Podcast: Taptu Reports Mobile Web Growing Faster Than Apps; Will Visual Search Take On New Meaning On Touchscreen Devices?
In brief: Steve Ives, Taptu CEO, recounts the key takeaways of the new report showing the growth of Mobile Touch Web sites outpaces the growth of apps in the Apple and Android app stores why commerce rocks on the Mobile Touch Web PLUS a look a the Virtual Roundtable and what mobile industry entrepreneurs, authorities and pundits think about the Mobile Touch Web and the potential impact on how we live, work and shop.
Taptu, the search and discovery engine that indexes touchscreen content, reports that the Mobile Touch Web – websites and destinations created specifically for access via touchscreen devices such as the Apple iPhone – has grown 35 percent since last quarter. Unlike other mobile Web content, this content stands out through finger-friendly layouts and light-weight pages that are faster to load over cellular networks. The report, which covers January 2010 thru April 2010, also shows Mobile Touch Web sites rose to 440,100 from 326,600 in January.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
This rise represents a 232 percent annual growth rate. Interestingly, the growth rate for Mobile Touch Web sites is far ahead of the Apple App Store, which currently shows an annual growth of 144 percent. Appleapp growth trails behind the Android Market, which is growing at an annual rate of 403 percent (after getting off to a slow start).
The growth of the Mobile Touch Web also far exceeds Taptu forecasts. It expected the number of touch-friendly sites would grow to more than 500,000 at the end of 2010, and to 1 million by end-2011. But now we’re well on our way to 1.1 million sites by end-2010 – almost twice the original forecast and nearly a full year ahead of schedule.
Why? For one, touchscreen device sales are skyrocketing. (Taptu draws from handset sales and market research from Gartner and Piper Jaffray to document this trend– another good reason to download the report.)
Another reason could be the business opportunity companies and brands can tap into if they have a site optimized for these devices. This would explain why commerce and shopping destinations dominate the Mobile Touch Web.
They continue to make up 22 percent of all sites on the Mobile Touch Web.
Connect the dots here, and the Mobile Touch Web is becoming more than another Web. It’s becoming a marketplace. Where does this leave apps? Perhaps apps will be a more natural fit for content and services (such as games) that need access to device feature and functionality (such as the accelerometer) to deliver an excellent user experience.
VIRTUAL ROUNDTABLE
Does the Mobile Touch Web represent a new wave in content, services and experiences?
In a search for answers and insights Taptu brought me on board to create and curate an ongoing discussion of the impact of touchscreen devices on how people access, enjoy and purchase content and services. The result is a Virtual Roundtable that includes commentary and analysis from a wide range of mobile industry entrepreneurs, authorities and pundits.
The Virtual Roundtable includes view from: Saverio Romeo (Frost & Sullivan); Tomi Ahonen (best-selling author); Jo Rabin (The Handheld Company); Alfred DeRose (Tego Interactive); Mark Curtis (Flirtomatic); Carl Martin (RedWeb); Andreas Constantinou (VisionMobile); Jonathan MacDonald (This Fluid World); Hugh Griffiths (Phonepay Plus); Dennis Bournique (WAP Review); Neil MacDonald (Nuance Communication); Martin Wilson (Indigo 102); Dave Moreau (Fonestarz); Dr. Mike Short (Telefónica Europe); Dan Appelquist (Vodafone R&D, MoMoLondon); Carl Uminiski (Somo); Christian Lindholm (Fjord); Simon Andrews (Addictive!); Tim Bray (Google) and Jason Grigsby (Cloud Four). Thanks guys!
The contributors agree the rise of touchscreen phone shipments from handset manufacturers including Apple, HTC, Nokia and Samsung, and the growth in touch-friendly websites and content will profoundly impact how we live, work and shop. From content creation and publishing, to user experience and design, to commerce to advertising, the Mobile Touch Web changes all the rules.
As Christian Lindholm, a partner and director with Fjord, a leading European digital design agency, who contributed his vision to the Taptu Virtual Roundtable, put it: the Mobile Touch Web has not only arrived full-force. It marks the beginning of a seismic shift that will spur the creation of new Webs and new device segments.
“Within 2-3 years we will have 3 Webs. The 13″ Mouse web, designed for computers, desktop and laptops; the 4″ pocket Touch Web for mobile touchscreen devices and the like; and the 10″ casual Touch Web for devices such as the iPad. Thus, we will have three segments: Phone, Pad and Computer. The Phone and Pad are Web sub-segments, and will require their own discovery, structure and monetization solutions.”
