10 most talented people in tech

Hot industries tend to attract the world’s best and brightest, and these days there are few industries hotter than tech.

From silicon valley to silicon roundabout, some of the world’s smartest, most talented people are building the future – and if we had the cash, we’d hire the very best of them and take over the entire universe.

So which tech titans would make the most amazing tech firm of all time?

These are our nominations for the tech industry’s smartest operators and biggest brains: let us know yours in the comments.

1. Tim Cook, Apple

As Apple’s chief operating officer, Tim Cook turned what Fortune called “the atrocious state of Apple’s manufacturing, distribution and supply apparatus” into the extraordinary and extraordinarily profitable machine it is today. He may not have Steve Jobs’ vision thing, but that’s okay, because our next two nominations have that in spades.

2. Jeff Bezos, Amazon

[Image credit: James Duncan Davidson, CC Attribution 2.0 Generic]

Many pundits see the Amazon founder and CEO as the spiritual heir to the late Steve Jobs, and while he may lack Jobs’ showmanship he has a Jobs-esque ability to see into the future – and he uses that ability to dominate markets before most people even know they exist. Amazon dominated bookselling, then online retail; the Kindle did for ebooks what the iPod did to music; the Kindle Fire is outselling Android tablets by an enormous margin, and Amazon Prime is almost a religion in the US.

3. Jonathan Ive, Apple

One of the most influential and imitated designers the world has ever seen – his original iMac even influenced toasters and sex toys – Jonathan Ive is responsible for an incredible range of stunning hardware. To have just one of his creations on a CV would be pretty impressive, but Ive’s been in charge of the design for every Apple product since the late 1990s: the iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, MacBook Pro, MacBook Air… The Daily Mail called him a “design genius”, and like everything else in the Daily Mail, that is absolutely true.

4. Marissa Mayer, Google

Google’s 20th employee is one of the sharpest executives in Silicon Valley, the youngest member of Google’s executive operating committee and the youngest woman ever featured in Fortune magazine’s annual Most Powerful Women list. Mayer is famed for her ability to spot, implement and improve bright ideas, and after years in charge of management and design for Google’s many products she’s now Google’s vice-president in charge of local, mobile and contextual services.

5. Joichi Ito, MIT

Joichi “Joi” Ito’s many hats include chairman of Creative Commons, director of the MIT Media Lab, Mozilla board member, venture capitalist, human rights activist, World of Warcraft guild master and being one of Foreign Policy magazine’s top 100 global thinkers. Ito’s many interests and fierce intelligence means he’s particularly good at the big picture stuff: not just technology, but technology’s place in the wider world.

6. Shigeru Miyamoto, Nintendo

[Image credit: Sklathill, CC Attribution-ShareAlike]

Has anybody in the technology industry spread more joy than Shigeru Miyamoto? The gaming legend’s CV includes Mario, Donkey Kong, The Legend of Zelda, Star Fox, Pikmin and Nintendogs, and he’s variously been called the guru of gaming, the father of modern videogames and the god of the videogames industry.

7. Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook

[Credit: Drew Altizer/Financial Times, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic]

Forget Mark Zuckerberg: Sandberg is the brains behind Facebook, where she “oversees the company’s business operations including sales, marketing, business development, human resources, public policy and communications.” In other words, she runs the place. Mark Zuckerberg may have built the site, but Sheryl Sandberg made it into a billion dollar business that’s well on its way to having a billion members.

8. Gabe Newell, Valve

[Image credit: Jontintinjordan, CC Attribution]

The plain-speaking former Microsoft man co-founded Valve, the publisher responsible for triple-A games including the Half-Life series, Team Fortress and Portal. Its incredibly profitable Steam service means that Valve is tremendously rich, but Valve’s really impressive achievement is to make all that money while being almost universally adored among gamers.

9. Sundar Pichai, Google

[Image credit: Sundar Pichai]

According to TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington, Google paid Sundar Pichai “tens of millions of dollars” to stay with Google instead of jumping ship to Twitter. That was probably a bargain: under his watch, Chrome has gone from zero to hero, overtaking Firefox in market share in late 2011. That’s a tremendous achievement, and it took just three years.

10. Marc Benioff, Salesforce

[Image credit: Robert Scoble CC Attribution]

The multi-award winning chairman and CEO of Salesforce.com calls himself “a student of Steve Jobs”, but he’s come a long way from his days writing assembly language for Apple: quick to spot the potential of cloud computing, Benioff declared war on traditional software and built a $16 billion business. His eye’s on social media now, with tools to help firms communicate internally, spot potential customers and mollify angry existing ones, and he also pioneered a model of philanthropy called the 1/1/1 rule: employees contribute 1% of profits, 1% of equity and 1% of working hours to the local community. Other firms, such as Google, have followed Benioff’s example.

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BBX: 10 things you need to know

The future of BlackBerry is HTML5 plus the same QNX operating system that’s in the PlayBook – and also in many cars, set-top boxes and even nuclear power stations.

The next version of the BlackBerry OS will be called BlackBerry 10 or BB10 (not BBX after a lawsuit was filed), it will run on phones as well as tablets and it’s a big change from the current BlackBerry OS (based on a mobile version of Java).

It also means rewriting all the BlackBerry apps out there, including RIM’s own apps like email and calendar, which we still haven’t seen on the PlayBook.

We don’t know the BB10 release date, although we’re expecting to see it next year – but here’s what we do know.

