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!

Now that we’ve recovered from last week’s birthday cake overdose, everyone is cracking up with new projects (oooh and there are some very shiny ones I can’t wait to share!)

But before we plow on with those ideas, we’re interested in your ideas too. If you’ve been using Taptu over the past year, what’s really clicked for you and what hasn’t? In your eyes, what features is Taptu missing? What would you like to be able to do with it?

James from MJelly reviewed Taptu two weeks ago, and the folks at MobileRoyale looked at our S60 widget from every possible angle yesterday. But your opinion matters as much as theirs, so why not drop us a line on hello@taptu.com or leave a comment here?

Every Friday, one of our team members, Becky, puts together an email for the whole company we call “The Wishing Line” which contains every comment you made during the week. Yep, you heard that right. Every single piece of feedback, criticism or encouragement! We don’t censor them, even if they’re a bit blunt sometimes.

Why do we do it? No, we’re not masochistic, but we do like to get a real view of what you think of the service. What’s the point of living life with rosy glasses and only sharing happy feedback with the team? All comments are valuable and we believe every team member should be aware of them.

So whether you send us comments by writing a blog post, sending us an email or leaving feedback on the site, this is our promise that your ideas will be heard. We’re here for you after all!

Are you an avid Symbian S60 user? Come and have an early look at the Taptu S60 Launcher by becoming a GetJar beta tester!

We created this widget to make it easier to launch a search on Taptu at the tap of a single button, and it’s now available to beta testers here. It places a shortcut to a Taptu search box on the shortcut screen or via the Pencil/Edit key giving you instant access to our ever-growing search engine. Typing in a query to the search box and pressing search opens up the Web and takes you to the results page for that Taptu query in one go.

You’ll need to register on GetJar, and you’ll also get the opportunity to send us your feedback, whether they’re bugs or suggestions. In a few weeks, once you’ve helped us polish it, we’ll release it to the rest of the world.

Download

Last week, we mentioned Taptu was celebrating a year of being live to the public, and we intended to celebrate this in style.

So we had cake. Very, very tasty and pink cake, with the Taptu stickmen crowning the large number one.

More photos on Flickr

Then the team went bowling. What mayhem! There were a few hidden talents discovered, such as Nick, one of the senior engineers turning out to be a bit of a keen bowler, and Lynsey (Miss Moneypenny) scoring three strikes in a row. She knows how to keep the boys in place!

One of the guys enjoyed bowling so much, he even tried to walk out of the venue with the bowling shoes still on. Needless to say he’ll never live that one down, sorry David…

And now, it’s time to steam ahead into our second year. Oh go on, let’s just have another little bit of cake first.

A year ago, at Mobile 2.0 in San Francisco, we launched the Taptu search engine in alpha version to the public. And today, we want to thank everyone who’s helped us build Taptu into what it is now.

First, thank you to our users who’ve shown us that the efforts we’ve put in are worthwhile by leaving us feedback which arrived in giant bags of fan mail (ok, maybe not), through our feedback pages and via email. You’re the reason we get up in the morning, the oxygen to our fire, the battery power to our mobile phones. In short, you’re what keeps us going!

Thank you to the truck delivery guys for not getting mad at us when we ordered yet another massive shipment of 750GB hard drives, many more of which arrived throughout the year.

Thank you to the user from North Carolina who searched for “reverse green hair dye” for the giggles it gave us reminiscing on bad hairdye experiences of our own. We truly hope you managed to fix your colour.

A generous thank you to the thousands of users who have been searching for Lil Wayne, we still don’t see it ourselves, but we’re glad you like him.

A playful thank you to the millions of players of the Taptu Music Cube game we released early in 2008. You raised the game by being far better than us at 80’s music trivia! (I was grateful when the girls released a cheat’s guide…)

We also owe a lot to the wonderful bloggers, journalists and other media pundits who took interest in Taptu’s growth and evolution; Ricky Cadden, Robert Scoble, Peggy Anne Salz, Andrew Grill and Pete Barrett, just to name a few.

So thank you all for helping us learn to stand on our feet, stumble around and finally walk properly. We look forward to the next few years where we run, learn to play football and score a few goals.

A few weeks ago, we let Matt, one of our design guys, loose in Japan. He came back with tons of ideas and observations on user experience design, so we’ve asked him to share a few of the things that struck him.

I always find travelling refreshes and brings new ideas. Japan was a great place to observe different and new ways of doing things.

As I travelled, I was struck by the efficiency of the transport network in Japan. I also noticed that passengers in Japan get more ‘feedback’ on journeys by public transport – by train, by metro/tube and even on buses. It seemed to me that culturally, Japanese people were keen on knowing the ’status of things’ in general – my perception was that they thrive on being kept informed.

One simple but effective piece of design I saw was on the Tokyo Metro – shown in the picture here. The stations of the Metro line are shown as a ‘line map’ within the carriage, above the doors, as you might expect. But the map goes further than those on say the London Tube system. The map also gives live feedback status to the passengers.

The technology used is not the latest in LCD displays – it’s quite simple cut out areas of the map that light up. But the effect on the passenger user experience is the key.

The status indicators tell the passengers:

1. Which station is next: Great if you miss the voice announcement, also shows the next station just as the train pulls out of the current station – so passengers are ready for their stop;
2. Which station they are at: Good if the passenger can’t see the signage of the station through the window for some reason;
3. Which side the doors will open: Means passengers can queue at the correct side of the train when they are next to get off – this makes a more ordered and more relaxing journey as people don’t have to guess which side at the last minute.

These are small design details, but someone has clearly thought about it and, clearly, it improves the user experience for the individual passenger and all their fellow passengers.