphone will make it entirely. While the device manufacturers still struggle with the (business)model around mobile search Taptu might have the correct answer. Listen to the passionate Steve Ives who speaks about his social mobile search application Taptu.”

Last night, we were invited to the MoMo Peer Awards, as we had been nominated to represent the London chapter in the Emerging Startups category. I’m thrilled to say that we won the Global Community Award, which Jari Tammisto, CEO of Mobile Monday, handed to Bob who’s our Biz Dev guy.

We’re chuffed to bits about the reception we’re getting here, and we’ve met some really lovely people since we’ve been here. If you’re also at MWC, come say hi at the stand!

This weekend, we’re packing our suitcases and heading off to (*checks weather forecast*) sunny Barcelona for Mobile World Congress, arguably the biggest mobile conference of the year.

We’ll have a fabulous white and pink stand, fully equipped with drinks and a handy place to charge your mobile phone. If you’re also attending, we’d love to meet you, so pop by stand 7D42, in the heart of Hall 7.

You’ll find us attending a number of events throughout the week as well:

• Mobile Sunday Barcelona,
• Mobile Monday Peer Awards where, thanks to you all, we’ve been selected to represent London in the “Early Stage” category,
• Swedish Beers on Tuesday evening
• And for the girls attending, see you at Women in Mobile Data on Wednesday afternoon!

This morning, votes have opened for the Mobile Monday Peer Awards for the London area. We’ve been put forward as one of the companies for which you can vote.

http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/momolondon/surveys?id=1986312

For those who aren’t familiar with the awards, it’s a great opportunity to give Taptu some visibility since colleagues and press will be at Mobile World Congress when the awards are handed out. Got friends who are also part of MoMo? Why not point them to this link and get them to support us? And if you’re at Mobile World Congress, why not pop by our stand since we’ll have a fabulous pink and white bar in Hall 7!

Fingers crossed!

Vero
Chief “Drum up some love for Taptu” Officer

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.