During my whirl-wind trip of companies and conferences in London this week I had the pleasure of meeting for dinner in Soho with Bob Last, who heads up business development at Taptu, a mobile search company that has been on my radar since its launch in 2005. Some helpful background: this company is by no means a me-too mobile search start-up. Steve Ives, Taptu founder and CEO, was the brains behind Trigenix, a first-mover content discovery company that was later snapped up by Qualcomm and rolled into Qualcomm Internet Services (QIS).

Bob walked me through the alpha of the company’s mobile search solution, a service that will begin with a strong focus on music content and fact-finding. Unlike many approaches that concentrate on downloadable mobile content only (which is likely the focus on Google’s mobile search service for mobile content), Taptu presents a balanced mix of downloadable content and results it gleans from sources such as Wikipedia (in this case Wapedia) and MySpace, which is an excellent repository for entertainment content. This variety is part of Taptu’s value proposition. (The approach is a hybrid of human and machine input: Taptu determines the best sources for information and content and its crawlers do the rest.)

But the real ace in Taptu’s hand is its own IP, which allows its mobile search service to work on all browsers – and effectively all model mobile phones. That’s a must-have feature for any mobile search service that wants to make it in a D2C play. What’s more, the ability of Taptu’s technology to intelligently cache content on phones solves the latency problem. But the results aren’t only fast, they are presented as part of what I would describe as a package of pre-cached pages. The result is a novel approach to one-click content discovery (and purchase!) since the service effectively intuits how a user might most likely want to delve down into the results. Taptu transcodes some results – such as Wikipedia – with its own technology and relies on third-parties for the rest.

I tested the service – and wanting to throw it a curve ball – challenged it to find music based on an obscure and somewhat outdated lyric/title. I thought the engine would balk at that one – but it understood that the words love will tear us apart referred to a track from Joy Division. Put another way, the system understands the relationship between the words and music content. The results – with an assortment of thumbnail cover art at the top – included a Wiki snippet on the track (in case I wanted details or trivia since the track was milestone for the band and genre at the time) and MySpace destinations, one of which was marked (song), indicating that this result presented an audio result.

Clicking on the audio result, I was quickly presented with clear one-click options (no screen clutter here) allowing me to preview it or view the page that contains the full-track. I should note that this is the point where a content company could come in and offer to sell the track – but this is beyond the scope of the present version. However, Bob assured me that Taptu will adapt its product to allow sponsored results and commercial propositions.

Bob invited me to test the quick answers feature. I recalled my mother’s childhood passion for the Beatles and obsession with the rumor that Paul was dead. Determined to stump the system, I suggested beatles death clues. Bob’s expression changed – could it be that Taptu wouldn’t manage this one after all? It quickly returned a result from Wikipedia and a thumbnail image of a magazine with the headline to top it off.

Taptu’s IP enables mobile search on any phone and its ability to deliver intelligent pre-packaged results goes a long way toward encouraging one-click content discovery on top of the search experience.
But there are some risks to delivering a D2C mobile search solution, the least of which is the promotion. However, the focus on verticals may enable Taptu to cross this hurdle quicker then we think. It has cleverly chosen verticals and sources that can deliver users a blend of popular and somewhat more obscure content. This aspect of the service is well-suited to exposing content hidden in the legendary long tail, as well as user-gen content making a mark in MySpace. (This makes business sense if we consider Taptu is also looking at social search in the form of search-and-share schemes.)

Overall, Taptu has crafted a service that covers all the bases for a successful D2C play. Expect to see a roll out in the next months that will the U.S., the U.K., France, Germany and Spain, as well as the introduction of local results (content and information – not business listings). BTW: You can sign up for to test the beta (due to be released end-August/early September) at www.taptu.com

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 19th, 2007 at 12:14 pm and is filed under Mobile Music, Mobile Search, Mobile Social Networking. 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.