After what seems like an age of no news, mobile search and discovery company Taptu seems to be suddenly getting back in the game. Today it’s doing a Twitter-style switcheroo – founder and CEO Steve Ives is becomes president and will stay to focus on product, while COO and President Mitch Lazar, who only joined in March from his role as managing director of Yahoo! Mobile Europe, will become CEO. Ives was previously founder and CEO since the company started in 2006.
This year Taptu set its sites on America, opening a US office in Denver, Colorado with Lazar, after picking up a lot more American users for its iPhone and Android search apps which are optimised for the ‘touch search’ interface. But its R&D operation remains in the company’s UK headquarters in Cambridge. It’s clear that this reshuffling of executive chairs is designed to re-focus on the US as its biggest market.
Founded in 2006, Taptu specialises in indexing and crawling media specifically designed for touchscreen mobile devices, which is a good space to be in right now. Taptu’s Touch Search app is getting a four-star user ranking in Apple’s App Store, and its Android version is doing OK too. We hear Taptu plans to move beyond mobile search, which probably means they are getting into discovery and social much more, but that remains to be seen.
Taptu is privately funded with investment from Sofinnova and DFJ Esprit.
Prior to Taptu, Ives was founder and CEO of Trigenix, a Cambridge-based mobile software company that Qualcomm acquired in 2004.