Lubna Dajani and David Harper invited me to participate in a panel session at Mobile Monday New York on April 28th. The subject was Mobile Analytics and Social Search. About 100 people attended the event in the gleaming Samsung Experience Center in the Time Warner Building at Columbus Circle, and one of the attendees, David Berkowitz, liveblogged the session.

Several people posed me questions on mobile social search. Here are a couple of them, together with my answers.

Why can’t existing desktop search engines meet the mobile challenge?

Well, they are trying to meet the challenge, because there are 27m searches a day already on mobile. But this is just 2% of the volume of desktop search, something is wrong. There is too great an emphasis on showing PC web results on devices that can’t consume PC web pages very well.

How can marketers and SEOs take advantage of social search?

The truth is that today it is very difficult. But there are a couple of early initiatives underway that will change this. At Taptu, we have recently created a search API for mobile content site owners. Moblr, a European mobile social networking site, have integrated this API into their service, to give their users access to the huge range of free mobile content that is contained within the Taptu search engine index.

At Yahoo, the new open SearchMonkey initiative will let site owners bring in some aspects of social search, which may or may not be applicable to mobile.

While in New York, I couldn’t resist the $20 tourist ride to the top of the Empire State Building. The last time I did this was 29 years ago, during my first visit to Manhattan. This time I visited at night, and the cityscape was just as awesome.

Next week on Monday 28th, Mobile Monday New York has invited us to join in on a panel on the topic of “Optimizing the Mobile Experience and Increasing Visibility with Social Search and Mobile Analytics”. We’ll be in great company, on this panel moderated by Bryson Meunier of Resolution Media.

Panelists:

• Dean Collins, Amethon
• Joe Cuccinelli, Quattro Wireless
• Dan Mason, ESPN Mobile Web
• Adam Kerr, Bango
• Greg Harris, Mobilytics
• Stephen Ives, taptu
• Stan Wiechers, TigTags

For more details on the event venue, have a look at the MoMo NY post on the event. We hope to see you there!

We’re excited and honoured to have been selected by Red Herring as one of the Top 100 European Tech Startups this year.

Past winners have included some of the most successful and innovative companies out there, such as Google, YouTube, Skype and Netscape, and the Top 100 falls under the theme “Europe 08: Ahead of the Curve”, so it’s great to be included in such hot company!

Following the warm reception we received at Mobile World Congress in February, where we received the Mobile Monday Peer Award’s Community vote in the Emerging Startups category, we’re very grateful for the recognition our users and industry colleagues have given us.

The Red Herring site contains the full list of companies in the Top 100.

On Monday night, a few members of the Taptu squad attended MoMo London where Steve presented, talking about user interface design and the process through which we develop it. Some of you have asked for a copy of the slides we used, so here they are. (Tip: Set the presentation to fullscreen if any of it goes a bit fuzzy)

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For more multimedia of the evening, check out Alex Craxton’s blog for the nerdiest sword fight you’ll ever see!

Next Monday, we’ll be taking part in Mobile Monday London, sponsoring the evening on the theme of Mobile User Interface.

• Bryan Rieger - Future Platforms Creative director www.futureplatforms.com
• Scott Weiss - Executive Director, EMEA, Human Factors International www.humanfactors.com
• Marek Pawlowski - MEX www.pmn.co.uk/mex/
• Dan Appelquist will be summing up and reviewing the Over the Air developers conference
• And our very own Steve Ives, Taptu CEO!

At the moment, the event is fully booked, but pleading or bribing the organisers with shiny gadgets might just get you in. Meanwhile, if you’re already on the list, we’ll see you there!

Today, we’re in Austin, Texas. It was an interesting, somewhat snow-laden journey, but now, we’re here for South by Southwest Interactive, the True Spring Break for Geeks. It’s only just getting started, but already, I’ll spare you the Texan hat and rodeo jokes, and I’ll only say that the hospitality of people here is larger than life.

