As you all know, we’re really excited about the utilizing the touch interface to it’s fullest extent.  To this end, we’ve taken a project of ours, The Music Cube, and ported it to the iPhone.  Our new application is now available in the iTunes App store.

How does The Music Cube work?  It’s a fun game whereby you analyze an image puzzle and try to guess the artist/band/song  based on the visual image(s) you see.  It’s challenging, addictive and works  well on the touch interface. So if you have an iPhone or Touch and love music then give it a spin.

Music Cube on the iPhone was a little side project here at Taptu.  As linked above, the desktop web version was produced a while back and proved so popular we just couldn’t resist porting it to the iPhone.  When so many Taptuans rally behind an effort, its hard to hold them back.  Our lead engineer on the project was Telmo Menezes (since crowned King of Open GL) with Matt and Marc on the design side.

Astonishingly, the Music Cube iPhone app was pumped out in just four weeks.  Pretty cool, I think!

The intent of the Music Cube is to provide a fun game to pass the time while you’re waiting in a line, riding the bus, or otherwise have a few spare moments to challenge your music knowledge.  Also, if you get stuck, you an always rely upon Taptu Mobile Search to help guide your way

Be sure to check out upcoming versions of the Music Cube app for additional, more challenging questions.

Earlier this week, we launched our iPhone app with much excitement – it was the culmination of many months of work, so we couldn’t help being curious to see what people thought.

Ewan at Mobile Industry Review says:

“[Ed note: In the context of your average mobile search engine] It’s incredibly annoying to have to click, click, click on a mobile device, irrespective what type. There’s a cost in terms of time and battery (assuming you’re on an unlimited data plan) to every single tap or click.

So they’ve tried really hard to get it right first time. A total godsend for any mobile user. [...] Nice work Taptu!”

Scott at MobileCrunch says:

“Another great feature of the current version of the Taptu app are context sensitive search filters included beneath the default search filters. As you can see, my search for beer produced a number of beer-related links. Mmmmm…beeer.

Bottom line: Taptu is a pretty slick mobile search solution.”

What’s On iPhone says:

“Google works just fine on the iPhone, especially now that iGoogle is back on line. But is it the only choice of search engines for the device? NO WAY!

Taptu brings a unique aproach to web searches on the iPhone with its new search engine. Designed to be finger friendly, it is intended for small screen. And it shows.”

Now, we have also had a few bits of criticism from some iTunes reviewers, who have flagged up that our index isn’t up to scratch for every type of search term. That’s a fair comment – our index is growing every day and will continue to improve as we keep plowing more material into it. In fact, you can help improve our index by recommending the best mobile sites out there if we don’t already list them.

Our thanks go out to everyone who’s taken time to look at the app, reviewed or commented (positively or negatively constructively) over the past few months. Now, how about I go get one of ‘em new 3GS iPhones and test that Taptu works properly on it? Oooh shiny!

Today we are launching the Taptu search app for the iPhone and iPod Touch. For us it’s the culmination of a 6 month effort to create a new kind of search experience that’s optimised for touch devices like the iPhone.

This search experience starts from scratch with a new mobile search index – an index of as many touch-friendly Web pages as our crawlers can find. By touch-friendly we mean not only a Web page that is optimised for mobile but also one which is easy to navigate with your finger without pinching, scrolling or zooming contortions. (We’ve talked in depth about this concept of touch-friendly search in our recent white paper “Exploring the Touch Friendly Web”)

Over the last 12 months we’ve seen an exponential growth in the number of touch–friendly Web sites. They’ve multiplied more than 10-fold (Taptu estimate) as site owners begin to focus more and more on building their mobile audiences. Some are doing this in anticipation of an expected surge of e-commerce activity on mobile phones (the same surge that has already happened in Japan and South Korea). Touch phones with their bigger screens, better browsers and all-you-can-eat data plans are where this wave is going to hit first in Western markets.

It’s hard for users to explore the touch-friendly Web. The well-known search engines take you to desktop site results, sometimes auto-transcoding them for your phone. Start-up players have indexed the older-style mobile sites designed for phones with their smaller screens and their keypads. But until today nobody has offered a search engine especially for the touch-friendly Web.

