The misconception about sales and business people is that they haven’t got an ounce of artistic creativity. In comes Bob, our business dev guy, with some fabulous Friday poetry, blowing any stereotypes to smithereens!

And without further ado…

Oh Taptu, what have you next?

New search for the mobiles, we must be mad!
An enduring business, not just a fad!
To take on Google, bright colours and all
In Universal search, where G & Y! rule

It’s a tech start-ups dilemma, go B2B
And hide forever, limited destiny
Or create a brand, and say “it’s me! Hey look!”
I’ll not conform to any book!

So here! new mobile search, Taptu by name
From the people at Taptu the very same
Today it searches facts and music to start
In 10 clicks or less, it sets us apart

It shines on that gem Apple have made
The iphone icon for the fashion brigade
And it works just fine on your phone too
Go Taptu.mobi on your browser, do!

Come February it will find all kinds of stuff
With new capabilities right off the cuff
Our sweat, tears and long productive nights
Brings new languages for our internationalites

And something special I dare not share
A certain mobile thing about which we care
It may change the way you search today
And if you like it we’ll rejoice, hooray!

So hang around and see what’s coming soon
February 11th Mobile World Congress at noon
To delight you in search, always our aim
And make Taptu, mobile search of fame

It was reported yesterday that 50% of the world’s population, 3.3 billion people, now have a mobile phone. Truly its an epic milestone for the mobile industry. With 224 networks across the world, the average country has 15m mobile users. It’s taken 26 years to get to there.

So what is the next big milestone? 4 billion subs? Not very interesting after we’ve already got to 3.3bn. No, the next epic milestone will be 1 billion regular mobile internet users.

For me, that marks the point where the mobile internet breaks out and goes mass market.

In Western markets (US, W. Europe) we’re now seeing about 10% penetration of mobile internet users (MEF report, Feb 2007). I’m defining a mobile internet user as someone who uses the browser on the phone at least once per month to find content. If 10% of the whole world’s 3.3 billion subscribers were using the mobile internet, that would be 330m users. I’d be willing to bet money on 200 million regular mobile internet users today, at the very least.

How far could this go? For a glimpse of the future, consider Japan. ComScore reported a couple of months ago that almost as many Japanese (53.6 million) used a mobile device to access the internet as accessed the internet from a work or home PC (53.7 million). Mobile internet usage in Japan already averages 8.1 hours per month compared to 18.9 hours per month for PCs. That’s 37 minutes per day!

From 200 million today to 1 billion – how long is it going to take? It’s going to happen a lot quicker than getting to the first 1 billion mobile voice users, that’s for sure. Mobile user interfaces are going to have to improve, but the iPhone shows the magnitude of the improvement that’s coming. The mobile networks are going to need a lot more backhaul bandwidth but a large chunk of the infrastructure is already in place.

I’ll stick my neck out and say no longer than three years – the end of 2010.

[Image source: The Hindu]

One of the greatest weaknesses many S60 phones is their short battery life when used actively, requiring users to literally carry a survival kit – spare battery, external charger, USB-to-phone charger, and sometimes spare phone!

Steve at All About Symbian gives a very helpful tip, pointing power users to a Nokia Energy Profiler tool, which tells you which app is most guilty of sucking all the juice out of your poor phone. Good find, Steve!

Over the past couple of days, we’ve been sneaky and swift like ninjas and have upgraded the Music Wall application on Facebook.

To avoid boring you with the details of what we’ve done under the hood in the same way people bore me when they tell me about engine valves and limited slip diffs, I’ve boiled it down to the important changes you should see. (If you really want me to bore you with the details, drop me a line…)

• We’re serving results to Facebook faster than ever
• Some minor bugs have also been ironed out in the process
• The app can now be used in the left sidebar – where you’ll see a bonus 6th image appear!
• We’ve added a Report a bug wall to help us squash ‘em nasty critters, and a Suggestions wall, which you can use to share your wild and wonderful ideas.

Stay tuned for some more cool developments to the Music Wall in the next few week…

[tags]Taptu, taptology, music wall, facebook, music, applications, development, bugs, Rose is the cutest kitten ever[/tags]

Martin Sauter, from Mobile Society, is hosting this week’s Mobile Carnival. It’s the third Carnival Martin hosts, and he reminisces on how things have changed since he first hosted the 18th Carnival in March ‘06.

“The mobile ecosphere is moving at an astounding pace and it becomes quite obvious when I look back to when I first hosted the Carnival early 2006: The first usable 3G phones slowly coming to market, Nseries in it’s infancy, no iPhone, not a lot of talk then about mobile web 2.0 applications. Today, all of this is in full swing and this week’s Carnival of the Mobilists is the proof.”

The biggest shock for me in this Carnival was the discovery that I’m apparently a man – according to Martin’s post anyways – “Vero over at Taptu has also taken a look at Kindle and shares his thoughts whether this will be the future device for book reading.”

