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

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!

It’s a big milestone for the mobile internet – At the beginning of this month, Vodafone announced some new consumer tariff plans in the UK market which include 500 MB of flat rate mobile internet access. Previously, mobile internet access was charged at a significant monthly premium. Now it’s included “free” in the standard tariff plan.

Don’t get too carried away with Vodafone’s spin on this. Vodafone users aren’t going to be queueing up to change their existing tariffs just yet. Compare the minutes and texts between these new “Vodafone best-ever value tariffs” and “Vodafone’s most popular price plans” on their UK website.

Vodafone’s “best-ever value” tariffs

Vodafone’s “most popular” price plans

I do think that this is exactly the sort of simplification step that is required to open up the mobile internet for the mass market. Mobile internet pricing has been enormously complicated and confusing for users. People are scared that if they use the mobile internet they’ll get hit with big unforeseen bills – even when they have flat rate tariffs, as one Vodafone UK user with a flat rate data card connection found out when he went to Germany and accidentally downloaded a whole episode of Friends that his wife had previously set running on his laptop in the UK – the world’s most expensive premium download at £11,000 or $22,000USD.

Mobile internet has a bright future ahead of it when operators include a big flat rate chunk of data as a standard feature of mainstream consumer contract tariffs. We are going to see a lot more of this kind of pricing in the US and in Western European markets where there is enough 3.5G infrastructure installed to enable it.

We’re looking for someone to join the Taptu team in Cambridge, as Mobile Internet traffic guru, taking care of PPC campaigns and traffic analysis.

If you can find your way around online advertising systems with your eyes shut, can navigate Excel like a pro and enjoy trying to make sense of web statistics, then have a look at the job spec we’ve just posted and get in touch!

Fascinating comparison from Nigel Bannister at Leicester University (via ShinyShiny)

Text messaging costs four times as much as receiving information from Nasa’s Hubble Space Telescope.

It cost £85 to obtain a megabyte of data from Hubble, 595km (370 miles) from Earth, as opposed to sending a 5p text, which works out at about £375 per megabyte.

Scientist Nigel Bannister, of Leicester University, said: ‘Hubble is by no means a cheap mission – but the mobile phone text costs were pretty astronomical.’

If you’re a heavy texter, it’s worth investigating a variety of tariffs to find the one that suits you best. And no matter whether you’re more of a voice, SMS or web user, remember to check every so often with your operator to find out whether you’re able to change your deal – without necessarily increasing your tariff.

For example, as we’ve mentioned before, Vodafone has added 500MB of free data to all pay monthly contracts but, if you’re an existing customer, you need to call to get this added to your current deal, as your operator cannot change terms and conditions of your contract without your approval. So what are you waiting for? Call your operator and see if you can get a deal that suits you better.

Meanwhile, if you’re not interested in browsing, but just want the ultimate el cheapo phone, how about a phone for £13 (that’s $25 USD!) on pay as you go. Not a bad phone to have around, that way you won’t shed a tear when it meets a watery grave in a pint of beer this Summer!