Monthly Archives: December 2008

Mobile Search Engine Taptu Wins $9.6M in New Funding

Taptu, a pure mobile search engine that I reviewed a while ago on this post just announced that it has won $9.6 million in extra funding from its existing investors.

This news confirms that there is still room for growth in the mobile search market. Taptu is specialized in mobile content search, as opposed to traditional search engines that still mainly focus on web pages. Taptu’s main competitor is ABPhone, a French mobile search engine, which is also seeing an exponential growth in the number of searches made.

Handheld devices will be the primary connection tool to the Internet for most people in the world in 2020, so there is a need for mobile vertical search, and players such as Taptu are already filling that need.

Via Mobile Marketer.

Google AdWords Allowing Targeting of iPhones, G1s and similar phones

If you’re a mobile content provider, then you’ll enjoy the new feature available in Google AdWords.

You can now display ads exclusively for the iPhone and Google’s G1. For example, if you are providing games for the iPhone, you can run AdWords Campaigns to only target these users, so you’ll get more targeted users when bidding for “games”, as opposed to buying the keyword “games” for all users (PC users, non-iPhone users, etc)

To do so, you need to do the following in your AdWords account:

To target ads for G1 and iPhone, go to your campaign settings tab in your AdWords account. Then for the “Device Platform” option under “Networks and Bidding,” select “iPhones and other mobile devices with full internet browsers.”

To only target iPhone, G1, and other phones with full HTML browsers, unselect “Destop and laptop computers”. This way only these kind of phones will see your ads.

Also note that if you’re currently running “regular” AdWords campaign, they will be displayed on iPhones, G1s, and other mobile phones with full internet browsers. You’ll need to opt-out in your AdWords account if you do not want to have your ads displayed on these devices.

I wish Google allowed to target even more, for example, only iPhones, only G1’s, etc. This could be very handy for content providers.

Also, I hope that this kind of customization will be applied to organic search, for example giving more weight to sites designed for the iPhone when people are searching from an iPhone…

Source : Google Mobile Blog.