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.

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!

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!

Over the next few months, we’ll be going to a few events across Europe and we’d love to meet some of our readers and fellow mobile phone fiends.

• On September 10th, Steve, Laura and I (Vero) will be in Helsinki, Finland for Mobile Monday Summit, and I’ll carry on for the St-Petersburg stretch of the trip as well.
• On September 29th & 30th, a few of us will be taking part in mobileCampLondon. Might be doing a panel on mobile search, usability or being volunteering around the event. It’s a very unique event style, and with topics ranging from mobile gaming and hardware hacking to mobile social networks, there’s really something for all types.
• On October 3rd & 4th, I will be at the Future of Web Apps conference in London. There are tickets left if you’re interested in the conference, otherwise the live filming of Diggnation in the evening is free, and should be a good laugh!

We’ll add more events soon when we’ve worked out where else you’ll be able to find it. If you’re going to any of the events above, see you there!

What are you up to on Monday, 10th September 2007?

I hope you’ll be saying that you’ll be attending the Mobile Monday Global Summit in Helsinki, Finland.

Mobile Monday is a global community of people working on the mobile industry, scattered across 40 cities. Once a month, on Mondays (no, really?), each city hosts an event discussing a topic relating to mobile, from phone widget development to how we might be using mobile phones 5 years down the line.

The Global Summit gives us an opportunity to get together once a year to catch up with colleagues and friends from other Mobile Monday cities. This year’s panels are very interesting, covering topics like The Future of Mobile Marketing and Social Media & Mobility.

Steve and I will both be attending, so if you’re also going, leave us a comment here to let us know!