When we first started out on this journey, 10,000 searches on a mobile device felt like climbing Everest but we’re pleased to announce today that we’ve just reached a major traffic milestone. The BIG 1m. Everyday Taptu users across the world tap over 1,000,000 search requests on their mobile phones.
It’s a cheesey cliche but we’d genuinely like to thank all the people who use Taptu regularly and the team at Taptu for working so hard to achieve this.
Our very own Bob Last will be taking part in the TechCrunch Talk event this afternoon at Hotel 1898, Barcelona. He will be joined by a panel of VCs and fellow mobile companies to take part in a discussion around mobile disruption; what VCs are looking for in mobile, the disruptive power of mobile companies, how mobile app stores are driving innovation and how the new wave of mobile handsets are changing the market.
The event starts at 3pm will take place at Hotel 1898, www.hotel1898.com, La Rambla, 109 (Entrance on Pintor Fortuny) – 08002 – Barcelona.
As 2008 comes to an end, we’re thrilled to announce that we’ve topped off a year we’re incredibly proud of with some great news. We announced today that Andreas Bernstrom has joined Taptu as Chief Operating Officer and that we’ve secured a second round of funding. We secured £6.45 million with our existing investors, 3i and Sofinnova, who are as excited as we are about the past 12 months and Taptu’s growth potential.
Andreas joins us, bringing 10 years of experience working with TradeDoubler, Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch. He will be helping us drive Taptu forward and play an important part in developing our business presence overseas.
We’ll be inviting Andreas to introduce himself on the blog in the near future so sign up to our RSS feed if you haven’t already done so, to hear the latest news as they happen!
Wapedia launched in 2004, and provides a fast and mobile-friendly edition of Wikipedia, so it seemed logical to kick it up a notch and create an iPhone application to complement it.
We focused on making the app as fast as possible, by scaling images for the iPhone, showing a table of contents to jump down to a section of the page in a snap and paginating the very long pages to speed up loading. We wouldn’t want you to lose the pub quiz because we can’t get you to the answer fast enough, would we?
As Taptu staff, we’re all nuts about sharing what we find on our phones, we’ve made it easy to email a link to a friend or open it in Safari so that you can bookmark it for future reference.
The application is available in English, French, German, Italian and Spanish, with 75 local language versions of Wikipedia accessible to browse. It can also be accessed at wapedia.mobi on any mobile phone.
This is the first version of the application, and we have a list of funky features we want to add that rivals Santa’s shopping list, but we’d love to get your feedback on it. What new features would you like to see in the next version? Drop us a line on iphone@wapedia.org.
You’ll find the Taptu segment on mobile search at the 4 minutes mark, but the whole report is interesting, covering the likes of Microsoft Live Search, Cuil and Powerset semantic search engine.
On Monday night, a few members of the Taptu squad attended MoMo London where Steve presented, talking about user interface design and the process through which we develop it. Some of you have asked for a copy of the slides we used, so here they are. (Tip: Set the presentation to fullscreen if any of it goes a bit fuzzy)
Last night, we started emailing some of the beta testers, the early birds who signed up before everyone else. Ricky, at Symbian-Guru, is already sharing his first impressions of Taptu, and we’re thrilled to see he likes what he sees.
You will have it bookmarked in your mobile phone (I’ll put money on it). It’s a mobile optimized search tool, allowing you to easily find information about a topic from numerous sources. [...] TapTu is something new, but I’m already liking where it’s going. Rather than just giving me a bunch of web links to sites mentioning Jerry Jeff (or whatever topic) I get a good selection of relevant information from various mediums.
Launching a new product is like having a party. You can’t help but be anxious about who will turn up, what they’ll think of the party, or whether anyone will turn up at all. It’s still early, but it looks like this will be a cracking party!
Big excitement here at Taptu yesterday evening. After 8 months of design and engineering we went live with the first of our private beta invites. We’re keeping it to a very small early group for the first couple of weeks. Then we’ll be opening it up to a larger private beta before we launch at the Mobile 2.0 conference in San Francisco in the middle of October. Very promising early feedback so far, and now we’re just itching to take it public. (By the way, you can join the beta mailing list here)
Very nice of Rudy de Waele to praise our “super-simple design interface”. You can’t imagine how much effort has gone into getting this right. Since January we’ve run 7 studies in our new user experience lab testing different aspects of the UI, that’s 70 users giving us their candid opinion from hands-on use and abuse of our prototypes.
Our engineering team have done a pretty amazing job since we started in January. We took the decision to use open source infrastructure components wherever we could, but this still left a lot of gaps to fill if we were going to deliver on our goal of a fully-clustered, triple-redundant, fault-tolerant architecture running on commodity 1U servers, scaleable to millions of users. An architecture which also has to serve results pages in an optimised and reliable way to hundreds of different handsets across a multiplicity of GSM and CDMA mobile networks. Now we’ve taken a very big step closer towards this goal.
Our novel social-assisted search (SAS) approach means that we also have to write custom crawlers and parsers for each content category (music, movies, sports, etc) which we point at our selected social Web source sites. Now we have the basic infrastructure for all this in place we can begin to add additional content categories at a much faster pace. So expect to see a rapid expansion of the scope of our system over the next 6 months.
Today, Taptu is a universal mobile search engine, but the SAS optimization approach is only applied to music. With SAS switched on, we can give you useful results almost all the time in 10 clicks or less. Without it, we fall back to the 25 or more clicks that you normally see in today’s mobile search engines. So for searches outside music, Taptu doesn’t perform any better today than the big 3 mobile search engines (for us, the big 3 means Google, Yahoo and Microsoft) . This will change as we switch on SAS for other big categories like movies, travel, sport, games, and mobile web. Then you’ll really see what SAS can do.
To visit Taptu mobile search engine on your phone, go to taptu.com. You'll find music, videos, news and more! You can share your search results with friends by SMS, email or Twitter.
Last night, we started emailing some of the beta testers, the early birds who signed up before everyone else. Ricky, at 
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