Breakfast with Taptu’s Bob Last and digestive thoughts on Google, Vodafone, mobile search and more

by: admin Thursday, July 19th, 2007

Rating: can fish sing?

The first time I met Taptu and Bob Last was at 3GSM where despite hosting a booth with a bar – he was very secretive. But today he was like Mary Poppins with a spoonful of mobile search sugar and I finally tested the Alpha version. BETA will be out by October 1, 2007.

Taptu who?
Taptu are a heavily VC backed mobile search company launching a pure social and share search engine for mobile. The company formed in 2005 and the BETA version will be available in October. After a year of testing and marketing the Gamma version will launch and it will be funded by mobile search advertising – keyword sales, links etc.

What did I think?

The Good
The user interface is simple and clean and nice and FAST.

The BAD
When Bob said “most impressive insightful mobile search engine” I knew that my expectations would never be met as I have heard this so many times. Indeed the first attempt to find Prince failed miserably as the mobile search in Alpha is tailored firstly for knowledge questions (i.e WAPEDIA). The results are also tailored to what Bob describes as “channels” so results are categorised in to music, song, wiki, mySpace etc.

The Interesting thing is that the music search crawls mySpace for answers. This means that the results are more obscure (to some on like myself) but more relevant to the younger youth market. A search for Purple Rain located several B-versions or home versions of the song that only a really true music lover, discovery geek, student or fan would want to listen to.

The Potential
Taptu are expecting to win a patent that will super speed the results of pages and downloading time (more on this in The Mobile Search Analyst).

The OK
I strangely like the idea of Taptu – but I have to keep my feet on the ground. The start-up is playing in extremely competitive ground. Instead of indexing music or choosing (perhaps) an easier mobile search approach the technology deployed is a full on meta-data engine that will crawl alone (or with human intervention) specific relevant pages.

Wow. Rome wasn’t built in a day and what Taptu hopes to do is mammoth. Medio and Jumptap already do it and Google is also muscling in on the mobile content search engine.

I questioned Bob on Taptu vs Google and he said “the whole mobile search industry needs to improve so it wasn’t an issue”.

Short digression
On the way home this argument played constantly in my mind and I though to myself. What would happen if Taptu did succeed in creating a mobile search and share engine focusing on 2.0 content from music mobile search, people mobile search, adult mobile search, social networking mobile search etc. Would there be a need for a mobile portal from the mobile operator?

Then something EVEN BIGGER HIT ME. Google is now working on creating a very similar mobile content search for mobile. Initially it must be doing this to play catch-up with Medio and JumpTap. But now, I realise that its doing this not to assist or aide the mobile operator in any way… But just as Taptu is not concerned with mobile operators only with the mobile Internet so is Google.

Google is buttering both sides of its toast and on the one hand is best friends with Vodafone but also going it alone so that when Vodafone kicks Google out in the next few years or the services go belly-up it (Google) will still be swimming (or singing) with the big fish.

Put very very simply.

If Google does manage to create a killer content search – what is in it for Vodafone or any other mobile operator?

But crystal ball to one side and back to Taptu.

Taptu has high hopes but I think that they are a little too high and its going to be tough for the company in the next year. Taptu might be “well funded” but that is not enough.

I recommend that Taptu signs up with Admob to help them in the early stages or BETA trial to test the market.

I don’t think that white label mobile search companies should be complacent either. The time is now to start getting sexy with mobile search ideas. In September, after a short holiday – The Mobile Search Analyst will be back with the top ten new mobile search business models.

Lastly – thank-you Bob I had a lovely English breakfast and good luck!