Don’t worry, Martin, you’re forgiven since you’ve written such a great Carnival entry!

We’ve just completed a first version of a Taptu Mobile Search API. It gives mobile site owners three main benefits:

• First, it will provide an easy way for mobile sites to get their content indexed by Taptu.
• Second, mobile sites will be able to present their content within Taptu search results as easy-to-browse, screen-sized summaries in the same way that Taptu does for all other content.
• Third, your mobile site will be able to access the Taptu engine to perform searches carried out by your users, creating a private search channel that shows only your content.

It uses the same high-performance, fault-tolerant clustered architecture as the main Taptu service, so it’s going to be super fast and super reliable. We’ve implemented this API using a standard SOAP-style interface, and we’re just beginning to trial it with mobile site owners. When we’ve got enough feedback from early users we will turn it into a full public API available directly from on www.taptu.com.

If you’re a mobile site owner and you’re keen to work with us on this, please contact me via Facebook or LinkedIn, or contact Vero via Facebook or Jaiku, or email us at api@taptu.com.

In the past two decades, our lives have become increasingly digital and portable with office work, kids’ homework, entertainment and shopping coming into the household in bits and bytes. We’re faced with more information than ever before, and more ways than ever to access it.

In most aspects, we’re happy with the digitisation of our lives, but have kept a few bastions of the analog world unmodified for centuries, one of which is the book. Unquestionably, the production process is easier than it was in Gutenberg’s days, but we still print with ink onto paper and bind it together with a thick cover.

In the past twenty years, a lot of written word’s moved to the computer screen, but leisure reading is one of those things that’s remained firmly printed on paper. There have been many attempts to create electronic readers that “feel like reading print”, but they’ve all fallen by the wayside without ever getting to critical mass.

Yet, on Monday, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos announced the launch of the Kindle Reader, a new twist on the ebook reader that failed time and time again. Brave move or naive pipedream?

I won’t go into the detailed technical specs since the Machinist does it so well but want to understand how and where this could be useful in today’s world.

Pros:

• Lightweight way to carry a lot of information, this could be a lifesaver on the train, tube, in crowded spaces and on long journeys.
• Easy way – in theory – to acquire new books without having to physically visit a bookshop or wait for an order to arrive. Less sure of it in practice if you’re outside of urban America, since wireless is provided by Sprint’s EVDO network.
• As a fellow blogger says, “I have on my bookshelf The Great war For Civilization: the Conquest of the Middle East [...] written pre-Gulf War 2. Wouldn’t it be absolutely marvelous if the book updated itself for a modest fee on publication of a second edition? Or if my Wrox ASP.Net 2.0 magically jumped versions to 3.0 0r 3.5? that would be great.”
• A mother and non-geek says “Finally, a tech toy that isn’t meant for techies!!! I couldn’t be happier to read about the Kindle. I was wondering what to get my daughter for Christmas and now I know. She’s a third year law student and lugs A MOUNTAIN of heavy books to school, which is a 90 minute commute. With all those textbooks, it’s really hard for her to take casual reading material with her, too. This will be perfect! I think all you geeks are wrong on this one.”

Cons:

• DRM around all Kindle books: Forget lending a book to a friend, moving it to another device, buying it as a present for someone else
• Device not particularly open to other formats: The lack of PDF support kills it for me, since I’d expect to, at the very least, be able to read whitepapers and reports on it without having to bend over backwards.
• Reading on screen still not the same as on paper, the feel, the smell and the ability to scribble or annotate.
• The web browser and RSS reader seem unnecessary: The browser is limited at best, as Russell reports, and RSS feeds are paid for. Paid for?! Seriously, what were they smoking when they decided that people would be willing to pay a monthly fee to read RSS feeds which one can read for free on a desktop, laptop, mobile phone, iPod touch. I doubt a Kindle buyer wouldn’t already have one of these devices already…

I’m a total bookworm, especially on holiday yet, somehow, I can’t picture myself laying on a deck chair on my next holiday and pulling out my Kindle to read a few lines of The Devil Wears Prada, really.

Now, a device open to other formats, with no wireless, on which content can purely be transferred via USB, without audio or web browser, sold for far less, I would probably consider. It would save me printing so many work documents, and I’d definitely be up for technical books where an update is available when technologies evolve. Imagine how many trees we could save!

I’ll reserve final judgement for the day I get my hands on one of them – If a kind soul wants to lend me one, I’m willing! – but until then, I think it’s an interesting addition to the world of handhelds but not one I’d currently be likely to buy, even as a hopeless gadget addict.

