Last night, Sir Alan Sugar picked his Apprentice (no spoilers for those who haven’t seen it yet!) and here at Taptu, we think we may have found ours. Or at least we’ve found a new wacky person to join the team!

Dear Taptu.com team,

I have read your email regarding your search for translators and can tell you one thing: this is your lucky day! You have just found the most awesome prospective employee under the sun.

In order to avoid beating about the bush I will list a few reasons explaining why you should choose me:

1. I am such an amazing person. You’d love to meet me personally.
2. My English is more than fluent.
3. Polish is my first language. I personally believe anyone who knows Polish should be worshiped.
4. I am concentrating on my Modern and Medieval Languages degree atm, specializing in German and Russian. The last text we had to prepare in our translation class included sentences like “Sir Cathart’s eyes bulged out of his head” or “The college is swarming with bloody poofters”. This task definitely made me stronger.
5. I’m a loser and when I’m not translating, I sit in my room with the curtains drawn and browse the Internet.
6. Being a loser does not prevent me from being a fantastic team worker.
7. Even though I don’t have a degree in Computer Sciences, I have an older brother who does. He has taught me everything a blonde should know about computers. References available on request.
8. I have a laptop and I want it to marry me.
9. I am a poor, underprivileged student, living on baked beans. I need this money!! Otherwise I’ll starve!
10. I strongly oppose what’s happening in Tibet at the moment.

I hope I have managed to persuade you I’m the right person for the job and look forward to hearing from you.

Yours truly and sincerely,
K.

Seriously, how could we not invite her for an interview?

So it’s happened. Saint Jobs announced the Second Coming of his child, the Holy iPhone.

Like Ben, I sat in front of my MacBook watching MacRumors, TUAW and Cali Lewis liveblog and report on the Keynote. Unlike Brian, I wasn’t mad (or privileged) enough to attend the Keynote at the Moscone Center, in SF.

Keynotes are a bit like circus acts. The event is rehearsed to the second, we all watch and wait with bated breath for the grandiose final scene, wondering whether anyone’s going to fall flat on their face along the way. While the keynote was light on substance, the short of it is the new iPhone hardware includes 3G, GPS, and there are a number of software changes - MobileMe particularly appeals to me.

However, the biggest change isn’t in the physical device. It’s all in the perception. Last time around, Apple was looking for early adopters, geeks and IWOOTs* to test-run their product in a giant, live usability testing session. Now that they’ve been able to watch us use the device, it’s time to reach out to the normobs with lower upfront costs. While the tariffs are still in the upper end of the scale, unlimited data makes it completely worthwhile.

As an existing user, I’m grateful that under O2’s reign I’m not given the “brand new customers only” treatment. I can upgrade without getting stung for breaking my contract. All first generation owners shedding their skin in prep for the Second Coming means there’ll be a number of orphaned first-generation iPhones floating around. Mine, for example, will most likely find a new home with my father-in-law, Roy. I’m curious to see what the trickle-down impact of giving second hand iPhones to unlikely buyers like Roy will have on the profile of future buyers.

I think Apple will continue to own marginal marketshare, because the iPhone remains too expensive, too complex and too closed for most, but it’s about to take a significant leap ahead. Are you jumping with me? Or kicking back and shaking your head at the fangirl* that I am?

[* Def. IWOOT: "I want one of those", otherwise known as saddos like me who can't resist the latest gadget, even at exorbitant prices.]
[* A fangirl who began supporting Apple back in 1986 when it definitely wasn't cool to own a Mac, I must add!]

Just like when you’re writing software, a trend is nearly always “90% there” - We always expect next year to be bigger, for the grass to be greener, and we wouldn’t recognise it if it stared us in the face. In the same way, everyone is waiting with bated breath for “the year of the mobile” to arrive, as obvious as the pizza delivery ringing the doorbell.

However, on Monday night, Marek Pawlowski, who was on the Mobile Monday panel on Mobile Media and Marketing, made a refreshing observation in saying it IS the year of mobile and that it’s been the year of mobile for some time now. While it isn’t at the center of most people’s world, the mobile phone is an essential tool for most. We would have been a couple of panelists short if it hadn’t been for Google Maps on their phones, and Helen wouldn’t have been able to share her every thought on Twitter that day had it not been for the mobile web.

Later on, Simon Maddox mentioned a recent survey in which Brits were asked to say which of television, computer or mobile phone they’d be able to live without: Mobile phones consistently came out as the one electronic no one wanted to go without.

If we’d rather get our left arm chopped off than lose that lifeline to friends, business and the rest of the world, I suppose Marek’s statement is right!

For more soundbites from the latest Mobile Monday, check out what James Cooper and Ben Matthews have had to say. They’ve clearly taken better notes than I have! And many thanks to Dan, Alex and Jo for organising yet another great event.

With a week left to go until the Being-Digital conference in London, I can announce that the winner of the Favourite Gadget competition and the free ticket to the event is James Whatley, an active mobile geek in London.