1. BlackBerry 10 isn’t the next version of the PlayBook OS

There’s an update coming for the PlayBook, called PlayBook OS 2.0, which adds key missing apps like email and BBM, but that’s not BB 10 and it won’t have all the BlackBerry features that BlackBerry 10 will include like voice search and push notification for apps.

RIM VP Chris Smith told TechRadar: “The vision is that all the native services in BlackBerry – whether that’s enterprise integration or push or payments, the vision is those services will still be available for developers to plug in to. They will come across onto BBX in the future but it’s incorrect to say they’ll be there on PlayBook 2 out of the gate.”

NOT BBX: The beta of the PlayBook OS 2.0 update looks just like the PlayBook

2. The beta isn’t BB 10 and you don’t want it

If you want to upgrade your PlayBook you can get a beta version today, but this is strictly a developer preview (and the instructions for signing up for the preview are suitably arcane.)

It doesn’t include any of the applications that will be in the PlayBook 2.0 operating system like email, calendar, contacts and BBM, although all the apps that came with the original PlayBook still work just as well.

What it does have is Air 3 and Flash Player 11, the latest version of the Bolt HTML5 browser and the runtime for using Android apps that have been repackaged by developers for BlackBerry – but unless you have your own Android source code to work with, you won’t see Android running.

3. BlackBerry 10 won’t run BlackBerry apps

When the PlayBook first came out, RIM talked about building a BlackBerry emulator so you could keep your existing apps. That’s not going to happen.

“I don’t want to tell you it was an easy decision,” the new head of developer evangelism at RIM Alec Saunders told TechRadar; “we spent a lot of energy on getting the BlackBerry Java platform to run in BBX.”

But when they looked at how the apps would compare to what you could build on BB10 with QNX, HTML5 and AIR, “it would look like a diminished experience”.

4. But BBX will run Android apps

BBX and PlayBook OS 2.0 will run Android apps, but you can’t just download them from Android Marketplace – they have to be repackaged for BlackBerry 10. That doesn’t mean changing the code but the developer has to take the .APK source code and use the RIM tools to turn it into an app.

And not every Android app can be repackaged, Saunders explained to us. “As an Android OEM you get to licence Google Maps. We’re not an Android OEM, so we don’t. If you have an app that relies on Google Maps it won’t run but there are about 70% of apps that will come across unchanged.”

SOME ANDROID: Not all Android apps can be packaged for BB10 but the Pulse social media client looks good on the PlayBook

5. HTML5 and Flash are the future

The Bolt browser for the BlackBerry is based on WebKit and ex-co-CEO Mike Lazaridis said RIM will be “investing in making sure we have the best HTML5 implementation in the world”.

It’s not just about web pages. RIM VP Alan Brenner told us he expects “the vast majority” of apps to be HTML5 within a few years. Developers can start work now; HTML5 and Air apps that work with BlackBerry 7 will also run on BB10.

The PlayBook is getting Flash Player 11 and Air 3 (the runtime that Photoshop Touch for Android is built in) in the next update. That puts RIM in head-to-head competition with Android tablets and it might come down to who can do the best job of connecting phone features like push notification to Web apps; RIM is promising to let Web apps integrate deeply with BlackBerry 10 features like the inbox and BBM.

SPECIAL EFFECTS: The RIM browser team is working on HTML5 standards and tools, like the AliceJS library to make it easier to do animations in CSS

6. It looks like only one phone will launch with BB 10

Despite the song and dance that RIM has made about its next-gen BlackBerry 10 handsets, sources say the company now only has one so-called ‘superphone’ under development.

The two handsets codenamed BlackBerry Colt and BlackBerry Milan have reportedly been kicked to the curb by the Canadian company, with only the BlackBerry London still in the running.

According to BGR‘s sources, despite some minor design changes, the London still looks very much like the leaked prototype we reported on back in October 2011.

7. Native is the future too

Thanks to QNX, BB10 – and the PlayBook today – can run the same kind of C++ code as a PC, Mac or console and most of the major gaming engines like Unity, Marmalade and ShiVa3D are now available for building PlayBook games, so you’ll see games using the same animation engine as on the PlayStation 3.

RIM is building a lot of open source projects right into the platform for developers to work with – including the Qt framework that was at the heart of Intel and Nokia’s ill-fated Meego operating system. That gives developers who are used to other platforms a lot of tools to build apps with that other mobile devices don’t have.

8. There’s lots of 3D: meet Cascades

Forget the boring black and blue BlackBerry interface; BB 10 apps will have 3D effects and animations so pages flip on and off screen, lists fold up like a concertina when you filter them and photographs curl slightly at the side like a real print.

That’s courtesy of user interface company The Amazing Tribe that RIM bought last year; they’ve written a user interface framework on top of Qt called Cascades that makes it easy to create those kinds of special effects.

The PlayBook picture viewer actually uses an early version of this but BlackBerry 10 will have far more effects and any app can use them.

3D LOOK: Cascades makes on-screen pictures look real and BB10 apps look more elegant

9. Think PlayBook in the car

The current PlayBook OS is based on the version of QNX built for car makers and “the next generation of QNX for cars is going to be built from BBX,” Alec Saunders told us; car makers are keen to use HTML5 for in-car information and entertainment.

That makes it easier to treat your car as another device, he suggested, and to share information. “Ultimately you will be able to transition from your smartphone to your tablet to your TV to your car. Sync will be important. I think you’ll start to see devices do things like Bridge today, where it mirrors [on the PlayBook] what’s on the BlackBerry handset.

