Taptu, a social media and social search company, announced today its plans to expand beyond its current lineup of mobile apps in order to include a new, white label offering called Tapform. As the name implies, Tapform is a platform for publishers, developers and hardware manufacturers interested in building their own social news aggregator.
The launch will be made possible by way of Taptu’s newly-received $3.5 million in Series B funding from U.K.-based DFJ Esprit and French firm Sofinnova. → Read More
From its founding in 2007, Taptu was a startup that specialized in search and touch-based interfaces for mobile, launching a realtime mobile search engine in conjunction with OneRiot back in 2009, for example. In November of last year, however, the startup made the smart decision to bring its mobile search proficiency into the news reader market, launching Flipboard-like Android and iPhone apps that brought an interesting value proposition to bear on the burgeoning mobile reader market: Users could aggregate more than 5,000 mixed streams — no paltry number, and far more than that offered by the competition. → Read More
Another day, another launch of a Flipboard-like news and social reader for the iPad. It seems like every day a new app launches that aims to offer a social news reading experience for the iPad, including Pulse, Summify, Flud and others. And today, Taptu is debuting its free iPad app, which offers a sleek, social news service for the tablet. Taptu has already offered the service on the Android and the iPhone.
Taptu’s iPad app allows you to bring in streams of content from news sources, your Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter streams. The design itself is sleek and clean, allowing you to separate each stream. Instead of accssing RSS feeds for news sources, Taptu uses its proprietary mobile search technology to aggregate news from thousands of news sources. → Read More
Touch interfaces for content and social media are, thanks to applications like Pulse and Flipboard – the ‘new new thing’. They are presenting streams of information in a far easier to digest manner and generating lots of engagement. Think how long you might spend on an app like Tweetdeck and then work out what would happen if that way of consuming went even more mainstream, especially on tablets like the iPad.
Well this appears to be the ambition of a new free Android and iPhone app which launches today, My Taptu, and will appear on iPad in due course. It’s also part of the re-invention of its maker, Taptu, which has until now specialised in mobile search and touch-based interfaces for mobile, but is now bringing that expertise to bear on an app which promises to organise your social and content streams in a highly scalable way. And they appear to have the firepower.
Currently Pulse only lets you add 20 streams to the app, while Flipboard allows for 21 ‘sections’. My Taptu will let users have have 5000 mixed streams. That is a huge difference. Taptu could well have a chance against Flipboard and Pulse with its new app when it eventually launches on iPad in December. → Read More
After what seems like an age of no news, mobile search and discovery company Taptu seems to be suddenly getting back in the game. Today it’s doing a Twitter-style switcheroo – founder and CEO Steve Ives is becomes president and will stay to focus on product, while COO and President Mitch Lazar, who only joined in March from his role as managing director of Yahoo! Mobile Europe, will become CEO. Ives was previously founder and CEO since the company started in 2006. → Read More
Taptu, the company indexing mobile touch friendly content, announces today that they’re opening an office in the U.S. to drive business development, marketing and product management in response to rapid growth in the North American audience. The new office, to be located in Denver, Colorado will be lead by Mitch Lazar, formerly of Yahoo! Mobile Europe. → Read More
Hoping to conquer America, touch-friendly mobile search engine Taptu is opening a US office in Denver, Colorado.
But, perhaps more interesting, it’s to be headed up by former Yahoo Mobile European MD, Mitch Lazar, who joined the Taptu Board as recently as March.
Not long in that role, his new title is President and Chief Operating Officer, which will see him “heading home” after 11 years in London.
Lazar will be charged with driving “business development, marketing and product management locally”, a move prompted by Taptu’s “rapidly growing American audience”, says the company. → Read More
Hoping to conquer America, touch-friendly mobile search engine Taptu is opening a US office in Denver, Colorado.
But, perhaps more interesting, it’s to be headed up by former Yahoo Mobile European MD, Mitch Lazar, who joined the Taptu Board as recently as March.
Not long in that role, his new title is President and Chief Operating Officer, which will see him “heading home” after 11 years in London.
