Is it just me or isn’t DevCon 2 a fraction away from Armageddon? Small wonder then that this years BlackBerry Developers Conference was held in a large underground space (read bunker) under the San Francisco Marriott. With no windows, full catering and every form of wireless access to “the outside”, RIM were indeed ready to launch DevCon 2, even if we weren’t underneath a mountain in Colorado.

Bigger, better and a more confident RIM (according to some other delegates), Jim Balsillie, commander of the troops took to the stage. Flush with new announcements, we sat through 3+ hours of BlackBerry product enhancements splintered occasionally by cheers from the crowd. The theme was “Deep rich application integration” and there were some mighty demos.

A new BlackBerry Services platform including integrated advertising from multiple mobile advertising networks (Admob, Jumptap, Quattro Wireless…) all through one API; a payment API, new Geo location APIs and even a “just nuke them now” API! (as if).

Push APIs “moved” the crowd, as did many of the tools. A new GUI builder design studio, a new BlackBerry Themes Studio and application creation with Adobe Tools such as Dreamweaver. In fact Adobe’s commander of the troops, Shantanu Narayen,  was there in support to ensure we understood the strike was from coalition forces.

Jim B took lots of opportunities to say “We hear you”. I took this to mean there was clearly some strong and presumably negative feedback from the developer community at last years DevCon and now RIM have responded with some much needed capabilities. I must say for Taptu, as a new developer to BlackBerry, it all seems very complete now. Indeed for any new developer looking at BlackBerry, there hasn’t been a better time to jump on board.

I came to BBDC 2009  (all the military run on acronyms) to get a sense of the BlackBerry developer community momentum. I also came to meet some key people from RIM and get a steer on what Taptu should include in a BlackBerry app for the touch screen Storm device. What I learned is that the BlackBerry momentum is rock solid and the developers are as passionate about BlackBerry as the Crackberry users themselves. I also met some great people from RIM. They were very approachable but then if you are going to nuke the outside world you may as well be friendly with your fellow colleagues in the shelter.

Of the new products, RIM’s new latest BlackBerry Bold is a gem. A new slimline Bold, with all the capability of South Korea with a waistline of an Air Korea flight hostess. And talking of waistlines, when it came to the DevCon entertainment, RIM gets this too. Scantily clad exotic dancers, plenty of smoke, live music and games for the geeks will secure this event as a not-to-be-missed event on the mobile development calendar.

So did RIM the push the red button and will we move to DevCon 3? The answer is a resounding yes, though I’m told DevCon 3 needs the authority of the President – lucky he’s a CrackBerry user too

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]

Another year at Mobile World Congress ends; the team comes home both exhausted from the long days (& nights) and energised by meeting so many interesting and enterprising people.

Looking at the mobile trends, many manufacturers have now jumped on the Touch UI bandwagon. For Taptu, that’s great news; we love a touchy-feely interface, since using your fingers to point at menus is so much more intuitive than having to scroll and click.

There are however a few cases where we couldn’t believe our eyes at how Touch UI can be used so poorly. Regardless, it’s encouraging that more manufacturers are considering the simplicity of touch; it’ll just take a while to polish it and make it most user-friendly rather than purely “flash, spin and float around” eye candy. Just before MWC, we published a whitepaper on Touch UI, which Bob Last mentioned on the TechCrunchTalk panel on Mobile Disruption.

The second noticeable trend was the clear focus on apps, apps and more apps. Everyone is opening their own app store, following Apple’s success. It’s exciting to see to think that every device platform could develop its own hub for applications, as it’s something I always felt was missing back in my S60 days, but the take-up will depend highly on the quality of the user experience in browsing the apps available. If every platform has a high quality app store, users will have more fun and developers will get the recognition they deserve. What could possibly go wrong?

Shiny gadgets and business exchanges aside, some of the other highlights of our week include the bear machine, which was so popular with visitors to our stand that it broke by the third day. Don’t worry, we still gave away the teddy bears for the rest of the week.

The team thoroughly enjoyed hosting drinks on Tuesday evening, and we want to thank everyone who popped by! Celia’s Killer Pink Cocktails were such a hit, we were asked for the recipe and we thought we’d share it here:

Celia’s Killer Pink Cocktail

• 1 part raspberry liqueur
• 2 parts triple sec
• Top up with chilled dry white wine

Serve with a pink stirrer and enjoy!

Twelve hours later, top up body with two headache-relief tablets, a glass of water and a bacon buttie.

Manning a stand for a few days can also lead to discovering new skills in your colleagues, as we did with Bob when he started juggling teddy bears to entertain people walking by!

In summary, we thoroughly enjoyed our time at Mobile World Congress and cannot wait to see what partnerships, funky app releases and friendships the next few months will bring as a result of this event.

In partnership with the creator of Wapedia, Florian Amrhein, we recently created the first version of the Wapedia mobile wiki iPhone application. [iTunes link]

Wapedia launched in 2004, and provides a fast and mobile-friendly edition of Wikipedia, so it seemed logical to kick it up a notch and create an iPhone application to complement it.

We focused on making the app as fast as possible, by scaling images for the iPhone, showing a table of contents to jump down to a section of the page in a snap and paginating the very long pages to speed up loading. We wouldn’t want you to lose the pub quiz because we can’t get you to the answer fast enough, would we?

As Taptu staff, we’re all nuts about sharing what we find on our phones, we’ve made it easy to email a link to a friend or open it in Safari so that you can bookmark it for future reference.

The application is available in English, French, German, Italian and Spanish, with 75 local language versions of Wikipedia accessible to browse. It can also be accessed at wapedia.mobi on any mobile phone.

This is the first version of the application, and we have a list of funky features we want to add that rivals Santa’s shopping list, but we’d love to get your feedback on it. What new features would you like to see in the next version? Drop us a line on iphone@wapedia.org.

Download the Wapedia – Mobile Wiki iPhone app in iTunes here.