“You’ll use one device to access what’s on another. QNX is made for these kind of scenarios, projecting information from one device to another. You won’t have five devices and have all your content on everything; it’s going to have to grow seamlessly across them.”

10. BlackBerry 7 isn’t dead yet

There will be BlackBerry 10 phones; “future unnamed devices” as Alec Saunders mysteriously puts it. But BlackBerry 7 phones will be on sale for quite a while, with new models launched recently and there will be new services coming out for BlackBerry 6 and 7 like the BBM Music social media sharing system.

RIM’s going to have to compete with Honeycomb tablets (and probably Ice Cream Sandwich ones too) with the PlayBook 2.0 update; BB 10 will probably come out in time to compete with Windows 8.

11. BlackBerry 10 is / isn’t delayed

RIM was forced to hit back at reports that it lied about the reason for the delay in bringing the next generation of BlackBerry phones to the market.

Boy Genius Report posted a story claiming that phones running the new BB10 operation system had been pushed back because RIM did “not have a working product.”

This contradicted the Canadians’ assertion that BB10 handsets would not arrive until later in 2012 because it was waiting for new LTE chipsets to be manufactured.

RIM’s full statement reads: “RIM made a strategic decision to launch BlackBerry 10 devices with a new, LTE-based dual-core chipset architecture. As explained on our earnings call, the broad engineering impact of this decision and certain other factors significantly influenced the anticipated timing for the BlackBerry 10 devices.

“The anonymous claim suggesting otherwise is inaccurate and uninformed. As RIM has previously explained, and as Mike Lazaridis reiterated on the earnings call, we will not launch BlackBerry 10 devices until we know they are ready and we believe this new chipset architecture is required to deliver the world-class user experience that our customers will expect. Any suggestion to the contrary is simply false.

“We appreciate the interest in our future platform and we will continue to work hard to deliver that platform as soon as possible. At the same time, we also remain very excited with the success of our recently launched BlackBerry 7 smartphones and we believe these products offer a very compelling choice for both new customers and the almost 75 million BlackBerry users around the world.”

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10 best iOS apps for keeping in touch

It’s more or less inevitable that, sooner or later, you’ll spend a holiday season apart from someone special to you.

Whether it’s a sibling freshly emigrated to sunnier climes or a close friend who has moved cities to take up a new job, we all know the dull ache that comes from missing someone during an important time.

Fortunately, as technology has got cleverer and cleverer, it has also become easier and cheaper to stay in touch. With broadband near-ubiquitous in the first world, and gaining a substantial foothold elsewhere, it’s become the norm to fire up Skype in an evening or early morning to chat with a far-flung friend or relative via a video call, all without spending a penny – something that was firmly the preserve of science fiction books and films until recently.

The myriad of ways to stay in touch with people – phoning, chatting via text or sending physical reminders through the post – have also made it to your iOS device, and sometimes in spectacular ways. You might find yourself sending your gran a postcard while you’re on your way home from work, or calling a friend in New York for free over your iPhone’s 3G connection, for instance.

Alternatively, you might use Blurb to create a completely new take on the traditional family Christmas letter by creating a bespoke ebook to share with friends and relatives. Or, you might make complicated family outings over Christmas easier by getting a few relatives connected to Google’s Latitude service, avoiding the spectre of losing Uncle Roger on the New Year’s Day hike.

We’ve rounded up the apps that will best help you to stay in touch, whether your loved ones are in the next room or on another continent entirely . Read on to uncover the very best available!

01. Skype

Price: Free, subscriptions available
Works with: iPhone, iPod touch, iPad

Skype is closing in on 700 million users – and if that alone isn’t enough to prove that it’s one of the most successful technologies of our age, consider the fact that it’s one of only a handful to become a verb. It’s easy to see why, too – its service is efficient, high-quality and surprisingly resilient in the face of low-bandwidth connections.

If you’ve got a device with a front-facing video camera – think the iPhone 4 and 4S, the iPad 2 and the fourth-generation iPod touch – then video calling works in much the same way as FaceTime. If you’ve got a device with a rear-facing camera, Skype still makes an attempt at video calling, although if you want your friend to see your face you’ll need to find a convenient mirror. It can still be a fun way of streaming a family get together to a distant relative, however.

Most impressive is Skype’s ability to with-stand a dodgy internet connection. For video purposes, this means even geographically distant relatives can be near-instantaneously chatted with, even if both participants are on standard broadband connections. We’ve had some notable successes making surprisingly clear voice calls on patchy wireless signals in far-flung places.

The app is a fully featured piece of telephony software: the ability to take part in (but not host) multi-person conferences, put people on hold and mute your device’s mic are all included. Skype can also communicate with Bluetooth headsets – ideal for iPod touch users, some of whom need to supply their own headset with a microphone.

Best of all, Skype is free. If you’re calling a fellow Skype user, there’s no charge for either voice calling or video calling, and unlike FaceTime, Skype is multi-platform. If your interlocutor is on another iOS device, things will work fine – but the same applies if they’re on a desktop PC, a Symbian mobile device or an Android tablet or phone.

If you’re trying to get in touch with people who aren’t on Skype, but are on standard landlines, you can use Skype’s apps to get in touch with them as well, for a very reasonable price. The apps themselves behave slightly differently depending on whether you’re paying for Skype.

