Touchnote Mobile profiled on Mobile Developer TV - Episode 9

I’ve another Mobile Developer TV episode for you this morning! Oh yes… check out Touchnote Mobile:

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Here are the shownotes:

A good friend of mine, Ed Hodges, first mentioned Touchnote to me back in March. I think I’d come across the company a few months prior — but since it wasn’t entirely mobile-based, the company drifted in and out of my radar for a little while. Touchnote is a service that enables you to upload a photo (or select one from various services) and then have your photo sent, physically, to anyone.

It’s a very simple concept — and one that’s been around in some form or another for a little while. For instance, Vodafone UK has a rather pants service that tries to do this via MMS. I used it about 3 years ago and.. well.. it was ok. But it wasn’t easy, it wasn’t graceful — in fact, the user interface was shocking. I used it once.

Touchnote’s web service is beautiful and graceful. Wouldn’t it be great if they could duplicate that on the mobile?

They have. Ed and a team of developers moved mountains in order to get Touchnote Mobile live and into the Nokia Ovi store in 33 days.

Thirty three days.

Shocking. They developed the mobile version from nothing — from literally a concept on a piece of paper to LIVE on the Ovi Store in 33 days. What an achievement.

It’s shit-hot too. Here’s how it works. Run Touchnote Mobile. Take a photo. Crop the photo into a square (really, really easily), type in a brief message and select the recipient’s address from your address book. Send.

It costs you two pounds. Your recipient gets a beautiful greetings card through the mail complete with your photo, your message AND even a Google Maps mash-up showing where you took the photo.

Writing about it doesn’t do it justice though.

You hafta-see-it. Which is why I invited Razia, one of Touchnote’s founders, to give us a demonstration on film. Take a few minutes, kick back and watch the video — and then tell me what you think.

I’m told the iPhone version is coming soon — and I’m sure Android and some kind of feature-phone support can’t be that far off.