Did you hear that? That’s the whooshing sound of 2008 running out of the door and slamming it on its way out.

Does anyone else feel like this year has flown by at the speed of a Peregrine falcon*?

For us at Taptu, it’s been a very eventful year with the key releases of Deadly Dart, Electric Eel and the imminent release of Frisky Fire (yes, we name our releases after fish…) and many other interesting moments in between.

Talking of interesting… At the end of 2007, Marc, one of our designers, admitted his favourite film was Titanic. He topped that this Christmas by announcing that his favourite band is Take That. We’re very impressed with Marc’s taste in music and movies (and are very grateful he’s not picking what gets added to the Taptu index!)

Our office manager Celia spent the year playing tricks on the designers by putting packing tape on the underside of their computer mouse, leaving them baffled for quite some time. We wonder what shenanigans she’ll get up to next year!

Now for the real events of 2008…

• In January, we launched the sharing functionality, letting you send results you find by email, Twitter and SMS as well as adding a heap of new channels to the search engine.
• In February, we were awarded the Mobile Monday Global Community Award at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
• In April, our first partner, Moblr, went live with Taptu powering the search on their site.
• In May, we launched Electric Eel, adding human-assisted results, the “I’m Bored” and received the MEX Design Award.
• September was an eventful month mainly because it’s my birthday with two more awards and Steve making himself pretty for the Sky Technofile cameras
• In October, we released the Series 60 quicklaunch widget, enabling Symbian S60 users to get to Taptu in a single click.
• We added itsmy.com, the mobile social network, as second search partner in November.
• And finally, things didn’t exactly slow down in December, with Wapedia for iPhone going live and shooting to #1 in the French iTunes App Store, closing Series B funding last week, and today, putting out our last release of the year, called FriskyFire!

Phew, what a year it was, and it wouldn’t have been the same without all the wonderful people we’ve met and received feedback from. So thank you from the bottom of our hearts for coming along for the ride this year, and we’re gearing up for an even better 2009!

[* The Peregrine Falcon is the fastest flying bird on Earth, with a recorded flight of over 200 mph. After much discussion, we're quite sure that 2008 has flown by faster than a swallow; African, European or otherwise.]

This entry was posted on Monday, December 22nd, 2008 at 4:28 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.