If you’ve only got a free account then the apps are ad-supported. You may well find Skype worth paying for, however.

There are some imperfect elements to the apps, however. For one thing, although Skype allows Push notifications, it doesn’t ‘ring’ unless it’s running in the background on your device, and there’s lots of anecdotal evidence suggesting that leaving Skype running all day is a great way to run down your battery. This is particularly true if the only data connection you have is 3G, which is much harder on batteries than Wi-Fi.

However, as a way to get in touch with people, wherever they are, and whatever kind of internet connection they have, either for free or for very little cost, there’s currently nothing out there to touch Skype.

02. Google Latitude

Price: Free
Works with: iPhone, iPod touch

Whether you think Google Latitude is cool or desperately creepy will depend on your perspective. The app harnesses Google’s aptitude for mapping and geolocation, as well as your iOS device’s ability to locate itself, and puts the two together to create an app that not only knows exactly where you are – as the standard Maps app does – but also broadcasts that information.

Crucially, it only broadcasts that information within a strict set of parameters. This isn’t like Facebook, where anyone can add you as a friend. You log in with your Google account (for power users, Google Apps accounts are supported), and then you can invite others to share their locations with you.

When someone sends you a request, you can confirm or deny it, and you can also set overriding settings for all the people you’ve already confirmed – setting a location manually, for instance, or not sharing one at all.

Given a big enough group of friends it’s a fun app to have, and can certainly come in handy if you’re trying to find someone either in a big crowd (think shopping on Oxford Street) or in a large space (a festival, perhaps).

The app – which isn’t Universal, but can function on all iOS devices (iPod touches can still use geolocation services when they can see some Wi-Fi networks) – works well, although a curious blind spot occurs when you try to get directions to another Latitude member: it switches to the Maps app, despite containing a map itself.

It’s also worth bearing in mind that Latitude updates your location even when the app isn’t running – so this is one app definitely worth keeping an eye on once you start using it.

03. Verbs IM

Price: 69p
Works with: iPhone, iPod touch, iPad

The good thing about Skype is that it’s got a huge number of users. Annoyingly, though, not everyone uses it, and chances are your friends are spread over a fairly wide range of social-networking and instant-messaging services. Enter Verbs, which consolidates services with hundreds of millions of users into one tidy, pared-back app.

Verbs covers Google Talk, AOL Instant Messenger, MobileMe and Facebook, and getting started is as simple as supplying your credentials for each service. From the home screen you can either sort your contacts so they’re shown by the service they’re subscribed to, or you can show all of your offline and online contacts at the same time.

Each chat with a different contact takes place in its own window, using the same animations and layout as Safari’s multiple windows. Unusually for an instant messenger app, there’s a file-sharing option, which gives you the option of connecting to either CloudApp or Droplr to share images.

Verbs works through the XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol), an open standard used by the chat services it supports. That means it’s possible to use other apps to chat with users on multiple services, such as AOL’s AIM for iPad app – not covered in depth here because it’s iPad-only.

Verbs is imperfect in other ways. For instance, it’s somewhat galling to buy an app (admittedly, for a fairly paltry fee, though) and then be offered Push notifications in return for spending another £2.99 in an In-App Purchase. (Verbs Pro also offers to save battery life by routing all your logged-in accounts through a single connection, which could be valuable.)

Still, if you’ve got lots of contacts split across several services, Verbs is likely to cover a lot of them in one fell swoop, even if it can’t claim to do everything.

04. Windows Live Messenger

Price: Free
Works with: iPhone, iPod touch

We at Tap! can’t find much to recommend Windows Live Mail over services such as iCloud or Gmail, but Windows Live Messenger is another kettle of fish. For one thing, it’s estimated to have over 300 million users per month, so it’s likely that someone you’re fond of uses it to stay in touch, making this free app a sensible addition to your device.

The app’s headline feature is its ability to connect Windows Live Messenger with data from other services. In this case the big fish is Facebook, but WLM can also dial into Yahoo!’s Y! Messenger, as well as providing connectivity to Flickr and, er, MySpace, for those lodged in the previous decade.

The app itself works really well: instant messaging text chats run smoothly, and handy notifications pop up if a message appears when the app isn’t at the front and centre of your screen.

Slightly disappointingly, the email feature turns out to be merely a wrapper for the mobile version of Windows Live Mail, but this app is otherwise a solid option for those wanting to stay connected to people solidly wedded to Microsoft’s social media efforts.

05. Facebook

Price: Free
Works with: iPhone, iPod touch, iPad

The Facebook app is the world’s biggest social-networking site is glorious in its iOS incarnation, with big, easy-to-use icons, plenty of detail and lightning performance, even on older devices like the iPhone 3G.

There’s plenty of use made of Push notifications, so relevant activity – such as someone commenting on your status or tagging you in a photo – appears instantly, allowing you to take immediate action.

Privacy advocates can take some comfort in the fact that the full range of account actions – including removing your details from Facebook entirely – can be done from the app. For those signed up to sharing their lives, this is an effective, free way of staying in touch, and its its unwaning popularity only bolsters its appeal.

06. Bump

Price: Free
Works with: iPhone, iPod touch

Bump is an ingenious free app that detects nearby Bump-enabled phones and lets you quickly send images, contacts, calendar entries and plenty more by ‘bumping’ your phones with the person in question.

