It’s been a while since I last blogged. Seven years, to be precise. On 1st August 2000, I was in Cambridge, England halfway through a 7000 mile round-the-world bike ride. To be honest, when I was last writing my daily posts, I didn’t even know it was called blogging. I was uploading a daily diary to a website from my Palm Pilot via the infrared port on my Motorola GSM phone. Very last century. Amazingly, it worked.

That adventure started two years earlier when I picked up a book called The Bike Ride in London’s Gatwick airport and was captivated by Anne Mustoe’s account of her own ride around the world at the age of 53. If she could embark on such a journey, as a just-retired headmistress, then why couldn’t I?

The ride had started in San Francisco in June 2000. I thought it would be fun to share my daily trials and tribulations with friends, family and sponsors. It wasn’t clear to anyone back then (least of all myself) that I could cross those two deserts and four mountain ranges, deliver the sponsorship I had promised to UNICEF and get back home to my family by the middle of September. Which I did in the end, but that’s another story.

Today I’m working with a really smart group of people at a new company called Taptu. We’re in a race to build a search engine for mobile devices that’s good enough for mass-market adoption, good enough that YOU would want to use it every day. Most people in the world today don’t use mobile search engines. For the 20% who do, most of them average between one search a week and one search a month. So there’s a long way to go.

Like my bike ride, the real beginning of this new journey was two years earlier. A venture capitalist who previously worked in Nokia told me that he thought Google were following the wrong track in mobile search. They were treating it as a direct extension of desktop search. To be honest, I hadn’t given mobile search a second thought until then.

That day, I started playing with Google’s mobile search service and soon understood the significance of what he had said. My previous startup, Trigenix, had created a market-leading position in user interface software for mobile phones before being acquired by Qualcomm. So I could appreciate the challenge of making a service like mobile search work really well on mobile. The seed had been well and truly planted.

Will Taptu, succeed in this race? We’ve been told that the big guys are bound to win, that we don’t have enough search experts, that we’re too late into the market, and the mobile internet isn’t good enough yet. We don’t care, we’re doing it anyway. Vero and I created this blog to give you a trackside view of the action, the story of one small company’s battle against much bigger competition. It won’t be boring. I promise.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 1st, 2007 at 4:12 pm and is filed under Company News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.