My final briefing of the day was with mobile search company Taptu which focuses on entertainment content such as music and videos. According to Taptu COO, Andreas Bernstrom, this type of content accounts for around 75% of searches on the mobile.
Since its launch, the company has set out to make mobile search more, er mobile. What that means is that the results of aTaptu search wont look like the results of a desktop search on the same term, and everything returned will be capable of being consumed on the mobile. In addition, it includes a cached summary of each search result to give the user a better idea as to whether that result is the one that is going to be most useful to them. It also tries to return related results that the user might be interested in. So search on U2 for example, and in addition to U2-related content, you will also get links to sites about other Irish bands.

Now, the company is turning its attention to the iPhone, with an iPhone app version of its search engine that is due to be released at the beginning of April. The app will return search results in the familiar deck of cards fashion, enabling users to see each result as a separate card. They can flick the card over to share the result with friends, and if they opt to click through to the site, the site is overlaid on the search result, so they can go back to the results by closing the Safari browser window.

This new way of presenting search results presents additional advertising opportunities. Search on a movie title, for example, and one of the results could be a trailer for the movie in question, from where you could click through to but tickets to see it. Taptu is also planning to enable users to save content such as trailers returned in search results for viewing offline.

Watching Bernstrom flick through the search results on his iPhone, it did not look particularly revolutionary, as this is what iPhone users do when viewing content such as photos, for example. But as Bernstrom notes, surprisingly, this type of interface is not currently available for search on the iPhone. In a few weeks time, thanks to Taptu, it will be, and according to Bernstrom, once the iPhone app is up and running, porting it to other touch devices will be relatively straightforward.