The winner was selected completely fairly by Jack, my big fuzzy ginger cat, who stuck his head in the hat full of paper and pulled one out for me to see. (And then proceeded to eat all the papers that were left in the hat…)

Congratulations and we hope you enjoy the conference!

If you didn’t participate in the competition, thinking your boss may be hard to convince when it comes to attending events, here are a few reasons you can fling his/her way to (hopefully) show them the importance of letting you out of your shackles every so often.

The 4th annual MEX conference opened in London yesterday morning, with a packed house of the leading thinkers in the mobile business. Operators, handset manufacturers, media companies, software developers and user experience consultants from 21 countries filled WallaceSpace, bringing with them a diverse range of views and a wealth of new ideas.

In the afternoon, Steve presented, following Scott Jensen from Google, discussing how search requires a radically different approach in the mobile environment. Later on, it’s with great excitement that we received the Commercial MEX Design Award (Check out the smile on Conor’s face, on the right!)

Marek covered the first day’s events in greater details and announced the Design Award winners on the official MEX blog. Today, the conference continues, with tons of insightful presentations.

If you didn’t make it to MEX, we’ll also be attending Mobile Monday London next week, Being-Digital on the 10th and Fuel Conference on 13th June, so we hope to meet you there!

As Taptu expands, we want to increase the number of languages we support. Currently we are looking for translators to translate our website into Romanian, French, Russian, Polish, Indonesian and Italian.

This is what’s on offer:

• Approx. 2 weeks of full work (8 h/day) depending on how quick you translate
• £7.30/hour (2 weeks wage guaranteed, £7.30 is approx. €9.20)
• You work from at home
• As we change our website quite often, we might need your help again once with bits and pieces of translation and related work

Essential criteria:

• You are a native speaker of one of the above languages and you’re fluent in English (”school English” is not sufficient)
• You are familiar with using the internet and you understand web-related terms
• You ideally have or are studying on a B.A. (if not, try to convince us)
• You are used to working independently but you are a team player as well
• You have a computer at home to work from and access to the internet

If you think you are the person we are looking for, contact us telling us why you’re special: translations@taptu.com

We’re also looking for a Mobile Traffic Guru, so have a look at the job spec if you’re tempted.

My favourite video of the week, found by Paul, our office’s biggest gadget geek (yes, worse than I am!!)

What was your first phone? Do you remember what your first text message ever said?

Tell us about it in the Being-Digital competition and win the free ticket to the event!

It’s that time again, and this week, the Carnival is hosted by Tarek Ghazali at Symbiano-Tek. Seventeen new posts on mobile advertising, mobile TV and transcoding.

Pop by his blog to read the latest entries, including ours, and to wish him a happy birthday.

Being-Digital is a one day Digital Mashup Conference on 10th June in London. There will be talks on some great teams by some fantastic people. We’re inviting you to join us as we have a free ticket worth £325 for the competition winner. More on the competition below…

Themes covered at Being-Digital

• Mashups
• Advertising
• Identity
• Content
• Location
• Social
• Search

Speakers include serial entrepreneur Loïc Le Meur, Alan Moore, Helen Keegan and many more, including our very own Bob Last, VP of Business Development at Taptu.

It’s also an opportunity to check out demos by a range of companies like Zyb, Fav.or.it and WebCanvas (or demo your own)

The competition

Want the ticket? Here’s what you have to do:

Remember the best gadget you’ve ever owned? Remember how much you tinkered with it, polished it and talked about it? Would you say it was unputdownable?

Create a video, a song, a photo, write a blog entry/comment or tell us through the lost art of interpretative dance about the best gadget you’ve ever owned. Use Qik video, Seesmic, Flickr or the tool of your choice, but be creative!

The most creative entry will win the free ticket to Being-Digital! You have until Wednesday, 28th May to add a comment below telling us about your favourite phone, portable computer, crackberry, mp3 player, handheld games console or any other gadget you’ve loved so much, you couldn’t bear going without it.

[Tip of the hat to the Southwest Airlines blog for reviving the term "unputdownable" - Ever so appropriate!]

Over the past few months, it’s with great fascination that we’ve gathered, watched and analysed all sorts of stats on Taptu traffic. Did you know that the video for Bon Jovi - Always was one of the top shared items in recent days? Getting back into our 90’s power ballads, are we?

As for what phones you’re using to browse through our wide collection of 90’s soft rock (and much more), you surprised us there as well. Head to head at the top of the race are Motorola and Nokia phones; Motorola forms a large part of the US marketshare, but I was still surprised to see it top the list! Meanwhile, Nokia and - with a far smaller marketshare - Sony Ericsson have pretty good default browsers, are popular in our key UK and European markets.

As an aside, before you jump to tell me, we know as well as you do that Opera isn’t a device manufacturer but the stats were interesting enough to throw them into the list.

A further surprise for me was to see how high the Blackberry devices ranked and how, sadly, the iPhone only made it to #14! I can’t wait to see how much (or how little) the balance between these two phones will change when the much-anticipated 3G iPhone is released.

Taptu Top 10 Mobile Devices this month