vTap

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

~ the last words ~

vTap launched on 10 September 2007, two months after the first iPhone went on sale and ten months before there was an App Store to put anything in. It was a video search engine for phones, built by Veveo, a company in Andover, Massachusetts founded in 2004 by Murali Aravamudan and Ajit Rajasekharan. Veveo had raised about $28 million before the product shipped, which was a lot of money to spend on mobile search in a year when most phones still charged by the megabyte.

The thing it did well was typing. vTap indexed character by character and predicted as you went, so the result list narrowed with every keypress instead of waiting for you to finish a query and press a button. On a numeric keypad in 2007 that was the difference between a usable tool and a novelty. It would also answer quick factual questions out of Wikipedia, which made it a broader mobile search product than the name suggests.

It shipped on Windows Mobile first, with an Ajax web app for the iPhone and J2ME support promised for everything else, and an Android client came later. Business Week reviewed it in 2008 under the headline "More Streaming, Less Screaming from vTap", which tells you roughly how mobile video felt that year.

Turkey in 2007 was a Symbian country and mobile data was still sold in small expensive slices, so searching video on a handset was not something anyone I knew was doing. Video lived on the desktop at the end of a TTNet line. By the time the phone became the default screen here, vTap had already been folded into somebody else's product.

~ the record ~

~ the company was the real product ~

Veveo's business turned out to be licensing rather than consumers. The search and discovery engine went to device makers and pay-TV operators, which is a quieter market than app stores but one that pays per deployment and signs multi-year contracts. The consumer app increasingly functioned as the showroom for the engine.

On 24 February 2014 Rovi announced it was acquiring Veveo for roughly $62 million in cash, plus up to $7 million tied to milestones, saying it would combine Veveo's personalization and semantic search with its own metadata and recommendation work. The engine went into Rovi. vTap did not continue as a standalone consumer service.

~ the doorway nobody closed ~

vtap.com had stopped being the product years before any of that. From late 2008 the domain was a redirect into m.vtap.com, where the actual service lived, and from 2012 it redirected somewhere else entirely: a Veveo corporate page titled "Mobile vTap QuickSearch for Android". That redirect was still in place in January 2016, two years after the acquisition that ended the product it was advertising.

Today vtap.com resolves to a parked page of a few kilobytes. The marketing copy for the Android client outlived both the app and the company that wrote it.

~ where the technology went ~

Predictive character-by-character search against a constrained keyboard was a hard problem in 2007 and then quietly stopped being one, which is usually what happens to the hard problems. Veveo's work went into television search boxes by way of Rovi. If you have ever spelled a show's name into a smart TV remote and watched the list collapse toward the right answer before you finished, that is the lineage, running inside a device nobody thinks of as a search engine.

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