Taptu

» see taptu.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Taptu was bought in September 2012 and switched off on 31 March 2015. The company that bought it went into administration about a year after that, which is an unusual order of events. Normally the acquirer is the thing still standing, and the product it absorbed is the part that gets quietly stopped. Here both went, in sequence, and the smaller one went first.

It started in Cambridge in 2007, founded by Steve Ives and funded by DFJ Esprit and Sofinnova, and the first product was a search engine for phones. That sounds redundant now and was not then. In 2007 a phone browser was a compromise, most of the web rendered badly or not at all on one, and there was a real argument that mobile needed its own index built out of pages that actually worked at that size. Taptu shipped it as a stripped-down site and then as apps for iPhone and Android, and in 2009 it wired in real-time results through a deal with OneRiot.

Then the iPhone kept getting better and the argument disappeared underneath them. A separate mobile index only makes sense while the normal web is unusable on a handset, and that window closed fast. Taptu shut its search product down in early 2011 and became something else, which is a harder thing for a company to do than it looks and which it managed cleanly.

The second product was My Taptu. You picked sources and mixed them into streams, the marketing said you could DJ your news, and CNET described the result as content playlists. It landed in the middle of the reader wars, next to Flipboard and Zite, all of them competing to be the thing you opened on a tablet with coffee.

I was not in that fight because I was not on that device. News reading here moved off the desktop and onto the phone, and from there into whatever the social apps put in front of you, skipping the stage the whole category was built for. The tablet as a morning reading object was a real habit in some places and it never became one around me, so a beautifully laid out magazine grid was a thing I saw in screenshots.

~ the case file ~

~ an index that fit on a screen ~

The first Taptu is the more interesting company. Its bet was that mobile was a distinct medium with its own corpus, and for about four years that bet paid rent. Somebody had to decide which pages were usable on a two-inch screen, and no general web crawler was asking that question.

What killed it was not a competitor. It was the phone getting good enough that the question stopped being worth asking, which is the most common way an infrastructure startup dies and the hardest one to see coming from inside. Taptu read it early and moved, at the cost of throwing away everything it had built.

~ streams ~

My Taptu's organizing idea was the stream, a mix of sources that you assembled and could then share as an object. That is more generous than the algorithmic readers next to it, which took your taste as input and gave you no way to point at the recipe afterward. It shipped on iOS and Android and pushed hard on tablets, which was where the money in the category was supposed to be.

The money was not there. Every product in that cohort was giving away a good reading experience over other people's articles and hoping something would attach itself to that later. Zite went to CNN and then to Flipboard, and Pulse went to LinkedIn. The ones that got out did it by being bought, which is what Taptu did in September 2012.

~ the buyer went second ~

MediaFed was a feed syndication business, which makes the purchase legible: it had publisher relationships and wanted a consumer surface to point them at. The service ran under that ownership for two and a half more years and stopped on 31 March 2015.

MediaFed entered administration in April 2016. The domain has since turned into a discussion forum for something else entirely, which is the tidiest possible ending for a company that spent eight years trying to work out where people would read. Neither of its two products lasted long enough to be missed, and both of them were right about something before they were wrong about it.

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