There was whooping. A man hollered. The air may or may not have been punched. An appalling cricket-related pun may have been deleted from the draft of this post.

Yes, last Friday we were passed news that Roulette Cricket, a product we launched earlier this year for the eponymous startup, won second place (and a not-to-be-sniffed-at 50,000 euros) in Vodafone Mobile Clicks, a high profile competition to find the best mobile Internet startup in Europe. Having put a great deal of thought and sweat into the app over the last 9 months, we're absolutely chuffed; and we think that some of the principles underlying the app (its use of live data and unashamedly humble attitude towards being used as a "second screen") are interesting ones that you'll see a lot more of in coming years.

There's a video which communicates some of the tension behind the final presentations and judging at PICNIC in Amsterdam here, and you can learn more about Roulette Cricket on their web site here, or in my blatherings here, or here.

And of course, congratulations to the RC team - who've propelled this product from paper plates at Lord's into the Apple App Store. If you had the patience to watch the talk I gave at MoMo Amsterdam a few weeks ago, you'll have seen me sing the praises of some clients who've been a wonderful mix of engaged and trusting this year. They're one of them, I'll be writing about one of the others soon :)

I've a little pile of speaking engagements over the coming months. Fill your face with me at these events:

• At the Brighton iPhone Creators get-together at the mighty Skiff on 19th October, I'm going to be talking about "Apps and live data", presenting some of the lessons we learned working on Roulette Cricket;
• I'm doing a delightful double act with Mr Ribot at DroidCon in London on 29th October, talking about our experiences growing software companies over the last 10 years;
• OpenMIC comes to Brighton on 4th November, and I'm going to do something unspecified for Chris & co. here;
• On 10th and 11th November I'll be at the FT Innovate 2010 conference in London, as part of a panel session "Mobile Innovation: Getting Smarter"

A week or two back we learned that of the 50 UK entries to the Vodafone Mobile Clicks competition, two of the 5 country finalists selected from the UK were our customers: Touchnote and Roulette Cricket. I've not written about our work for Touchnote here because it's all a little hush-hush, but you'll find out more soon, I promise. Roulette Cricket is a 2nd-screen gaming app which lets you bet on cricket games as they happen, from your iPhone. You can read more about it here and here.

Getting to the UK finals was cause for celebration in the office, but we found out this morning that of these 5 finalists, it's Roulette Cricket who have been chosen to represent the UK in the finals of the competition. So congratulations to Dave, Simon and Stuart at RC for getting this far, and to the team here who've worked so hard on the app this year. The winner is chosen by a combination of a public vote, which I'd urge you to get involved with, and a jury round at PICNIC in Amsterdam. Fingers crossed :)

On a personal note, three things I've started doing recently:

• Inspired by Not For The Faint Hearted (née Write Club), every day I visit Flickr, find the top left photo on the 7 Days Most Interesting page, and spend 5 minutes writing a story inspired by it. I'm interested in constraints at the moment (Mobile Mountains was exploration of them in a worky context), and rediscovering a love of language which I shelved some time in my teenage years.
• I'm using Mappiness. Got an iPhone? Go grab it - it's a research project for the London School of Economics, looking at how people's happiness is affected by their environment. As a side-effect, you get to see charts of your own behaviour, and get a peek at the data their gathering (like the meters). I did a little talk covering these kinds of services at Mobile Web Summit last June: there's something really interesting about our growing desire and willingness to track our own behaviour, whether it's with Mappiness, CureTogether, Nike+, EcoDrive, or Wi-fi bathroom scales. And in the light of some of my recent antipathy towards advertising: I think that providing branded services which help us understand ourselves better is one of the few places where the ad industry can do genuine good.
• More of a stopping than a starting: after reading No News Is Good News by Dr Bramwell, I've given up daily news. I don't find this too difficult - I haven't had a live TV feed into my home in a few years now, and don't listen to much radio. Mainly this involves avoiding newspapers and online news sites. I cheat slightly by using Flipboard to read up on stories which my friends are discussing or find interesting. Correlation isn't causation, but I've been in a rather good mood recently. I'm going to carry on with the experiment.

Yay, we just passed a little milestone with The Guardian Anywhere, the free Android news-reading product we've been working on over the last year. We've passed the 20,000 download mark (20,430 to be precise), and a little birdie tells me that we've now distributed more than 450,000 copies of the Guardian to date. The reviews from users are positive, too; here's how our 540 customer reviews to date break down:

Oh, and T3 magazine have just reviewed it too, saying:

"The app is a revelation for those who have been browsing the ‘full fat’ version of the Guardian on their phone. Articles take seconds to load, images just a little more. Everything is laid out in an easy to read manner and the whole thing is a joy to use.

So we're pretty chuffed: we've learned a great deal about Android, and how to launch and support our own products. Where next?

We're looking to find a commercial home for the Guardian Anywhere now: to take the app and tie it into other publications. We expect this to be pretty straightforward: it consumes RSS, the standard for syndicating content online, and we've reworked and re-skinned the user interface of the product ourselves once already. Feature-wise it's very rich: we have customisation (letting users choose content they're interested in), some implicit personalisation, tight integration with social networking, and the core "offline" feature which lets you download content when your phone is plugged in and charging overnight, using your Wi-fi to avoid unpleasant phone bills.

So if you know of anyone who might be interested in licensing the Guardian Anywhere and using it themselves, please do pop a comment here or email me.