Julia Palatovska invited me to present on the topic of “Social-assisted search: a new approach to mobile search?” at the inaugural Mobile Monday in Moscow earlier this week. I’ve never been to Russia before, plus this was a good opportunity to talk about Taptu to a completely new audience in a big mobile market (pop = 141.2m, subs = 140.4m, 99.4% penetration). Travelwise, the 9am BA flight out of Heathrow would get me there around 4pm Moscow time. Then I had to get from the airport to the venue near the Olympic Stadium by 6pm.

There were nearly 1000 people in the arrival hall when I arrived, and I joined the back of a 30 person queue. Yet, I was checked through within 10 minutes. What a super-efficient process compared to my San Francisco visit the week before! Russian visas are now machine-readable, and it just took 30 seconds for the officials to check each passenger through.

I met some really smart people at the MoMo event. There is a very active community of mobile developers now in Moscow, with many investments in startups being made mainly by private individuals. There are over 5000 mobile sites in Russia, I learned. Mobile internet infrastructure is still at an embryonic stage with most base stations still plain vanilla GPRS, some with EDGE, with 3G to come in 2008. Yet there are millions of 3G handsets in the market, as consumers buy the latest Nokia models. My presentation on mobile search was well-received, and several people in the audience told me afterwards that Taptu was working fine on the Russian networks, from their own handsets.

Some other first impressions. My hotel, the Marriott Teverskya, was top notch, one of the best I’ve stayed in. Russia has a vibrant economy powered by oil and gas money. It manifests itself in countless cranes, building sites, brand new hotels, shops, Mercedes and Astons. The old GUM department store refurbished with scores of high-end stores, boutiques and cafes. All sitting somewhat incongruously side-by-side with the old Soviet edifices.

It became crystal clear to me after my Moscow trip that we should make the Taptu platform as open as possible to 3rd party developers and other collaborators so that we can offer country-specific versions of Taptu in as many markets as possible in the shortest possible time frame.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 26th, 2007 at 2:22 pm and is filed under Events and conferences, On the Radar. 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.