Once two phones become aware they’ve been bumped, your image (for instance) is sent over the web, so this isn’t a potentially handy peer-to-peer connection: you need to be online. You can also send data to people further afield by adding friends from your address book.

When Bump has a connection it works sensationally well, and it’s such a light download that it’s worth recommending whenever you need to send things to anyone.

Perhaps our favourite feature is the social networking aspect, which connects to Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Choose the appropriate network and bump phones, and your request will show up immediately, saving your new friend the hassle of searching for you online. Nice!

07. Tweetbot

Price: £1.99
Works with: iPhone, iPod touch

For communicating with your wider network of friends and colleagues, we wouldn’t be without Twitter. The trick is finding an app that distils the data into a manageable trickle, and Tweetbot fits the bill.

At its heart it’s a Twitter client not unlike the free official version, giving you the ability to quickly manage tweets from others, as well as being able to view retweets, track conversation threads and contribute your own voice to the conversation.

Along the way, there are plenty of gestures. For instance, a swipe right gives you the conversation history between two people – useful for getting to the bottom of what’s caused the latest spat. The app is extremely fast, and supports Twitter add-ons such as the bit.ly URL shortener, various image and video hosts, and adding to your read-later pile via the superb Instapaper, along with a few others. If only it were available for the iPad.

08. WhatsApp Messenger

Price: 69p
Works with: iPhone

iMessage is one of our favourite iOS 5 features, but the limitation of only being able to communicate with other iOS users is grinding. WhatsApp Messenger is effectively a cheap way of bringing multi-platform text messaging to your device.

You don’t send messages to a particular phone number, but to other WhatsApp users. This is still fairly restrictive, but the WhatsApp app is available on iOS, Android, various flavours of Symbian, Windows Phone 7 and BlackBerry, so there’s plenty of scope for your friends to join in with the fun (and you can invite them from within the app).

You can create group conversations, send images and videos, share your location and even record audio notes, though Skype remains our firm favourite for voice chatting. But with plenty of Push notifications, WhatsApp is a clean, very well-featured way of messaging anyone on a compatible device.

09. Cards

Price: Free
Works with: iPhone, iPod touch

Apple has a good reputation when it comes to designing and producing many printed goods, as anyone who’s bought a photo book through iPhoto or Aperture will attest. Cards is an app that brings Apple’s attention to detail to bear on the humble art of printing greetings cards. And if you’re horribly behind on this year’s quota, Cards gives you a great chance to send cards out while you’re on the go.

The app is classic Apple. It’s simple and gracefully animated, giving you a clear impression of where you’ve come from and where you’re going. It’s also iPhone-only, though, which seems like rather a waste. Creating a card – the finished versions of which are printed on heavy cotton paper – is simple.

You can add an image from your own camera roll or, better still, an image side-loaded to your phone through iPhoto. Positioning and sizing a shot is simple, as is adding text to the interior. Once done, tap in an address on the envelope (Americans, the lucky souls, can even add bespoke stamps) and tap in the price. Cards cost £3.99 to the UK, and this price includes the postage.

10. Blurb Mobile

Price: Free
Works with: iPhone, iPod touch, iPad

Those interested in photography are likely to know what Blurb is already. For everyone else, it’s a company that creates beautifully bound and printed photobooks. Blurb Mobile is the company’s attempt to bring that self-publishing magic to the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch.

The idea is simple – pick a number of photos (the free version gets you up to eight; purchase the Plus version for £1.49 through an In-App Purchase to bump that up to 15), and have them either placed independently or in a layout.

Next choose a theme, then publish your mini ebook to Blurb, where you can either have it accessible to anyone with the right URL, or the world in general. You can write captions, or even include audio clips. It’s an ingenious way of putting a modern spin on the round-robin family letter.

10 best iOS apps for keeping in touch

It’s more or less inevitable that, sooner or later, you’ll spend a holiday season apart from someone special to you.

Whether it’s a sibling freshly emigrated to sunnier climes or a close friend who has moved cities to take up a new job, we all know the dull ache that comes from missing someone during an important time.

Fortunately, as technology has got cleverer and cleverer, it has also become easier and cheaper to stay in touch. With broadband near-ubiquitous in the first world, and gaining a substantial foothold elsewhere, it’s become the norm to fire up Skype in an evening or early morning to chat with a far-flung friend or relative via a video call, all without spending a penny – something that was firmly the preserve of science fiction books and films until recently.

The myriad of ways to stay in touch with people – phoning, chatting via text or sending physical reminders through the post – have also made it to your iOS device, and sometimes in spectacular ways. You might find yourself sending your gran a postcard while you’re on your way home from work, or calling a friend in New York for free over your iPhone’s 3G connection, for instance.

Alternatively, you might use Blurb to create a completely new take on the traditional family Christmas letter by creating a bespoke ebook to share with friends and relatives. Or, you might make complicated family outings over Christmas easier by getting a few relatives connected to Google’s Latitude service, avoiding the spectre of losing Uncle Roger on the New Year’s Day hike.

We’ve rounded up the apps that will best help you to stay in touch, whether your loved ones are in the next room or on another continent entirely . Read on to uncover the very best available!

01. Skype

Price: Free, subscriptions available
Works with: iPhone, iPod touch, iPad

Skype is closing in on 700 million users – and if that alone isn’t enough to prove that it’s one of the most successful technologies of our age, consider the fact that it’s one of only a handful to become a verb. It’s easy to see why, too – its service is efficient, high-quality and surprisingly resilient in the face of low-bandwidth connections.