Over the next few days, we hope to meet as many fellow gadgeteers, usability rockstars and design geeks as possible, by attending panels and joining conversations on topics we all love, then sprinkle the lot with a few heated discussions over beers in the evening. (See how much we sacrifice ourselves for you, our users?)

This is, of course, a call to anyone attending SXSW to get in touch so we can meet, but also an invitation to join us on Monday night at Mobile Monday Austin, where we’ll be giving a little Taptu demo, in the company of James Pearce from dotMobi, Brian Fling from Blue Flavor and David Gill from Nielsen Mobile. It’s all happening at Austin City Hall, within spitting distance from the Conference Centre so why not pop by? (RSVP recommended)

Ready for more networking, learning and exchanging of ideas than ever before?

We’re now all home after an eventful week at Mobile World Congress, spent meeting new and interesting people who love the mobile web as much as we do, looking out for new phones and services, and eating great Spanish tapas.

Since launching many new features on Monday, we’ve made the news a few times.

TechDigest says “We’ve been getting excited about Taptu for months now, so it’s fantastic to see they won the Global Community Award at the MoMo Peer Awards last night at the Mobile World Congress, rewarding our confidence in this small English start-up to no end.”

Mike Butcher from TechCrunch UK agreed 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.”

Fritz Nelson from Information Week writes about MWC and the lack of innovation since last year. However, he highlights Taptu as one of the mobile service that have caught his attention. “Taptu, a startup based in the U.K., also has a compelling story — perhaps even more so. It builds not only relevance into its results, it brings those results to within a click of accessing. It presents results based on a ranking of social popularity, provides categories (like blogs, news stories, videos), a nifty little summary of the item, and then a one-click way to share it.”

Susi Weaser from Shiny Shiny, writes “It’s good to see that there are people out there who haven’t just accepted Google as the only option when it comes to internet searches. In particular, Taptu have vowed to take on mobile searching, with their easy peasy service.”

Peggy Ann Salz from MSearchGroove posted an article on the new features we launched at MWC, but also interviewed Steve, our CEO, in a podcast about where he thinks mobile search is heading.

The Dutch Cowboys interviewed Steve at the stand, also capturing a bit of the atmosphere of the conference in their video, and Heise Online congratulated us on the Mobile Monday award we received and are very excited about!

Here’s a translation of the Dutch Cowboys’ text for those who, like me, may be Dutch-impaired (kindly provided by Raimo from Mobile Monday Amsterdam)

“The readers of Dutchcowboys know that Search is one of our favourite things. Moreover web 2.0 and Social media play more and more an important role in things we are involved in. For this reason it is a pleasure to hear an entrepreneur and visionary talk about all this even more so that it is happening on your mobile. Closer it cannot get.

Some will think that this is however the millionth promise that search on a cellphone will make it entirely. While the device manufacturers still struggle with the (business)model around mobile search Taptu might have the correct answer. Listen to the passionate Steve Ives who speaks about his social mobile search application Taptu.”

Last night, we were invited to the MoMo Peer Awards, as we had been nominated to represent the London chapter in the Emerging Startups category. I’m thrilled to say that we won the Global Community Award, which Jari Tammisto, CEO of Mobile Monday, handed to Bob who’s our Biz Dev guy.

We’re chuffed to bits about the reception we’re getting here, and we’ve met some really lovely people since we’ve been here. If you’re also at MWC, come say hi at the stand!

This morning, votes have opened for the Mobile Monday Peer Awards for the London area. We’ve been put forward as one of the companies for which you can vote.

http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/momolondon/surveys?id=1986312

For those who aren’t familiar with the awards, it’s a great opportunity to give Taptu some visibility since colleagues and press will be at Mobile World Congress when the awards are handed out. Got friends who are also part of MoMo? Why not point them to this link and get them to support us? And if you’re at Mobile World Congress, why not pop by our stand since we’ll have a fabulous pink and white bar in Hall 7!

Fingers crossed!

Vero
Chief “Drum up some love for Taptu” Officer