Look ma, we’re on the telly!

On Friday, Sky News broadcast a report on Google’s 10th Birthday (Happy birthday, guys!) Looking to the future of search, Sky interviewed Steve, our CEO, on how mobile search fits into the exciting times ahead.

You’ll find the Taptu segment on mobile search at the 4 minutes mark, but the whole report is interesting, covering the likes of Microsoft Live Search, Cuil and Powerset semantic search engine.

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)

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

This morning, I woke up to find that Robert Scoble posted his review of our mobile search engine. I was convinced that Robert would enjoy using Taptu, but the review is simply glowing!

Last night, we started emailing some of the beta testers, the early birds who signed up before everyone else. Ricky, at Symbian-Guru, is already sharing his first impressions of Taptu, and we’re thrilled to see he likes what he sees.

Launching a new product is like having a party. You can’t help but be anxious about who will turn up, what they’ll think of the party, or whether anyone will turn up at all. It’s still early, but it looks like this will be a cracking party!

Big excitement here at Taptu yesterday evening. After 8 months of design and engineering we went live with the first of our private beta invites. We’re keeping it to a very small early group for the first couple of weeks. Then we’ll be opening it up to a larger private beta before we launch at the Mobile 2.0 conference in San Francisco in the middle of October. Very promising early feedback so far, and now we’re just itching to take it public. (By the way, you can join the beta mailing list here)

Very nice of Rudy de Waele to praise our “super-simple design interface”. You can’t imagine how much effort has gone into getting this right. Since January we’ve run 7 studies in our new user experience lab testing different aspects of the UI, that’s 70 users giving us their candid opinion from hands-on use and abuse of our prototypes.

Our engineering team have done a pretty amazing job since we started in January. We took the decision to use open source infrastructure components wherever we could, but this still left a lot of gaps to fill if we were going to deliver on our goal of a fully-clustered, triple-redundant, fault-tolerant architecture running on commodity 1U servers, scaleable to millions of users. An architecture which also has to serve results pages in an optimised and reliable way to hundreds of different handsets across a multiplicity of GSM and CDMA mobile networks. Now we’ve taken a very big step closer towards this goal.

Our novel social-assisted search (SAS) approach means that we also have to write custom crawlers and parsers for each content category (music, movies, sports, etc) which we point at our selected social Web source sites. Now we have the basic infrastructure for all this in place we can begin to add additional content categories at a much faster pace. So expect to see a rapid expansion of the scope of our system over the next 6 months.

Today, Taptu is a universal mobile search engine, but the SAS optimization approach is only applied to music. With SAS switched on, we can give you useful results almost all the time in 10 clicks or less. Without it, we fall back to the 25 or more clicks that you normally see in today’s mobile search engines. So for searches outside music, Taptu doesn’t perform any better today than the big 3 mobile search engines (for us, the big 3 means Google, Yahoo and Microsoft) . This will change as we switch on SAS for other big categories like movies, travel, sport, games, and mobile web. Then you’ll really see what SAS can do.