Our touch-friendly index is still young and growing by leaps and bounds, but it’s now big enough – 3m+ pages – to be really useful. It’s available for you to play with right now. Just download it from the Apple App Store onto any iPhone or iPod touch. We’re keen to get your feedback, so please let us know what you think.  Email iPhone [AT] taptu.com, @taptu on Twitter or use the feedback forums you’ll find in the About section of the App.

And watch out for updates and other new developments from Taptu coming soon.

[the full press release is available here]

Links:

• Try the App now : take me to App Store
• Follow Taptu on Twitter: http://twitter.com/taptu
• Join Taptu’s Facebook group: http://bit.ly/woxVg
• See Video of the Taptu app: http://tinyurl.com/ktkg4p

Over the past few months we’ve not just been busy on creating new branding for Taptu, but we’ve also been beavering away on an iPhone app which you’ll hear about in more details very soon. We couldn’t find any templates on the web to help us preview our new iPhone logo in-situ, so we created our own.

If you’re also developing an iPhone app and want it to stand-out amongst the crowd in the App Store, then this download is for you.  Download the templates below and you can see how your app will look before it’s submitted.

Just drag your icon into the template to see how it’ll look with Apple’s funky  gel-effects applied.  Or better yet, design your app icon from scratch from within these templates.  We use these to design in context so as to ensure we are thinking about how it will look from a user’s point of view – in the App Store list, the Home Screen dock, and on the Desktop iTunes Store.  If you’re a designer or a developer, you’ll find these assets ultra-useful.

The templates are in Photoshop PSD format with full editable layers.  We recreated the gel-effects using vector paths to give you greatest flexibility.  The pink symbol is there just as an example.  Hopefully the layers are all quite self-explanatory – if not, give us a shout.

Click here to download the whole zip package.  There are templates for the Home Screen, the iPhone and Desktop App Store as well as individual 57×57px and 512×512px icon PSDs.

In Cambridge, we recently had our Spring Party.

To celebrate the upcoming release of our iPhone application, we had a fantastic iPod Touch cake.

And in case you were wondering: yes, the cake was as good as it looks!

That is, of course, I was *told* it was really good.  As I’m in the US, I didn’t get to partake in the yummy iPhone baked goods

In the past 24 hours, I’ve had a flurry of new followers on FriendFeed, a network that focuses on aggregating all of your feeds from across the web. I wondered where the sudden influx had come from, and Paul Kane quickly pointed me to FriendFeed’s announcement.

This is their new signup: Three icons recognised universally by anyone who’s ever wasted time on the web. Simple, isn’t it?

While FriendFeed still isn’t a very active part of my daily diet, I can see that it’s gaining more of an audience with every day that goes past. By making both the signup process and the addition of new feeds mindblowingly easy, a new user can feel “at home” in the new network within minutes of joining.

On mobile, stabbing at a small mobile device, using the small gaps of time between getting from location A to B, the importance of the simple signup process is even more significant. For this reason, on the soon-to-be released Taptu iPhone application, we’ve done away with much signup. We ask for the bare minimum information, only when it’s strictly necessary, even though sometimes, there’s a part of us that would love to know more about you.

In a similar attempt to keep it super simple, in creating the signup page for Cambridge Geek Nights – a small local gathering of geeks and geekettes – I chose to have a single, retro-looking text field. In a world of more, More, MORE, it can be difficult to take a few steps back and remember that sometimes, we don’t need to make you type your name and email address!

[Geek Nights were founded in Oxford and, with the help of David, another Taptu team member, I'll be launching the first Cambridge one in June in my spare time. If you're in the area, why not join us?]

Thanks to drastic advances in mobile handset technology, today’s cellular phones are very capable machines. A few short years ago, our phones only had a few functions, mainly consisting of making/receiving calls and sending SMS messages.

However, with the advent of the camera phone and subsequent advances, our mobile handsets pack a whopping amount of hardware and functionality. For example, the Nokia NSeries handsets feature 5MP cameras, on-board GPS, FM Transmitters, email and much, much more.

