Former Yahoo! Mobile Europe executive Mitch Lazar is now going to be president and COO of mobile search app Taptu. Taptu’s value proposition is that it indexes only mobile “touch friendly” sites. Its legacy is feature-phone search. The UK-based company is also opening a US office in Colorado that Lazar will operate from.
The concept behind Taptu is great but in practice users don’t generally get a better experience than from a major engine. And the limited index makes for fewer reasons to use it.
Lazar will need to figure out how to raise the profile of the company and improve (or further differentiate) the user experience overall. He’ll be doing battle against the market leader Google, as well as his old company Yahoo! and Microsoft’s Bing. These companies obviously have many more resources.
In addition all the vertically oriented apps on the leading smartphone platforms (iPhone, Android) represent an alternative to conventional search. So Taptu must answer the two-headed question: why should I use it instead of Google and, equally, why should I use it instead of a specific, branded app such as Yelp, Zillow, Urbanspoon, Where, Citysearch, Weather and so on.
It’s a big challenge to say the least.