Every August, around 400-500 geeks migrate north to Seattle, Washington for the annual Gnomedex conference.  This event, put on by Chris Pirillo (former host on Tech TV), is a fantastic tech conference that is centered around facilitating conversation and building relationships amongst those who attend.

Gnomedex is a single-track conference where hallway conversations almost outweigh the sessions themselves.  The conference is not billed as a “blogging” conference or centered around any one particular technology.  The popular event is where tech-savvy enthusiasts of all backgrounds and interests gather to learn, explore, and network.

This year at Gnomedex, Taptu’s US Community Manager (me) Jason will be at the event to take part in all the action and hopefully meet some cool people interested mobile search and the mobile ecosystem.

In fact, to kick things off, Taptu will be hosting a round (or two) at the kick-off Tweetup that is occurring on Thursday, August 20th at the Alibi Room in Seattle.  Join us at the Alibi Room from 5:00 – 6:45 PM.

Drop in, say hi, and join us for a beverage! 

Here’s more info about the Pre Gnomdex Tweetup:

Please RSVP At AnyVite

Official Gnomedex Event Calendar

Upcoming

If you’re a fan of Taptu’s service and technology, you should meet the guy who drives our innovation and vision.  This may sound like I’m sucking up, but Steve Ives is a true entrepreneur who has some amazing ideas about the future of mobile technology.

That said, Steve will be at a few different events in the month of June where you can meet and greet our head honcho.

Mobile Web Summit 2.0

3-4 June 2009 in London, England

Steve will be speaking at this exciting conference early in June.

Open Mobile Summit

10-11 June 2009 in London, England

Barcelona Mobile 2.0

18-19 June in Barcelona, Spain

Mobile Entertainment Market

23-24 June  in London, England

Having attended a number of events lately, I’ve been fascinated by watching how interaction during conferences – formal or informal – have evolved.

“People used to whisper to each other or pass hand-scribbled notes during presentations. Now these notes are going digital on Twitter or via conference-provided chat rooms.

Up until now, this back-channel has been mainly confined to the Internet industry and technology conferences. [...]

So the next time you present at a conference, instead of being confronted by a sea of faces looking at you, you may be phased by a sea of heads looking down at their laptops.”

Laura Fitton, otherwise known as Pistachio, goes on to give tips to public speakers to avoid feeling left out of the conversation.

At events I’ve attended recently, the speakers have encouraged conversation on services like Twitter by using a hashtag (eg. #taptu) which ensures that anyone who uses the tag will see their words on the big screen. Others have used Meebo and similar backchannel services to give people a chatroom in which to interact. It takes very little pre-planning and anyone with a phone in their pocket can usually contribute.

There are huge benefits in contributing to a panel or presentation in this way:

• You can give your two cents without having to wait at the microphone to ask a question
• You can say something fairly trivial, which might not justify putting your hand up to comment
• You have the power to give the presentation some direction – an intelligent presenter will use the feed to get a sense of what does and doesn’t interest the audience, shaping the presentation to focus on the best stuff
• You can hear what others think without whispering or passing notes across the room

While, as Laura suggests, it can be a bit disconcerting to get less eye contact than the presenter might be used to, it’s a wonderful way to communicate how you feel and share thoughts.

Next time you’re listening or giving a presentation, crack out your phone or laptop and interact!

[Image source: Keith Burtis on Flickr]

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?

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.

Next week, Taptu will be at Mobile World Congress, one of the biggest events of the year in mobile – and a great opportunity to go galavanting around beautiful Barcelona.

As we’ll be busy galavanting working very hard, meeting the mobile community and demonstrating the latest version of the Taptu service, we’ve called in the help of Gemma, Caroline and Philip, from Racepoint Group. They will be blogging on our behalf, snapping pics of the event, and sharing their MWC experience.

Remember, if you’re at the event, you’re welcome to join us on Tuesday evening for a drink; from 5 to 7pm in Hall 7, Stand D42. Be sure to say hi to our lovely office manager Celia and ask to see her pink Taptu shoes.

Did you hear that? That’s the whooshing sound of 2008 running out of the door and slamming it on its way out.

Does anyone else feel like this year has flown by at the speed of a Peregrine falcon*?

For us at Taptu, it’s been a very eventful year with the key releases of Deadly Dart, Electric Eel and the imminent release of Frisky Fire (yes, we name our releases after fish…) and many other interesting moments in between.

Talking of interesting… At the end of 2007, Marc, one of our designers, admitted his favourite film was Titanic. He topped that this Christmas by announcing that his favourite band is Take That. We’re very impressed with Marc’s taste in music and movies (and are very grateful he’s not picking what gets added to the Taptu index!)

Our office manager Celia spent the year playing tricks on the designers by putting packing tape on the underside of their computer mouse, leaving them baffled for quite some time. We wonder what shenanigans she’ll get up to next year!

Now for the real events of 2008…

• In January, we launched the sharing functionality, letting you send results you find by email, Twitter and SMS as well as adding a heap of new channels to the search engine.
• In February, we were awarded the Mobile Monday Global Community Award at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
• In April, our first partner, Moblr, went live with Taptu powering the search on their site.
• In May, we launched Electric Eel, adding human-assisted results, the “I’m Bored” and received the MEX Design Award.
• September was an eventful month mainly because it’s my birthday with two more awards and Steve making himself pretty for the Sky Technofile cameras
• In October, we released the Series 60 quicklaunch widget, enabling Symbian S60 users to get to Taptu in a single click.
• We added itsmy.com, the mobile social network, as second search partner in November.
• And finally, things didn’t exactly slow down in December, with Wapedia for iPhone going live and shooting to #1 in the French iTunes App Store, closing Series B funding last week, and today, putting out our last release of the year, called FriskyFire!

Phew, what a year it was, and it wouldn’t have been the same without all the wonderful people we’ve met and received feedback from. So thank you from the bottom of our hearts for coming along for the ride this year, and we’re gearing up for an even better 2009!

[* The Peregrine Falcon is the fastest flying bird on Earth, with a recorded flight of over 200 mph. After much discussion, we're quite sure that 2008 has flown by faster than a swallow; African, European or otherwise.]

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!

If you’re in London and you like the mobile world, there’s only one place to be this evening: Mobile Geeks of London (and here’s a non-Facebook link!) It’s an informal evening gathering of people who work in mobile or simply enjoy geeking about with phones. Good company, good beer and hopefully good weather.

It all begins at 6:45pm at the New Oxford Street All-Bar-One, and even though over a hundred people have RSVP’ed as attending, I’m putting money on it that there’ll be at least twice as many phones and mobile devices than people. Yes, we’re geeks. And we love it.

With a week left to go until the Being-Digital conference in London, I can announce that the winner of the Favourite Gadget competition and the free ticket to the event is James Whatley, an active mobile geek in London.

The winner was selected completely fairly by Jack, my big fuzzy ginger cat, who stuck his head in the hat full of paper and pulled one out for me to see. (And then proceeded to eat all the papers that were left in the hat…)

Congratulations and we hope you enjoy the conference!

If you didn’t participate in the competition, thinking your boss may be hard to convince when it comes to attending events, here are a few reasons you can fling his/her way to (hopefully) show them the importance of letting you out of your shackles every so often.