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!

Lubna Dajani and David Harper invited me to participate in a panel session at Mobile Monday New York on April 28th. The subject was Mobile Analytics and Social Search. About 100 people attended the event in the gleaming Samsung Experience Center in the Time Warner Building at Columbus Circle, and one of the attendees, David Berkowitz, liveblogged the session.

Several people posed me questions on mobile social search. Here are a couple of them, together with my answers.

Why can’t existing desktop search engines meet the mobile challenge?

Well, they are trying to meet the challenge, because there are 27m searches a day already on mobile. But this is just 2% of the volume of desktop search, something is wrong. There is too great an emphasis on showing PC web results on devices that can’t consume PC web pages very well.

How can marketers and SEOs take advantage of social search?

The truth is that today it is very difficult. But there are a couple of early initiatives underway that will change this. At Taptu, we have recently created a search API for mobile content site owners. Moblr, a European mobile social networking site, have integrated this API into their service, to give their users access to the huge range of free mobile content that is contained within the Taptu search engine index.

At Yahoo, the new open SearchMonkey initiative will let site owners bring in some aspects of social search, which may or may not be applicable to mobile.

While in New York, I couldn’t resist the $20 tourist ride to the top of the Empire State Building. The last time I did this was 29 years ago, during my first visit to Manhattan. This time I visited at night, and the cityscape was just as awesome.

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!

Next Monday, we’ll be taking part in Mobile Monday London, sponsoring the evening on the theme of Mobile User Interface.

• Bryan Rieger - Future Platforms Creative director www.futureplatforms.com
• Scott Weiss - Executive Director, EMEA, Human Factors International www.humanfactors.com
• Marek Pawlowski - MEX www.pmn.co.uk/mex/
• Dan Appelquist will be summing up and reviewing the Over the Air developers conference
• And our very own Steve Ives, Taptu CEO!

At the moment, the event is fully booked, but pleading or bribing the organisers with shiny gadgets might just get you in. Meanwhile, if you’re already on the list, we’ll see you there!

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!

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]

Big excitement here at Taptu yesterday evening. After 8 months of design and engineering we went live with the first of our private beta invites. We’re keeping it to a very small early group for the first couple of weeks. Then we’ll be opening it up to a larger private beta before we launch at the Mobile 2.0 conference in San Francisco in the middle of October. Very promising early feedback so far, and now we’re just itching to take it public. (By the way, you can join the beta mailing list here)

Very nice of Rudy de Waele to praise our “super-simple design interface”. You can’t imagine how much effort has gone into getting this right. Since January we’ve run 7 studies in our new user experience lab testing different aspects of the UI, that’s 70 users giving us their candid opinion from hands-on use and abuse of our prototypes.

Our engineering team have done a pretty amazing job since we started in January. We took the decision to use open source infrastructure components wherever we could, but this still left a lot of gaps to fill if we were going to deliver on our goal of a fully-clustered, triple-redundant, fault-tolerant architecture running on commodity 1U servers, scaleable to millions of users. An architecture which also has to serve results pages in an optimised and reliable way to hundreds of different handsets across a multiplicity of GSM and CDMA mobile networks. Now we’ve taken a very big step closer towards this goal.

Our novel social-assisted search (SAS) approach means that we also have to write custom crawlers and parsers for each content category (music, movies, sports, etc) which we point at our selected social Web source sites. Now we have the basic infrastructure for all this in place we can begin to add additional content categories at a much faster pace. So expect to see a rapid expansion of the scope of our system over the next 6 months.

Today, Taptu is a universal mobile search engine, but the SAS optimization approach is only applied to music. With SAS switched on, we can give you useful results almost all the time in 10 clicks or less. Without it, we fall back to the 25 or more clicks that you normally see in today’s mobile search engines. So for searches outside music, Taptu doesn’t perform any better today than the big 3 mobile search engines (for us, the big 3 means Google, Yahoo and Microsoft) . This will change as we switch on SAS for other big categories like movies, travel, sport, games, and mobile web. Then you’ll really see what SAS can do.