Hello and welcome to another mjelly.com mobile 2.0 service of the week here at Mobile Zeitgeist. This week we are going to take a look at the only real player challenging the major online players in mobile search and that’s Taptu. I recently saw the CEO Steve Ives speak at the Mobile Web Summit in London and had a chat with him afterwards – so here’s the lowdown about one of the most ambitious mobile startups out there right now.
Taptu is a mobile-focused search engine
Taptu is a mobile-only search engine that covers a range of content including websites, video, images, news, blogs, music lyrics and wikis. Taptu only delivers mobile-ready sites and content whereas the mobile versions of online search engines like Google will often push services that are not optimized for mobile, using transcoders. Taptu uses a range of approaches to rank content not just page rank / links for example they use “socially assisted scoring” e.g. the number of plays for a youtube video to decide which is most popular, and “human assisted scoring” – human intervention to deliver search results in popular categories. Taptu has really invested heavily in user-experience and design and as a result they have a beautiful, clean mobile site which is a great benchmark for anyone building mobile services.
Taptu is based in Cambridge in the UK and they have raised 2 rounds of funding ..
Taptu hits 3.4 m monthly uniques and 1m searches per day
The Taptu service is starting to gain traction, especially in the US after being operational for quite a while but not really gaining much traffic. The latest figures from the company suggest that it is really starting to hit critical mass in terms of usage which is really encouraging:
- 60% of Taptu’s audience is based in the USA
- volumes have grown from 0.25m searches in Dec 07, 2.5m to June 08 and 25m by April 09
- currently have hit 3.4m unique users a month, and claim 1m searches per day
With an iphone app in the works, Taptu could soon be seeing even greater search volumes – all the evidence suggests that moblie search is very valuable for advertisers on mobile so they could be onto a good thing.
Taptu are saying that the future of the mobile web is Touch
Taptu are making a big play in the area of mobile touch. They released a fantastic white paper recently which makes the case that touch screens represent a new paradigm for the mobile internet. The CEO of Taptu, Steve Ives, made some interesting points on touch in his presenation at the mobile web summit:
- 220m touch screens were shipped this year – only a small proportion of these are iphones – touch is coming to the mass market
- touch is a fluent, relaxed way of mobile browsing ideal for MAINSTREAM CONSUMERS TO ADOPT MOBILE WEB
- 10% of the top 1000 websites now have a touch-optimized mobile site
So – touch is clearly going to be a big, disruptive change in the mobile internet market and by focusing on it, Taptu has the chance to over-take Google in this area. Taptu’s new iphone app is going to focus on displaying touch results in a way that is optimized for the iphone – watch this space.
Apart from the French startup abphone there are very few startups really taking on Google in mobile search and Taptu have a great chance of succeeding with the service they are building. It is great to see such an ambitious play in the mobile space – could this be the first $1 bn acquisition in Mobile 2.0 in a few years time?
You can find Taptu on mjelly – a directory of the best mobile web sites and and other stuff including message tones and mobile apps
Author: James Coops has worked in the mobile internet industry since the dark days of ‘wap’ all the way through to the present day. In 2001 he developed one of the first mobile web sites to allow downloading of content over the mobile internet (previously this was done over SMS). He then spent 7 years working all over the world as a consultant for mobile operators, media companies, service providers and investors including the likes of O2, Vodafone, Telecom Italia Mobile, Discovery Networks, FIFA and Goldman Sachs. James has also written for Techcrunch UK, Mobile Industry Review and New Media Age Magazine and runs a directory of mobile sites and applications at http://mjelly.com (PC) and http://m.mjelly.com (mobile) and blogs at http://blog.mjelly.com. He loves Germany, especially the Weiss bier!
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