The Taptu team is growing quickly to support our growth as a business; we now officially have a new team member to our US team. You’ll be reading much more from Jason in the near future, as he covers the perspective of a mobile guy in the American market. Join me in welcoming him to the team! – Vero

I’m Jason and I’m the new US Community Manager for Taptu.  My role will be to help boost Taptu’s profile here in the U.S. and make sure Taptu users’ needs are being met.

I am glad to be a part of the Taptu family.  The company already has a very well established presence in providing a socially connected mobile search experience, and has some amazing technologies that will soon be revealed.  I’m excited to be joining at this juncture in the company’s history.

You’re probably wondering – who is this guy?  Well, put simply, I’m a technologist who constantly likes to tinker and hack.  I’ve been online since 1994 when I got my first Unix shell account and I was hooked instantly with the online world.  My two passions are mobile technology and social media, especially when these two areas collide.

I’ve written about mobile technology on different publications including my own blog – techcraver.com.  Additionally, I’ve been a contributor to GigaOm, WebWorkerDaily, ReadWriteWeb, DownloadSquad, and CMSWire.

I am based in Portland, Oregon – however you should expect to see me at a variety of events and conferences as I’ll be spreading the word about Taptu across the U.S. mobile ecosystem.

Please reach out to me – my email address is jason.harris@taptu.com.  Also, you can find me on Twitter at @harrisja.

This report comes to you from sunny Austin, Texas, where the Taptu team are busy drinking beer observing new trends, participating in panels and discussing new ideas. I’m spending most of the week looking for conversations about user experience in the hope that I can go back to the Taptu offices with some great ideas to improve your experience.

Funnily enough, the best inspiration I’ve found so far hasn’t been in a panel or presentation, but rather walking the streets of Austin. This sign is on a fairly busy road, next to a music venue and makes it unexpectedly easy for musicians to stop their rusty tour bus by the door to unload their equipment.

What’s beautiful about this is that it’s completely wacky and unusual but so much more intelligent and convenient. It’s so easy to stick to the rulebook and say “No, we can’t do that. That’s not how it’s done” and force the tour bus to go park at the end of the road and walk down with their gear. In the same way, it’s easy to create a site or an app in the normal, expected way, at the cost of the user’s time and clicks.

That’s where I hope we can learn from Austin; We will do everything we can, even if it’s a bit wacky, in order to make you, the rock band, have a better experience with us. So tell us, what can we do for you?

[Image source: Jamie Zawinski, DNA Lounge]

Next week, two members of of the Taptu team will be heading to Texas for South by Southwest Interactive, a rather unique yearly event where people from different backgrounds get together to talk about emerging technologies. It’s a lot more exciting than it sounds, I promise.

If you’re attending, drop us a line here or on vero@taptu.com and we’d love to meet you. I’ll bring whatever Taptu goodies the nice ladies at the check-in desk at the airport will let me cram into my suitcase (alongside the gadgets & shoes of course) so if you can find me, you might get a Taptu teddy or some stickers/badges.

We’ll also be able to give you a first peek at the iPhone application we’re developing, which will be supercharged with new features. Ask us about it and we’ll be happy to show you!

Throughout the week, we will report our experiences on the Taptu blog, but if you’re wondering what we’re up to every day, follow us on Twitter. We will occasionally update the Taptu Twitter feed, but you can also follow @fatbusinessman for David’s stream and @vero for mine. For wider coverage of the event, why not check out the #sxsw tag on Twitter Search?

During my Monday morning RSS catchup, I came across Mobile Today’s report of O2 and Orange throwing their toys out of the pram in discussions with Nokia over the inclusion (or not) of Skype on the new N97.

O2 and Orange responded furiously to Nokia’s declaration that it will equip its upcoming flagship Nseries device, the N97, with Skype. If the row is not resolved the two operators may refuse to stock the N97 – or any future Nseries handsets containing Skype – unless Nokia strips out the Skype client.

This level of reticence towards services that invade their territory isn’t surprising, but it’s unfortunate. Who loses out by useful services like Skype being removed from the devices? It’s the customer.

It reminds me of the music industry battle; It was ten years ago already that Napster surfaced from a university student’s dorm, changing the landscape for the music industry ever since by showing music consumers that there was a new way (legit or not) of accessing more music than what your local music chain could offer.

The music industry has been grappling with this hot potato ever since; rather than going with the flow and finding ways to work with peer-to-peer networks in the early days, it opted for a lengthy legal game of Whack-a-mole with developers who were much smarter than them. It’s only in the past year or two that services like Spotify and Last.fm have started making creative use of the web to distribute music legally. Would users have gone on to use illegitimate services if no one had managed to put a business plan together to do it all above board? I suspect so.

To put it simply, once the penny drops, there’s no going back.

This is the crossroad the mobile industry is at; Through devices like the iPhone, the N-Series Nokia range and many other new phones, we’re getting an inkling of how customisable our gadgets are. Need to call a friend abroad? Grab Skype. Fancy using a Twitter app instead of SMS? Grab it from the App Store.

Of course, this freaks out the operators who want to be “more than just a bit pipe”, who up until recently received a cut of most mobile activity. And it’s fair that they need to ensure their revenue in order to stay in business, that’s just common sense. However, excessive greed may help increase the revenue-per-head in the short term, but in the long term, customers will see right through this ploy and find an operator who’s less likely to put a spanner in their creative works. Whether it’s Skype, off-portal mobile web access or having some flexibility in available tariffs, customers are (slowly but surely) becoming more empowered. Customers will only accept a less-than-full-featured phone for so long before they review their choice of operator.

The area where operators can build true value for their users is customer care; provide prompt and responsive service when something goes wrong, be helpful rather than obscure in helping your users choose a tariff and device that suits them. Users will love you. Nothing can replace the good feeling that accompanies a smooth transaction when the new shiny phone arrives. Happy customers is what makes a business, isn’t it?

[Via PaidContent]