If you’ve got a device with a front-facing video camera – think the iPhone 4 and 4S, the iPad 2 and the fourth-generation iPod touch – then video calling works in much the same way as FaceTime. If you’ve got a device with a rear-facing camera, Skype still makes an attempt at video calling, although if you want your friend to see your face you’ll need to find a convenient mirror. It can still be a fun way of streaming a family get together to a distant relative, however.

Most impressive is Skype’s ability to with-stand a dodgy internet connection. For video purposes, this means even geographically distant relatives can be near-instantaneously chatted with, even if both participants are on standard broadband connections. We’ve had some notable successes making surprisingly clear voice calls on patchy wireless signals in far-flung places.

The app is a fully featured piece of telephony software: the ability to take part in (but not host) multi-person conferences, put people on hold and mute your device’s mic are all included. Skype can also communicate with Bluetooth headsets – ideal for iPod touch users, some of whom need to supply their own headset with a microphone.

Best of all, Skype is free. If you’re calling a fellow Skype user, there’s no charge for either voice calling or video calling, and unlike FaceTime, Skype is multi-platform. If your interlocutor is on another iOS device, things will work fine – but the same applies if they’re on a desktop PC, a Symbian mobile device or an Android tablet or phone.

If you’re trying to get in touch with people who aren’t on Skype, but are on standard landlines, you can use Skype’s apps to get in touch with them as well, for a very reasonable price. The apps themselves behave slightly differently depending on whether you’re paying for Skype.

If you’ve only got a free account then the apps are ad-supported. You may well find Skype worth paying for, however.

There are some imperfect elements to the apps, however. For one thing, although Skype allows Push notifications, it doesn’t ‘ring’ unless it’s running in the background on your device, and there’s lots of anecdotal evidence suggesting that leaving Skype running all day is a great way to run down your battery. This is particularly true if the only data connection you have is 3G, which is much harder on batteries than Wi-Fi.

However, as a way to get in touch with people, wherever they are, and whatever kind of internet connection they have, either for free or for very little cost, there’s currently nothing out there to touch Skype.

02. Google Latitude

Price: Free
Works with: iPhone, iPod touch

Whether you think Google Latitude is cool or desperately creepy will depend on your perspective. The app harnesses Google’s aptitude for mapping and geolocation, as well as your iOS device’s ability to locate itself, and puts the two together to create an app that not only knows exactly where you are – as the standard Maps app does – but also broadcasts that information.

Crucially, it only broadcasts that information within a strict set of parameters. This isn’t like Facebook, where anyone can add you as a friend. You log in with your Google account (for power users, Google Apps accounts are supported), and then you can invite others to share their locations with you.

When someone sends you a request, you can confirm or deny it, and you can also set overriding settings for all the people you’ve already confirmed – setting a location manually, for instance, or not sharing one at all.

Given a big enough group of friends it’s a fun app to have, and can certainly come in handy if you’re trying to find someone either in a big crowd (think shopping on Oxford Street) or in a large space (a festival, perhaps).

The app – which isn’t Universal, but can function on all iOS devices (iPod touches can still use geolocation services when they can see some Wi-Fi networks) – works well, although a curious blind spot occurs when you try to get directions to another Latitude member: it switches to the Maps app, despite containing a map itself.

It’s also worth bearing in mind that Latitude updates your location even when the app isn’t running – so this is one app definitely worth keeping an eye on once you start using it.

03. Verbs IM

Price: 69p
Works with: iPhone, iPod touch, iPad

The good thing about Skype is that it’s got a huge number of users. Annoyingly, though, not everyone uses it, and chances are your friends are spread over a fairly wide range of social-networking and instant-messaging services. Enter Verbs, which consolidates services with hundreds of millions of users into one tidy, pared-back app.

Verbs covers Google Talk, AOL Instant Messenger, MobileMe and Facebook, and getting started is as simple as supplying your credentials for each service. From the home screen you can either sort your contacts so they’re shown by the service they’re subscribed to, or you can show all of your offline and online contacts at the same time.

Each chat with a different contact takes place in its own window, using the same animations and layout as Safari’s multiple windows. Unusually for an instant messenger app, there’s a file-sharing option, which gives you the option of connecting to either CloudApp or Droplr to share images.

Verbs works through the XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol), an open standard used by the chat services it supports. That means it’s possible to use other apps to chat with users on multiple services, such as AOL’s AIM for iPad app – not covered in depth here because it’s iPad-only.

Verbs is imperfect in other ways. For instance, it’s somewhat galling to buy an app (admittedly, for a fairly paltry fee, though) and then be offered Push notifications in return for spending another £2.99 in an In-App Purchase. (Verbs Pro also offers to save battery life by routing all your logged-in accounts through a single connection, which could be valuable.)

Still, if you’ve got lots of contacts split across several services, Verbs is likely to cover a lot of them in one fell swoop, even if it can’t claim to do everything.

04. Windows Live Messenger

Price: Free
Works with: iPhone, iPod touch

We at Tap! can’t find much to recommend Windows Live Mail over services such as iCloud or Gmail, but Windows Live Messenger is another kettle of fish. For one thing, it’s estimated to have over 300 million users per month, so it’s likely that someone you’re fond of uses it to stay in touch, making this free app a sensible addition to your device.

