The screaming monkey on 12seconds.tv

South by SouthWest, Future of Web Apps, Future of Mobile, Fuel Conference, Mobile World Congress… Yes, I love conferences and, most of all, I love meeting new people.

Coming up soon is Being-Digital, a conference organised by the Mashup* events crowd, and I’m going along with Bob Last, from Taptu, who’s going to be speaking alongside with some other great speakers and entrepreneurs.

Being cheeky as I am, I asked the organisers whether I could extend the invitation to attend the conference to the Taptu blog readers. I now hold one precious ticket, worth £325, and I can’t wait to give it out!

So take part in the competition to win the ticket by creating a video, showing off some pics or leaving a blog comment telling us about the most unputdownable gadget ever.

I’ve got a goooooooolden ticket, come and get it! And see you at Being-Digital on the 10th of June, right?

Tomorrow morning, really bloody early, I’ll be heading off to Barcelona to attend Mobile World Congress, an event of gargantuan proportions (from what everyone tells me). I’ll be blogging as much as possible on the Taptu blog and twittering away*. If I’m lucky, I should have the time to post a few videos to my Qik profile.

If you’re also attending Mobile World Congress, then pop by and see me at the Taptu stand, 7D42, in hall 7 and join me for a coffee or a beer!

[* Thanks to Alex Payne at Twitter, I now have the username Vero, which uber-rocks!]

As first entry for my infamous Blog Topic Challenge, I thought I’d begin with an elementary and logical first step.

James Whatley, SpinVox blogger and great friend of mine, suggested that I should “write about your job and everyone you have ever met in your niche industry…” Great suggestion, but there are just too many awesome people I’ve met so I’ll split this into two entries, concentrating on the “write about your job” part first.

From one day to the next, I wear many hats… and wigs… and tiaras. By daylight, I’m part of a great team at Taptu. It’s my first time taking part in the early days of a startup and I’m really enjoying it. There are new challenges every day, which is a refreshing change from previous jobs where tasks were repetitive to say the least (could YOU spend 52 weeks a year sending email newsletters that always say the same thing? I couldn’t.)

These days, there’s blogging, attending events, handling search engine optimisation (which I love), researching new ideas for the search engine, speaking to our mobile search users as well as our Facebook app users to get their feedback (which I love even more!) and planning future super-secret projects which I can’t tell you about yet… unless you ply me with shiny gadgets, at which point I might just crack. Or not. (But you can offer me shiny gadgets anyways!)
My job also entails making copious amounts of coffee every day and occasionally teasing Bob about his taste in movies and Lynsey about her Scrabulous choice of words.

All in all, it’s exciting and challenging. And no, you can’t have my job!

Blog Topic Challenge: Want to suggest the next topic for me to write about? Leave a comment here and I’ll tackle your topic soon!

Do you work in mobile? Do you have questions about mobile phones? Do you have an opinion on mobile phones of today? (Who doesn’t!)

Tomorrow, I’ll be hosting the 94th Carnival of the Mobilists, a big roundup of news and posts in the week about the mobile world, over on Taptology, the Taptu blog.

I would love to get some fresh blood into the Carnival, so if you want to contribute, send a link to a post about mobile you’ve written recently to mobilists at gmail dot com before midnight PST tonight and I’ll include you in the roundup.

It’s a work thing but I wanted to crosspost my entry on testing for mobile, because I just love the screenshot. Neil, our testing dude, is a god of focus and dedication.

I can’t imagine doing all this thumb-RSI-inducing testing without getting distracted to death… Oooh look a butterfly, ooh I wonder what’s happening in San Francisco this weekend… Ooh I wonder what that scribble on paper was supposed to mean…

Along with the rest of the team, I’ve been searching, clicking, browsing and trying to break the search, and I really can’t wait for us to go live with the beta so that I can show off what we’ve done to everyone. But patience, still a bit of testing to be done!