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.

The 4th annual MEX conference opened in London yesterday morning, with a packed house of the leading thinkers in the mobile business. Operators, handset manufacturers, media companies, software developers and user experience consultants from 21 countries filled WallaceSpace, bringing with them a diverse range of views and a wealth of new ideas.

In the afternoon, Steve presented, following Scott Jensen from Google, discussing how search requires a radically different approach in the mobile environment. Later on, it’s with great excitement that we received the Commercial MEX Design Award (Check out the smile on Conor’s face, on the right!)

Marek covered the first day’s events in greater details and announced the Design Award winners on the official MEX blog. Today, the conference continues, with tons of insightful presentations.

If you didn’t make it to MEX, we’ll also be attending Mobile Monday London next week, Being-Digital on the 10th and Fuel Conference on 13th June, so we hope to meet you there!

Being-Digital is a one day Digital Mashup Conference on 10th June in London. There will be talks on some great teams by some fantastic people. We’re inviting you to join us as we have a free ticket worth £325 for the competition winner. More on the competition below…

The competition

Want the ticket? Here’s what you have to do:

Remember the best gadget you’ve ever owned? Remember how much you tinkered with it, polished it and talked about it? Would you say it was unputdownable?

Create a video, a song, a photo, write a blog entry/comment or tell us through the lost art of interpretative dance about the best gadget you’ve ever owned. Use Qik video, Seesmic, Flickr or the tool of your choice, but be creative!

The most creative entry will win the free ticket to Being-Digital! You have until Wednesday, 28th May to add a comment below telling us about your favourite phone, portable computer, crackberry, mp3 player, handheld games console or any other gadget you’ve loved so much, you couldn’t bear going without it.

[Tip of the hat to the Southwest Airlines blog for reviving the term "unputdownable" - Ever so appropriate!]

The MEX Mobile User Experience Awards shortlist was unveiled yesterday, and we’re thrilled to bits to hear we’ve been shortlisted in both the Commercial category and the Innovator of the Year one.

We’re shortlisted alongside some very cool companies, like Vuzix, who make virtual reality glasses - which friends of ours have been known to use to marvel at the back of their own heads - as well as Mobyko and Zeemote.

The winners will be officially announced at a special evening reception in London on 27th May, the opening night of the 4th annual MEX conference, and we’ll be there with our fingers crossed!

Lubna Dajani and David Harper invited me to participate in a panel session at Mobile Monday New York on April 28th. The subject was Mobile Analytics and Social Search. About 100 people attended the event in the gleaming Samsung Experience Center in the Time Warner Building at Columbus Circle, and one of the attendees, David Berkowitz, liveblogged the session.

Several people posed me questions on mobile social search. Here are a couple of them, together with my answers.

Why can’t existing desktop search engines meet the mobile challenge?

Well, they are trying to meet the challenge, because there are 27m searches a day already on mobile. But this is just 2% of the volume of desktop search, something is wrong. There is too great an emphasis on showing PC web results on devices that can’t consume PC web pages very well.

How can marketers and SEOs take advantage of social search?

The truth is that today it is very difficult. But there are a couple of early initiatives underway that will change this. At Taptu, we have recently created a search API for mobile content site owners. Moblr, a European mobile social networking site, have integrated this API into their service, to give their users access to the huge range of free mobile content that is contained within the Taptu search engine index.

At Yahoo, the new open SearchMonkey initiative will let site owners bring in some aspects of social search, which may or may not be applicable to mobile.

While in New York, I couldn’t resist the $20 tourist ride to the top of the Empire State Building. The last time I did this was 29 years ago, during my first visit to Manhattan. This time I visited at night, and the cityscape was just as awesome.

Next week on Monday 28th, Mobile Monday New York has invited us to join in on a panel on the topic of “Optimizing the Mobile Experience and Increasing Visibility with Social Search and Mobile Analytics”. We’ll be in great company, on this panel moderated by Bryson Meunier of Resolution Media.

Panelists:

For more details on the event venue, have a look at the MoMo NY post on the event. We hope to see you there!

Next Monday, we’ll be taking part in Mobile Monday London, sponsoring the evening on the theme of Mobile User Interface.

At the moment, the event is fully booked, but pleading or bribing the organisers with shiny gadgets might just get you in. Meanwhile, if you’re already on the list, we’ll see you there!

This weekend, we’re packing our suitcases and heading off to (*checks weather forecast*) sunny Barcelona for Mobile World Congress, arguably the biggest mobile conference of the year.

We’ll have a fabulous white and pink stand, fully equipped with drinks and a handy place to charge your mobile phone. If you’re also attending, we’d love to meet you, so pop by stand 7D42, in the heart of Hall 7.

You’ll find us attending a number of events throughout the week as well:

I’m at the Future of Web Apps in London today. So far, I’ve attended the intro keynote with Om Malik and Michael Arrington, followed by Heather Champ & Derek Powazek on “We’ve got this community: Now what?”. I’m now in Tony Conrad’s “Future of Search”.

The main running thread of all talks so far is quite clear: Nobody knew what would happen next after launching their app. And in fact, few ended up where they expected to go. Someone this morning said that the real work on a web app really begins after you launch (see, I was listening, but didn’t take note so not sure who said this…) You need to listen intently, watch your users and see what they make of it. Odds are you’ll notice that they’ve hacked your app and use it in ways you would never have imagined. That’s your cue to harness their creativity and evolve accordingly.

Sometimes, Web 2.0 big names can get a bit cocky about success, but I think this is one point everyone agrees on: You just don’t know what’s going to happen next when you launch a startup.

But then, that’s why we’re in this business; that’s where the fun stuff happens!