The app’s headline feature is its ability to connect Windows Live Messenger with data from other services. In this case the big fish is Facebook, but WLM can also dial into Yahoo!’s Y! Messenger, as well as providing connectivity to Flickr and, er, MySpace, for those lodged in the previous decade.

The app itself works really well: instant messaging text chats run smoothly, and handy notifications pop up if a message appears when the app isn’t at the front and centre of your screen.

Slightly disappointingly, the email feature turns out to be merely a wrapper for the mobile version of Windows Live Mail, but this app is otherwise a solid option for those wanting to stay connected to people solidly wedded to Microsoft’s social media efforts.

05. Facebook

Price: Free
Works with: iPhone, iPod touch, iPad

The Facebook app is the world’s biggest social-networking site is glorious in its iOS incarnation, with big, easy-to-use icons, plenty of detail and lightning performance, even on older devices like the iPhone 3G.

There’s plenty of use made of Push notifications, so relevant activity – such as someone commenting on your status or tagging you in a photo – appears instantly, allowing you to take immediate action.

Privacy advocates can take some comfort in the fact that the full range of account actions – including removing your details from Facebook entirely – can be done from the app. For those signed up to sharing their lives, this is an effective, free way of staying in touch, and its its unwaning popularity only bolsters its appeal.

06. Bump

Price: Free
Works with: iPhone, iPod touch

Bump is an ingenious free app that detects nearby Bump-enabled phones and lets you quickly send images, contacts, calendar entries and plenty more by ‘bumping’ your phones with the person in question.

Once two phones become aware they’ve been bumped, your image (for instance) is sent over the web, so this isn’t a potentially handy peer-to-peer connection: you need to be online. You can also send data to people further afield by adding friends from your address book.

When Bump has a connection it works sensationally well, and it’s such a light download that it’s worth recommending whenever you need to send things to anyone.

Perhaps our favourite feature is the social networking aspect, which connects to Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Choose the appropriate network and bump phones, and your request will show up immediately, saving your new friend the hassle of searching for you online. Nice!

07. Tweetbot

Price: £1.99
Works with: iPhone, iPod touch

For communicating with your wider network of friends and colleagues, we wouldn’t be without Twitter. The trick is finding an app that distils the data into a manageable trickle, and Tweetbot fits the bill.

At its heart it’s a Twitter client not unlike the free official version, giving you the ability to quickly manage tweets from others, as well as being able to view retweets, track conversation threads and contribute your own voice to the conversation.

Along the way, there are plenty of gestures. For instance, a swipe right gives you the conversation history between two people – useful for getting to the bottom of what’s caused the latest spat. The app is extremely fast, and supports Twitter add-ons such as the bit.ly URL shortener, various image and video hosts, and adding to your read-later pile via the superb Instapaper, along with a few others. If only it were available for the iPad.

08. WhatsApp Messenger

Price: 69p
Works with: iPhone

iMessage is one of our favourite iOS 5 features, but the limitation of only being able to communicate with other iOS users is grinding. WhatsApp Messenger is effectively a cheap way of bringing multi-platform text messaging to your device.

You don’t send messages to a particular phone number, but to other WhatsApp users. This is still fairly restrictive, but the WhatsApp app is available on iOS, Android, various flavours of Symbian, Windows Phone 7 and BlackBerry, so there’s plenty of scope for your friends to join in with the fun (and you can invite them from within the app).

You can create group conversations, send images and videos, share your location and even record audio notes, though Skype remains our firm favourite for voice chatting. But with plenty of Push notifications, WhatsApp is a clean, very well-featured way of messaging anyone on a compatible device.

09. Cards

Price: Free
Works with: iPhone, iPod touch

Apple has a good reputation when it comes to designing and producing many printed goods, as anyone who’s bought a photo book through iPhoto or Aperture will attest. Cards is an app that brings Apple’s attention to detail to bear on the humble art of printing greetings cards. And if you’re horribly behind on this year’s quota, Cards gives you a great chance to send cards out while you’re on the go.

The app is classic Apple. It’s simple and gracefully animated, giving you a clear impression of where you’ve come from and where you’re going. It’s also iPhone-only, though, which seems like rather a waste. Creating a card – the finished versions of which are printed on heavy cotton paper – is simple.

You can add an image from your own camera roll or, better still, an image side-loaded to your phone through iPhoto. Positioning and sizing a shot is simple, as is adding text to the interior. Once done, tap in an address on the envelope (Americans, the lucky souls, can even add bespoke stamps) and tap in the price. Cards cost £3.99 to the UK, and this price includes the postage.

10. Blurb Mobile

Price: Free
Works with: iPhone, iPod touch, iPad

Those interested in photography are likely to know what Blurb is already. For everyone else, it’s a company that creates beautifully bound and printed photobooks. Blurb Mobile is the company’s attempt to bring that self-publishing magic to the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch.

The idea is simple – pick a number of photos (the free version gets you up to eight; purchase the Plus version for £1.49 through an In-App Purchase to bump that up to 15), and have them either placed independently or in a layout.

Next choose a theme, then publish your mini ebook to Blurb, where you can either have it accessible to anyone with the right URL, or the world in general. You can write captions, or even include audio clips. It’s an ingenious way of putting a modern spin on the round-robin family letter.

Intel’s Ultrabook vision

Dan Belton is the consumer and retail director for Intel UK. His main responsibilities include engaging with the principal UK retailers and OEMs to bring consumer platforms and technologies to market.

We asked him all about Ultrabooks.

How excited is Intel about Ultrabooks?