PODCAST WITH STEVE IVES
Read between the lines, and the advance of the Mobile Touch Web could herald a new kind of interactive mobile Internet, a vibrant bazaar where new content, new experiences and even new forms of commerce set the bar. But that’s my take…
To get the inside track I caught up with Steve Ives, Taptu CEO. We discussed the report findings and debated some larger issues, including the requirement to fix mobile search for touchscreen devices and presenting mobile search results in a format that fits better with the UI.
Highlights from the podcast:
WEB OR APPS?: A lot of the Touch Web is a “website-centric approach where [companies] are taking a website paradigm and they’re just trying to make [content] work well on the touch screen device….The other paradigm is the app paradigm, where there’s usually a smaller and more focused scope of the content and often it’s task-centric.”
COMMERCE EXPLODING: “We observed that 22 percent of our index was shopping and services sites and that kind of surprised us because, in the App Store on the iPhone, games were top category at around 20 percent or so.” Why commerce and shopping? Steve says it makes business sense. “If you’ve got a big successful e-commerce site on the desktop web, it’s a lot easier to create a mobile version as a Touch Web property rather than going down the apps route. You can re-use a lot of the technology on your existing desktop e-commerce site. You can re-use the session handling, the cookies, the shopping cart structures and so on.
VIRTUAL ROUNDTABLE: “Tomi Ahonen has an interesting viewpoint that Touchscreen represents a media platform. That really fits in with our thinking. We think that the mobile device is now not really a voice device so much anymore. About 80 to 90 percent of what you do on these touch screen devices in the future is non-voice.” It’s early days for this new medium and companies are first “just using existing forms of content and repurposing very quickly to run on the touch screen devices, but more and more we’re seeing highly optimized, made for touchscreen content. The App Store is the first wave of that and the Mobile Touch Web is the second wave for that.”
MOBILE SEARCH INNOVATION: “Firstly, nobody’s really tackled the whole challenge of visual mobile search. A lot of the content that’s being created for these touch screen devices is very visual in nature, and the blue [search] links approach that Google has traditionally brought from the desktop doesn’t really do justice to the huge variety of new content forms that are appearing on these devices.” In fact, mobile search may be due for a re-think. “It’s no good to have a search engine that just returns PC content results first and then occasionally may give you some touch-optimized content….At some point in the future, there will be a tipping point where there’s more made for touchscreen content in the world that needs to be accessed than there is PC content.”
CONTENT CURATION: “We’re in the very early stage of the Mobile Touch Web and users need help to show them what exists. It’s not sufficient just to give them a search box; you need to show them which are the important categories of content, which are the important sites in those categories. There’s a need to curate content into meaningful collections for different audiences and we’ve taken a first step in this direction with the directory that we have in the latest versions of our app and browser.” Moving forward, Taptu is focused on “more powerful and more flexible curation structures, so users can go and create their own selections of content.”
ROADMAP: Taptu is innovating in two directions: “Firstly, we think there’s more interesting stuff that can be done and needs to be done in visual search.” To this end Taptu has introduced a flick-based user interface model on the iPhone that allows people to have an overview of results. “On the browser version of Taptu, if you point your mobile touchscreen browser at taptu.com you get a more kind of traditional scrolling overview and we think there’s a really interesting visual treatment that can blend the best of both worlds in one very attractive and simple solution. So, you’ll see some innovation in the next couple of months from Taptu in that direction.”
My take: I summed it up best in the press release MSG issued to kick off the discussion on the Mobile Touch Web and this exclusive podcast. “The Mobile Touch Web, though growing vigorously as Taptu shows, is not the only game in town. Thus, the pressure is on companies everywhere in the ecosystem to re-think their strategies and create a balance of touch-friendly content for touchscreen devices and the emerging Mobile Touch Web, while not losing sight of the opportunities offered by the other Internets. We face tough choices, but hoping for the Internet to become a unified place where everything is accessible and connected (again) is not an option.”
LISTEN TO THE PODCAST WITH STEVE IVES HERE.[11:12]
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Disclaimer: Taptu is an MSG supporter and client.
Tags: Android, app store, Apple, Curation, Fjord, Gartner Piper Jaffray, Google, iPhone, mobile analytics, Mobile Commerce, Mobile Internet, Mobile Marketing, Mobile Marketing, Mobile Search, Mobile Touch Web, podcast, Taptu, touchscreen, Virtual Roundtable, visual search, white paper
May 14th, 2010 at 6:57 am
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