It’s great to kick off the New Year with an analysis of some of the companies and developments sure to leave their mark on 2009. In the case of Taptu – a provider of “socially assisted” mobile search that MSG has tracked from day one – it’s a case of both. It’s a company we’re sure to hear more from, and – more importantly – it’s a company whose recent deal with Gofresh-owned itsmy.com point the way to one trend high on my radar: The natural fit between mobile social networks and mobile search.

I caught up with Steve Ives, Taptu CEO, in an exclusive interview where he revealed the recent deal with itsmy.com is just the start. Look for three more deals with mobile social networks before February. Also expect Taptu to sharpen its focus on mobile search monetization, particularly in the U.S. where Steve tells me most of his traffic is. (And there’s an even better reason to concentrate on mobile search sponsored links; sources tell me CPMs around key word search terms are in the $3-$10 range.)

Listen to the podcast here. [20:22]

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I should add it’s longer than others in the series, but that is because we deep-dive into a variety of key topics, including mobile search trends, Taptu’s ambitions to deliver mobile search verticals (and allow users to personalize them), the impact of the iPhone, the emergence (and pivotal importance) of a new segment Steve calls “unwired socials” (accounting for over half of Taptu’s users today), and a few details of a strategy Steve would rather keep under wraps to develop a “user interface for discovery” inspired by touch devices.

But for me, the real news is the keen focus on mobile social networks. In November Taptu quietly and cleverly sealed a deal with itsmy.com, an ad-funded mobile-only social network with two million users, to provide core search functionality (allowing them to search for mobile content such as videos, entertainment, music, and images from within the community as well as directly from their personal homepage). The deal also lets itsmy.com monetize those searches through mobile search sponsored links. (By way of background, Taptu replaces Google, and I’ll go into the reasons in my podcast with Vince Staybl, Gofresh CEO, which is coming up in this series. As Vince put it: Google failed to “get” mobile – a serious shortcoming that convinced him to switch to Taptu.) Gofresh isn’t the first mobile social network to ally with Taptu for search and advertising. Moblr quietly replaced Yahoo with Taptu in February 2008 to do much the same thing. (More evidence of a trend: The decision by BuzzCity to partner with MCN for mobile search for its mobile-only social network myGamma in Thailand.)

Another deal from Taptu you may have missed in the holiday hectic: A partnership with ZooVision, a U.S.-based free streaming mobile video portal, to provide mobile search and no doubt increase its entertainment-related inventory. (By way of background, Taptu replaced Google – yet again.)

Other highlights from the podcast:

FUNDING: In December, Taptu secured GBP6.45m in series B funding from its existing investors (3i and Sofinnova) and appointed Andreas Bernstrom to the position of Chief Operating Officer (COO). The money will allow Taptu to focus on monetization. As Steve put it: “We’ve only just started putting ads on our site. So, for 09, the big focus is optimizing the monetization, so for every thousand searches that get made on our site, we optimize the revenue.” (The business model is a rev share.)

AD NETWORKS: Taptu works with Yahoo, Google and AdMob. “We’re focusing on search ads and search ad platforms, so we’ve been working with Yahoo in the U.K. for a couple of months now just to explore what happens when we put those search ads up on our site….For us, a big priority next year is the U.S., because actually the majority of our audience is in the U.S., and looking at how we best monetize that. But it is going to be search ads, in other words ads that are tied into search keywords, because we found from our ad experiments that they have the best revenue per thousand.” (I asked around in the industry and the word is keywords can fetch $3-$10 CPMs.)

RELEVANCY & ENAGEMENT: The industry needs to work on both. Online we have annoying display ads, and users are anything but engaged. Mobile could go the same way – so wake up! “In the mobile world, users can develop banner blindness very quickly. They’re not terribly engaging, and we’re training users to ignore them because most ads are not very relevant to the needs of the user. So we’ve got to increase relevancy on the one hand, and we’ve got to make them more engaging and kind of entertaining on the other hand.”

SEGMENTATION: Most of the audience is Unwired Socials whose first screen in is the PC, but this is changing. Make way for the Pioneer Youth, propelled into a strong second position by the iPhone and other touch screen devices delivering a rich mobile Web experience. (Keeping in mind they still don’t do a great job transcoding sites with flash, for example.)

SEARCH BEHAVIOR: Unwired Socials search for entertainment and some adult; Pioneer Youth gravitates to career and lifestyle. Sensing an opportunity in other verticals such as mobile job search in emerging markets, Taptu is determined to evolve “from a sort of beachhead in entertainment search, which is where we started, to add more and more sources to become a universal search engine.”

FEDERATED SEARCH: Figures prominently in Taptu’s roadmap. “Our strategy is to extend that to allow for hundreds or even thousands of sources and to allow users to create their own vertical channels with Taptu. It’s going to take a while to translate that vision into reality, but it’s the way forward which offers the best scope for improving the relevancy of results because you can have custom scoring systems for each channel which are optimized to that channel.” As Steve sees it, it’s all about “allowing the user and having a discovery into user interface which allows the user to explore these different channels easily and look for related results.”

UI IMPROVEMENTS: Look for them! Steve preferred not to disclose details, but he’s bullish on touch screen devices. As he puts it: “Touch devices give you the opportunity for a much more interesting user interface for discovery than normal phones, so you’ll see some innovation from us in that area.”

2009 TRENDS: A slowdown in the market and fewer people replacing their handsets. The bright spot: The continued enthusiasm for the iPhone and the N97. Another interesting development to watch for: Local search on mobile will develop into a different market – with different dynamics. “The user interface for local search is going to be in a mapping application; it’s not going to be the search engine search box. So, local search will gravitate – it will almost fork into being somewhat of a different market, accessed from a different point on the handset user interface.”

On a personal note, I’m pleased to report Charles Knight, at MSG partner site AltSearchEngines, is back in full-force and looking forward to a fantastic 2009 with more staff, more content and more traffic. And it’s a similar success story at MSG. He is cross-posting this podcast and all MSG mobile search coverage. I’m excited about the cross-pollination because many super-cool online search engines are gearing up to go mobile – giving both our sites loads to track and analyze. Another trait that brings us closer together: Our determination to offer Alts (alternative search engines) a platform. To this end, we are planning yet another event, much like our search engine dinner in Berlin last fall. This time it’s MARCH 30 in San Francisco (timed to the SF Expo) – so please mark that date.

Disclaimer: MSG collaborated with Taptu on a white paper in 2008; MCN has been an MSG supporter.

Tags: 3i, Apple, BuzzCity, Discovery, Facebook, Google, iPhone, itsmy.com, MCN, Mobile Advertising, Mobile Search, Segmentation, Sofinnova, Taptu, UI, Yahoo

This entry was posted on Monday, January 5th, 2009 at 7:15 pm and is filed under Content Discovery, Mobile Advertising, Mobile Content, Mobile Research, Mobile Search, Mobile Social Networking, Personalization, Portfolio. 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.