The first thing I would say about Ultrabooks is that this is a really big deal for Intel. We see it as a big deal, as big as when we launched Centrino eight and a half years ago. This is a really exciting category that gives consumers the features and form factor that they love in laptops, but also delivers the features they are beginning to really enjoy with tablet PCs, such as instant-on.

So the ‘ultra’ part of it isn’t just that it’s ultra-thin and ultra-cool looking, which it is. It’s about the ultra-capabilities that we’re going to be building into these systems – security features, battery power, instant-on and standby. It’s massively exciting for us; we have big ambitions and we’re pleased to see how the OEMs are really getting behind the product.

What is the philosophy behind the Ultrabook?

We’ve always been at the forefront of creating categories and form factors. Our new Sandy Bridge products are delivering high performance for the consumer, but more importantly, they’re also delivering really fantastic visual capabilities for things such as photos, videos – even some gaming. In some cases our Sandy Bridge Core i5 and i7 products are running games as fast as a graphics card would.

I think this is a response to what we see happening in the market, and we think that users are definitely still buying lots of laptops. We’re still seeing lots of growth in that, but the extension of use of computing is becoming so important, hence the need to have these more beautiful, slimmer designs.

We also need that capability built into the systems that add this instant-on connection with the added security features you get with a laptop. This is definitely where people are moving in terms of the type of computing they’re doing.

You’ve said that the OEMS are really excited about Ultrabooks. How much interest has there been from the industry?

Yes, you may have seen launches from companies like Acer, Asus, Toshiba and Lenovo, and we expect the other big manufacturers to be coming on stream in the early part of next year as well. So there is a broad interest.

You know, as much as anything else, this is good for the consumers, because they are getting very feature-rich products in a great form factor. But it’s good for the industry as well in terms of hitting that sweet price point of around £699 to £899. This is something that the OEMs and the retailers have been looking how to do with new and exciting technologies.

Ultrabooks are the thing that’s driving that for them, and you’ve got a rich ecosystem behind it, around those people that are buying it, and some of the applications and services that we’ll see coming through with it as well. We know from what’s going on in the market that this is a really compelling proposition.

You’ve mentioned the sweet spot, price wise, of around £699 to £899. At the moment prices for Ultrabooks are around £1,000. There have been some concerns that this price is too high.

The prices will come down. Actually, what’s happened is that some of the products are coming in with Core i5 and Core i7 at launch. So you’ve seen Acer and Asus launch at around the price you’ve described, but as the volume goes up, like any commercial model, going forward our expectation is that the prices will adjust themselves. The target price was always $1,000, which turns out to be around £699.

How much market share is Intel hoping to get with the Ultrabook?

We have an aggressive target that 40 per cent of consumer laptops will be Ultrabooks this time next year.

One of the Ultrabook’s biggest competitors is the MacBook Air. Why should people buy an Ultrabook over a MacBook Air?

This is a question that a lot of people have asked, and we can’t deny that the MacBook Air is a very good product and Apple is a very good partner of Intel on those products. But there is the fact that there are people used to the Windows environment as well and this is what Ultrabooks are going to provide and it’s going to offer a broadening of brands that they’re used to buying within a form factor that they are looking for.

So are you working closely with Microsoft then?

We always do. Our connection with Microsoft almost dates back to when we both started, and we have a very tight working relationship with the company.

With Windows 8 launching, you’ve mentioned that there are going to be touch capabilities in the future. Can you explain more about that?

We expect that as our technology develops around the new platforms for Ivy Bridge and so forth, we’ll absolutely see those sorts of capabilities become more involved and integrated with the product.

I can tell you that’s within our roadmap, so whether that will be in the OEMs’ roadmaps as we go forward – we’ll learn that in the future. We certainly see touch as part of the proposition of the future.

Has Intel issued a set of standards that products must meet to be called Ultrabooks?

We have. It’s things like what we call the ‘Z’ height, which is the thickness. It also has technical capabilities within the platform as well, around SSD and various other bits. In late 2011 you’ll begin to see systems that offer thin and light designs that are less than 21mm thick, and some much thinner than that.

System must also have ultra-fast startup. The PC should wake up almost instantly for quick access to your data and applications. They should also have a minimum of five hours’ battery life.

So do you expect people to walk into a shop and ask for an Ultrabook instead of a laptop or a netbook?

Well, we’ve just started [laughs] so you know… Certainly the early signs are very encouraging. We’ve only just gone on the shelves and the products, we believe, are starting to sell out, so that’s encouraging.

We’ll certainly be putting a lot of effort into describing the benefits associated with Ultrabooks in the future, so that will incorporate full retail merchandising, above the line activities and social media with a view to positioning the Ultrabook as the product that people are really going to want to buy. I think that when they get it in their hands and use it, I think they will see that it the product people will want to buy in the future.

Are you using one at the moment?

I’m waiting for mine to come. I should be getting one fairly shortly, and I’m going to be using it at home. In fact, I’m buying my Ultrabook with my own money, I want one so badly!

What does the future hold for Intel and Ultrabooks?

The future looks fantastically bright. We’ve got great products coming through, and the Ultrabook is absolutely one of those. We’ve got a great understanding of the consumer journey. We’ve got great channel models, and as far as we’re concerned we’re going to invest heavily in the value parts of the market and we’ll drive value for the consumer and for our partners, or retailers, for OEMs. That covers the future of consumer computers as well. The future’s very bright.