Our service has been unavailable intermitently today via the taptu.mobi address, because our DNS registrar has had network issues. This may have caused problems for some of our users, and we hope that normal service will be restored as soon as possible.
In the meantime, you can continue to use and bookmark taptu.com to access our service.
W00t! Yeah! Hooray! Awesome!
As you might have guessed we’re in high spirits at Taptu towers this week, having picked up another award last night. We were honored to receive ‘Best Search Engine Provider 2008′ at the Mobile Entertainment Awards. The ME awards are one of the most prestigious events in the mobile calendar with 400 of the industry’s movers and shakers in attendance. We faced stiff competition from the likes of Google, Yahoo, Jumptap and MCN so we’re over-the-moon to win.
Our ambassadors for the evening were Lynsey and Conor who collected the award, posed for the photos and were reportedly seen celebrating into the wee hours – but they did ensure safe delivery of the trophy to the office, and to a very happy Taptu team.
Congratulations to all the other winners and also to Anssi Vanjoki, Executive Vice President, Markets, at Nokia who received a special award for outstanding contribution to the mobile entertainment content industry.
Full list of winners and further details can be found at Mobile Entertainment magazine’s site.
We were chuffed to bits to pick up ‘Overall Mobile Search Company of the Year 2008′ at the VisionGain Search Awards in London the other evening.
A very happy Bob
The award was presented to Bob Last , our SVP of Business Development by Jussi-Pekka Partanen of Nokia. Apparently, we pipped our rivals at the post due to the speed of Taptu search, innovative social scoring, and our user experience. To say we were pleased is perhaps an under-statement, thanks everyone that’s helped us get to where we are now, and especially to all our users who have provided us with such valuable feedback. Congrats to all the other winners too.
The full list of winners can be found in the MarketWatch story here, as well as on MSearchGroove.
Now where’s that fizzy pop…
Marc is one of the iPhone owners here at Taptu, and following a lunchtime conversation about how we feel about that much-talked-about phone, he was prompted into writing a post about the few things that irritate him about it. (Granted he’s pretty irritable these days with a little sprog who wakes up in the night! 
)
1) No ‘Silent mode ON’ indicator in UI
I often flip the Silent switch on when I’m in a meeting. But when I get out I often forget to flip it back resulting in a barrage of missed calls. There are even times when I use my iPhone unaware that it’s still in Silent mode, and will be for the next 4hours. Let’s face it, the Silent switch is pretty discrete. I’m not saying I’d like a gargantuan neon button on the front of the device, I’m just saying that the iPhone is in desperate need of an elegant UI solution – a visual indicator in the header area to remind me when it’s in Silent mode.
2) Privacy of incoming SMS’s
I invested in an Apple iPhone 3G Dock to show off my prized possession in the office and reduce scratching on the back. But there’s an unexpected flip-side: whenever I get an SMS, the backlight comes on and the body of my SMS is shown proud to all – no user-interaction is involved. This is pretty neat when in the confines of your home, but can be pretty embarrassing when you’re in the office and a risqué message comes in from your wife/girlfriend/mistress. Give me a setting for this behaviour, Apple!
3) Dictionary auto-correction drives me nuts
Why doesn’t the dictionary automatically learn the spellings I frequently use?
It’s so irritating to have to dismiss the auto-correction popup every time I use the word “dood” into an SMS or email, and even more annoying to find it has sneakily auto-corrected it to “food” for me leading to much confusion for the recipient. [Ed.: Possible that Apple sees more sense than Marc and thinks "dood" should be banned from the English language? However "w00t!" is accepted and in the dictionary... apparently!]
4) Inconsistency between native applications
Here’s one example: In cover-flow mode in the iPod app you can press the little ‘i’ icon in the bottom-right to flip the album cover-art over and see it’s track listing. Ok, I’ve got the hang of that now – it gives me additional contextual info. So, when I’m checking the temperature in Boston in the Weather app, why does the very same ‘i’ icon flip over the panel to reveal a settings page for *all* my cities? Seems like odd behaviour until you get used to it. Aside from consistently using a flip transition, the panel the ‘i’ icon behaves very differently at times, leading to unexpected behaviour.
5) Where do I go for what?
And don’t even get me started on having to remember to go to the iPod app when I want to play a video… my device isn’t an iPod, it’s an iPhone. ‘iTunes’ would be a more suitable name to get to my music/video as that’s what it’s called on my Mac, so why do I have to relearn the terminology for each device? Here’s a suggestion: relabel iTunes > iTunes Store, and iPod > iTunes.
Here is a bit of insight into what some of us at Taptu do during our coffee breaks.
Just treat this as a “Friday fun” video on a Wednesday.
Look ma, we’re on the telly!
On Friday, Sky News broadcast a report on Google’s 10th Birthday (Happy birthday, guys!) Looking to the future of search, Sky interviewed Steve, our CEO, on how mobile search fits into the exciting times ahead.
You’ll find the Taptu segment on mobile search at the 4 minutes mark, but the whole report is interesting, covering the likes of Microsoft Live Search, Cuil and Powerset semantic search engine.
When you were frantically unpacking your iPhone 3G were you also having problems figuring out how to put the SIM card in? In my packaging was a loose O2 SIM which obviously needs to plug into the iPhone… somehow!
Sure, the small hole in the top looks like a familiar place to engage the mechanism, but do you really want to go ramming a bent paper-clip in your shiny new priced-possession willy-nilly? I used to think I was pretty clued-up on product design – I have a 1st-class degree in it for god sake – but sometimes you start to question yourself. Surely I must be missing something??
Flicking through the user-manual didn’t help either. It’s pretty frustrating to have to:
After 5 more minutes of hitting things, it turned out that the SIM Ejector Tool was fully integrated INTO the packaging itself – you have to open up one of packaging compartments to reveal it. There was absolutely no indication that it would be hiding in there.
This is a great example of Cleverness vs Clarity. Apple decided to (mistakenly) go for the former on this one. I expect a clear distinction between a product’s packaging and the product itself. Apple: do you want your users to feel dumb?
[Ed.: He's a man, what do you expect?! ]
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