Lazar will be charged with driving “business development, marketing and product management locally”, a move prompted by Taptu’s “rapidly growing American audience”, says the company. → Read More
The proliferation of mobile content has caught Taptu (and a lot of other people) by surprise. Perhaps unsurprisingly the number of mobile applications has also increased rather dramatically. There’s an interesting balance to be struck for content producers between device-specific applications and app stores, and the general availability, but reduced functionality, of a mobile web site. Taptu’s latest report explores these details. → Read More
[UK] Cambridge, UK-based Taptu, the mobile search engine that targets the touch-friendly web, has appointed “industry veteran” and former Yahoo Mobile MD Mitch Lazar to its board as a non-executive director.
Prior to Yahoo, Lazar “launched, ran and commercialized the mobile services and products” of various media brands, including Time Warner’s CNN, Cartoon Network and TCM. He also led the international roll out of AOL’s mobile initiatives.
Obviously, Lazar brings to Taptu a lot of experience in the mobile sector and, crucially, a large number of contacts that could help provide the needed inroads to grow the business. → Read More
Taptu, the mobile search solution, has been keeping an eye on the mobile web — specifically what they’re calling the mobile touch web, which I guess is slightly different from the non-touch mobile web — and has produced a fairly comprehensive report of their findings. Of particular interest is the fact that “there are a higher proportion of shopping and services sites on the mobile touch Web (20%) compared to Apple’s App Store (3.6%).” According to Taptu, this is because “the mobile touch Web provides the opportunity for direct-to-consumer billing.” → Read More
Taptu, the mobile search engine, announced a partnership with OneRiot last month to provide real time search results in their mobile-friendly web site. This worked from any mobile client, not just the iPhone. But one of the points of using a smartphone is the use of native applications. Today Taptu announced that they’ve rolled the real-time search results into their iPhone app. → Read More
[UK] Cambridge, UK-based Taptu, the mobile optimised search engine that, in particular, targets touch screen devices, has released a dedicated Android app. The service already offers a generic browser-based version for mobile phones, along with a native app for the iPhone which disappointingly for Android users, appears to be at least one generation ahead.
After playing with the Android app for a short while, I’m also struggling to see Taptu’s appeal, although admittedly I’m probably not the target user. → Read More
Taptu, the mobile search engine, is announcing today that they’re using the OneRiot search API to provide realtime search results to mobile devices at their touch-friendly mobile web page. The realtime search results will eventually make their way into the Taptu iPhone app. Full press release inside! → Read More
Everyone moans about the lack of Flash on the iPhone, right? Let’s face it: if someone makes a solid Flash implementation for the iPhone there would be substantially less interest in making native iPhone apps. You could create a rich user environment in the browser, and the iPhone App Store would be less and less relevant. As things stand now, I prefer native apps over browser apps for iPhone services. I use the dedicated mail client to access my GMail account, rather than load the mobile GMail interface in Safari. I use a dedicated Twitter client, FaceBook client, and LinkedIn client rather than load the mobile version of those sites (assuming a mobile version even exists!).
Often, though, no native client exists, and you’re stuck using a web site. It can be a real pain to find a mobile-friendly version of the sites you need, sometimes. Enter Taptu, the alternative search machine. This free app provides iPhone-friendly search results in a surprisingly intuitive way. → Read More
News out of Barcelona’s 3GSM conference today includes some from Taptu, the mobile search engine startup launched in the UK in October last year. It’s unveiling an improved version of its search engine and the ability for results to be shared with friends via email, mobile-to-mobile and Twitter. The formerly music and trivia-focused search engine also now adds news and travel to its index. Investors include 3i Group and Sofinnova Partners. In January they launched a 3rd Party Search API enabling mobile website owners to hook into Taptu’s search engine to provide their users with results either purely from their local content pages, or from Taptu’s public web index of the web. The first partner to use this is Moblr, a site which allows you to view videos uploaded to the site directly on your mobile. Taptu was founded by Steve Ives, previously CEO and founder of Trigenix Ltd, the mobile user interface firm acquired by Qualcomm in 2004. Taptu has previously had positive coverage from Ricky Cadden at Symbian-Guru, and Robert Scoble. My personal feeling is that if the future is social search – as many think it is – then the future must also be mobile social search, since the mobile is such a social device. The problem is cracking that nut, and in the face of massive potential players like Yahoo!Go and Google Mobile/Android. → Read More
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