14 DAY TRIAL // Real-time search is heading to its rightful home, mobile phones, with a new partnership between mobile search engine Taptu and real-time search engine OneRiot. The idea is to bring a real-time experience to mobile phones in a way that takes advantage of their capabilities and solves their shortcomings. The new Taptu homepage now offers a touch-friendly interface powered by OneRiot's backend.
“Taptu introduced touch search to meet the specific needs of mobile users, and adding realtime search to this offering is a great feature. For the first time, mobile users will be able to find out what is going on right now in a mobile friendly format,” Steve Ives, founder and CEO of Taptu, said.
“Increasingly, people want constant access to new information – a need that can be even more pressing when on the go. Mobile is an ideal platform for the discovery of realtime information and we are thrilled to partner with Taptu to start offering users the power of realtime search on their mobile devices,” Tobias Peggs, General Manager of OneRiot, added.
The new Taptu homepage is designed specifically for mobile devices and features three main categories “web,” “images” and, now, “buzz.” This last section makes use of the OneRiot API to provide real-time results from places like Twitter, Digg and other social sites though there is greater emphasis on Twitter.
Any mobile device with a web browser can access the site, obviously, but Taptu also has a dedicated iPhone app, which will get updated to feature the new functionality. The company plans to make money through dedicated search ads and is confident revenue will start coming in as soon as advertisers realize the opportunity.
The mobile space is becoming increasingly appealing to web services and mobile use is expected to grow exponentially both in the number of users but also in revenue over the coming years. But as things get interesting, the big players are also getting more involved with Google, for example, coming to the market from several angles, including its very own mobile OS Android.