Matt Marshall at VentureBeat gives an up-close look at vTap, a brand-new mobile search service provided by Veveo and slated to launch September 10. The client-server search solution is made up of an an embedded thin-client at the device level that sends user queries to the Veveo Search Complex. Once received, the Veveo Search Complex processes the request and then relays results back to the device where the thin-client converts them for display. The service will launch “with support for Windows Mobile, along with an Ajax application for the iPhone. A few weeks later, it will offer support for J2ME.

In a nutshell, vTap searches a major index of video-related sites, letting users search for videos on their mobile phones. The app does this at “blazing speed,” Matt tells us, due in part to the fact that vTap uses predictive technology. (Typing in “gwy” returns a listing of content related to Gwyneth Paltrow. The service also delivers even when you get the spelling wrong.) According to Veveo CEO Murali Aravamudan “the trick to making it so quick is in indexing content by individual letters/characters, instead of words, like most search engines do.” (Veveo has raised $28 million in venture cap – this sum includes a $14 million the company received in May and key under wraps until now.)

According to the company website, the core of vTap is the Veveo Search Complex, which is hosted by Veveo and also ensures the mobile device requesting the video receives it in a format that is compatible. “Using advanced proprietary web-crawling techniques and algorithms, the web is crawled with specific focus on identifying links to the videos embedded in web pages. Only the most relevant metadata corresponding to the videos is identified from the web pages containing these videos. This metadata is then correlated with relevant metadata from other sources. The metadata and relevance metrics associated with the web videos are then used to create a web video search index that is used by our unique proprietary search algorithms that employ new-to-the-world computer science techniques and complex mathematical concepts.”

Some other interesting features: Vtap doesn’t use page rank to order results. Instead, it checks out what other people have selected as their favorite channels on sites like YouTube and elsewhere. Its Wikipedia search lets users find quick answers. From Matt’s test drive of the service: “If you’re interested in Palo Alto, Calif.’s population, you type in ‘Palo Alto popul..’ and it has already provided you the answer. If you type in ‘incipient,’ it provides you a definition, and also a voice recording on how to pronounce it.”

When I saw the mention of Wikipedia and vTap’s ability to deep-dive the metadata I immediately thought of Taptu, another service I recently had the pleasure of testing and writing about here. A quick call to Bob Last, who heads business development for the company, revealed there are some slight similarities – but huge differences, such as the singular focus on video. But the chat gave me an excuse to touch base and find out that Taptu has moved its launch date forward to mid-September. We’ll have an exclusive podcast with Bob and/or Steve Ives, Taptu CEO, near to that date.

In the meantime, what are odds that will vTap rise above the noise out there to take on the major players? It’s a tall order for any newcomer…But Matt tells us Veveo is “busy signing deals with mobile phone manufacturers and carriers, giving them a revenue share in any advertising or subscription fees it makes in the future.” After some digging (great job!) Matt also found out Veveo has licensed the technology to Verizon. (It has replaced Microsoft and will power the Verizon FiOS TV interactive media guide that lets users find and access content from TV listings, video-on-demand catalogs and digital video recorders as well as personal music and photos from the home network.)

This entry was posted on Friday, August 24th, 2007 at 10:51 am and is filed under 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.