Search On Tap

I’m fresh out of a meeting with Taptu CEO, Steve Ives, in which he gave me the low down on the company’s mobile search engine. Taptu is a consumer site which aims eventually to be a universal mobile search engine, but which is concentrating initially on the music and entertainment sectors, on the basis that in the US at least, 60% of operator portal searches are for music and entertainment content. Taptu works on any network and on any phone with a browser, though inevitably, there is a custom interface for the iPhone.
Ives invited me to load up the Taptu site on my Nokia E61 and search for a band I liked. I chose Interpol, partly because I like them, partly to see how many music results returned were for the band, and how many for the international police force. Though the top result was for the cops, the rest on the first page were all for the New York band. What was also impressive was the way that some of the results returned were music or video clips that you could play on the handset. 
Taptu launched just a few weeks ago, after building the number of searches per month to over a million in the pre-launch period, almost all through word of mouth and a limited amount of viral activity. Ives told me the company is aiming for 15 million searches per month by “later this year”. The biggest markets for Taptu are currently the US and the UK, followed by France, Germany, Italy and Spain. Together, these developed countries account for 50% of the site’s traffic, with the balance coming from the developing world.
While results are currently all organic, a paid search model will launch in the next couple of weeks. Taptu is working with three paid search providers, including AdMob. Ives says that in tests, the company is seeing an ECPM (Equivalent CPM) of $6 (£3.20) nett, after paying the platform provider. (This figure is arrived at by multiplying the average clickthrough rate by the revenue per click.)
I’m always interested to hear how companies get their names. Ives told me that Taptu came from a 5-letter dotcom name-generating program on a PC. The fact that Ives was happy to reveal this was no surprise. A product of the Cambridge tech crowd who has already made one fortune selling his previous company Trigenix to Qualcomm for $36 million (£19 million), Ives is a quietly-spoken, unassuming character who, along with his backroom team, have created a very neat search solution. I’ll be interested to hear whether the viral effect the company has enjoyed to date is sufficient to see it hit those search targets.

David Murphy
Editor