Fancy catching up with a few of the Taptu folks in person? A few of us will be attending Future of Mobile, organised by the folks at Carsonified, next Monday, November 17th at Kensington Town Hall in London.

They’ve also been mad enough to trust me with a mic, so I’ll be joining a few highly esteemed colleagues on a ‘6×6 UK Bloggers Perspectives’, speaking alongside Helen Keegan, Jemima Kiss, James Whatley, Andrew Grill and Ewan Macleod.

For more on the speakers and topics covered at Future of Mobile, visit the site and see for yourself. It isn’t too late to get a ticket!

Following Mobile 2.0 in San Francisco last week, a few people have asked us to share the slides from our CTO Stef’s presentation. So by popular demand, you can now view them here. Attended Mobile 2.0 and have feedback or questions for us? Get in touch, we’d love to hear from you.

The Mobile 2.0 Conference is being held in San Francisco on Monday, 3rd November and everything points to it being an excellent event. Excellent because we’ll be there of course! (Just kidding)

On Monday afternoon, our CTO Stef will be presenting as part of the Builder Track, on “Building, dynamic, compelling, ad-funded, off-deck mobile web content”. Many more great presentations on the schedule by Brian Fling, Kelly Goto and the likes of Nokia, AdMob and Facebook Mobile.

Steve (our CEO), Bob (our biz dev guy) and Stef will all be there, looking forward to meeting existing and new partners, and meeting you too. So don’t hesitate to come say hi if you see any of them!

In September, Matt Davies, from our User Experience team, will be presenting at MobileHCI08, a conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services in Amsterdam.

MobileHCI08 is an annual conference, held on 2-5 September, that brings together industry and academic specialists in mobile user experience from all over the world. Matt’s talk will be called ‘Designing a new mobile search service - a user-centred approach’. The talk will focus on how we design for our users. Matt will look at personas, prototyping and how we do usability tests of our service and designs with target users.

The next event we’ll be attending is on Sep 8 2008 - Mobile Web Megatrends in Berkeley, California. Speakers include Nokia, Opera Mobile 9.5, ESPN mobile, Oracle atomdb, Admob, alongside the likes of Ajit Jaokar, Michael Mace , Barbara Ballard , and Mike Rowehl.

If you plan to be in Amsterdam or Berkeley in September, let us know!

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!

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!]