For more reading on the Kindle:

• Dive Into Mark’s “The Future of Reading (A Play in Six Acts)” draws some interesting parallels between Amazon’s own words from the past, some classic 1984 quotes and the current Kindle announcement.
• Mike’s review shows he’s not totally sold on the idea either…
• Diego’s second review
• Of course, Scoble’s also got an opinion on this…

[tags]Amazon, Kindle, eBooks, wireless, Taptu, mobile, technology[/tags]

One hundred Carnivals. One hundred weeks of insightful posts and sharp reviews.

Russell Buckley and Carlo Longino of MobHappy who started it all back in Oct 2005. Along with Rudy De Waele they were original the visionaries. Finally Judy Breck and Troy Norcross for keeping the carnival going, week after week.

This milestone Carnival is hosted by Abhishek Tiwari in Santa Cruz, and covers topics from Google Android’s implications for the mobile world to the evolution of 3.5G HSDPA, amongst others.

Here’s a cheer to 100 more Carnivals!

Several people asked me about the implications of Google’s launch of Android this week. Here’s my take on it.

• Google is finding it hard to replicate its successful desktop search model in the mobile world.
• One of the big barriers, as Google see it, is the continued presence of walled gardens erected by the mobile operators which interfere with Google’s ability to reach out to consumers directly with an optimised search experience.
• Another key barrier Google sees is a lack of understanding by handset manufacturers of what it takes to truly turn the handset into a useful mobile internet device.
• Google see a more capable mobile browser across the widest possible range of handsets as a key enabler for better mobile search. Not just on high end devices like the iPhone and N95, but right across the handset market.
• Android is an initiative that if successful would break down a number of these barriers in one fell swoop.

Will Android be successful? I wouldn’t completely rule it out, but I remain cautious…

Not very much has been said about exactly what Android contains and what it doesn’t contain. Does it have a complete user interface layer? Does it integrate a full set of phone applications (SMS, MMS, IM etc)? Does it include a 3G protocol stack? The lack of a complete solution would make it very expensive to bring an Android handset to market compared to Symbian and Microsoft.

From a technical perspective Google’s platform reminds me of Savaje (US-based mobile OS startup, now defunct) and the operator-led Open Mobile Terminal Platform Alliance (Java-based OS, initially implemented on HTC devices).

With the OMTP Alliance, the operators wanted to weaken the grip of Nokia and Microsoft on the phone OS, and get control over the user experience. Google’s Open Handset Alliance is an attempt to build similar industry support, but has notably fewer operators participating.

Getting a new OS into significant volume i.e. 10s of millions of new handsets is a massive engineering undertaking. Are Google resourced to deliver this? They have plenty of software engineers, but not too many mobile software engineers.

Android is an initiative without a business model. In my experience, these kinds of strategic initiatives don’t get sustained unless the business model is clearly defined.

This morning, Bob and I met at Waterloo Eurostar station in London on our way to tonight’s Paris Mobile Monday get together. Over coffee, we looked at the building, which is now two days from being shut down for good, since the Eurostar will be leaving from St-Pancras International from this Wednesday.

I’ve lived in the UK for over 5 years now, but only vaguely remembered the Channel Tunnel being opened at some point in the 90’s. Jokingly, I suggested to Bob that we should check on Taptu what year the tunnel actually opened. He picked up his mobile and typed taptu.mobi in. Full 3G signal, but latency meant the site wasn’t even loading. I grabbed my N95 – on the same T-Mobile network as Bob’s phone – and tried to access the site. Ok, fair enough, busy mobile cell on a Monday morning doesn’t get such great 3G connection.

Being cheeky, I pulled my brand new shiny iPhone out of my handbag. Sure it’s on O2 (No, I’m not hacking it, thanks). Sure it’s on EDGE. But it gave us an answer instantly. And I didn’t even cheat and use The Cloud’s WiFi either. Turns out the Channel Tunnel was open on 6th May 1994.

So please accept this as a pied de nez* to those who say that a phone without 3G is hopeless. It all depends on the conditions, the network load and the phase of the moon, clearly!

Tomorrow, I’ll be returning to Waterloo International from Paris and bidding farewell to the big clunky metal and glass structure. Next trip will begin from St-Pancras in a – hopefully – shiny new station.

As an aside, if you’ve attended Mobile Monday Paris this evening, thank you for being such a welcoming audience! More on this tomorrow, but Bob and I can’t say thanks enough for inviting us to join the event.

[* To make a pied de nez, put hand upwards, fingers apart, with thumb resting against nose. Point towards the person you are mocking and wiggle fingers. Preferably avoid making this gesture to your evening hostess when she's about to offer you a glass of champagne or you may remain without a drink a whole lot longer.]

[tags]Taptu, Mobile Monday, Paris, MoMoParis, iPhone, Apple, Nokia, N95, phone, mobile, technology, gadgets, mobile search, Channel Tunnel, La Manche, Waterloo, Eurostar, Ha ha 3G lost to the measly 2G[/tags]