Even today’s more inexpensive feature phones carry on them 1 or 2 megapixel cameras capable of sending MMS messages and so forth. But, in my experience, many mobile phone users don’t use these advanced features because they are too hard to work with. This is part of the reason the iPhone is such a game changer, as it altered user behavior by creating a better user experience when accessing these advanced hardware features.

The Ease-of-Use Factor

Adding to this, the usage figures of iPhone users show they consume these advanced services more frequently than phone users on other platforms. A Financial Times article reports that iPhone users consume more mobile data because surfing the web on Apple’s mobile handset is so simple and enjoyable.  It’s a fact: iPhone users snap more photos, send more emails and text messages and this pattern doesn’t seem to be slowing down any time soon.

The Youth Factor

mocoNews recently reported that, in the U.S., T-Mobile will soon refresh the very-popular Sidekick product.  The Sidekick is a handset that features a slide-out screen that reveals a full QWERTY keyboard.  This particular handset is especially popular with teenagers and college students here in the United States.

However, the way these young users utilize their Sidekicks is astounding.  Here are some usage statistics that show Sidekick users:

• Send and receive 3,000 instant-messages a month
• Send and receive 600 text messages a month
• View more than 450 web pages a month
• Two-thirds of all traffic through the Sidekick browser goes to social networking sites

This handset, when combined with its 3.2 megapixel camera and built-in social networking software, is a connected teenager’s dream phone!  It goes to show that the Sidekick user base is a mobile-data hungry crowd that loves to use their handsets to the fullest.

However, in your opinion – what other factors drive advanced mobile feature usage?  I look forward to seeing your thoughts in the comments section below.

We believe that the touch interface is going to be a dominant technology in the mobile world for some time to come.  It turns out Nokia may be catching on to this mentality as well.

Nokia fans have had only one touch enabled mobile handset come out in recent months – the Nokia XpressMusic 5800.  In June, the Finnish handset giant is posed to deliver the Nokia N97, a device that is a feature monster, packing a touch screen and full QWERTY keyboard for data entry.

To add to this Nokia touch fever, a few poignant publications have noted that sources inside Nokia are reporting a threesome of ‘thin touchscreen phones’ set to debut later this year.  The new phones are said to feature the VibeTonz technology that Nokia licensed from Immersion, which takes haptic feedback technology to the next level by delivering a “multi-sensory experience”.

I’m not sure what to expect from a VibeTonz-enabled hands yet.  However, after experiencing how Apple’s iPhone and application developers are utilizing touch on the Apple platform, I’m anxious to see what Nokia can deliver if and when they put their creative and engineering muscle into delivering a touch-enabled device.

A chief complaint amongst touchscreen phone users (and a major barrier for buying them) is the lack of tactile feedback while typing.  Perhaps with Immersion’s haptic technology, Nokia can win over those who have held out on buying a touch device to date.

What is your opinion?  Can you type adequately on your touch-enabled phone?  Have you held off on buying a touch-enabled handsets, or is the utility of the iPhone enough to make typing troubles non-existent?

Also, do you think Nokia can deliver a winner of a touch handset, or are they just too late to the game?

We look forward to the comments!

[image courtesy: MaxRoam]

A few days ago, I was on the train home and eavesdropping on a conversation. (Don’t look at me like that, you know you do it too!) A mid-50’s gentleman was discussing with a friend that he didn’t approve of mobile phones that were more than just phones, referring often to “that Apple phone”.

His argument was that gadgets like phones and handheld gaming systems were breaking society, making kids antisocial and emotionally incompetent.

As I was silently fuming and formulating my undiplomatic riposte (had I had the guts to barge into his conversation), perfectly on cue, the kids in the next set of seats, who clearly didn’t know each other, all simultaneously started asking questions, after one of them brought out “that Apple phone”. The mid-50’s technophobe sat, silently, watching teens who still didn’t know each other’s names pile up on top of one other to see the game the boy with the spiky hair had just downloaded. “Wow, what’s that one called? I’m grabbing that one too!”

It seemed poetic justice that the kids then exchanged IM names before each leaving the train at their respective station, completely unaware that they’d proven the grumpy man wrong in every way. Immensely satisfying, I must admit!

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?