Taptu have a fantastic white paper out all about Touch Screen phones. They make the case that "touch" is something of a new paradigm for mobile internet:
- touch screen devices like iphone lead to a massive increase in usage
- mobile search is going to be dominated by touch phones
- mobile advertising is already being dominated by touch phones
We have seen this sort of thing happen before in the world of mobile media:
- the move from black and white to colour screens
- the shift from monophonic to polyphonic to real ringtones
- WML markup being super-ceded by XMTML markup
Each time this happened it created a whole new range of opportunities such as colour wallpapers, new types of ringtones and more advanced mobile internet sites. At the same time, whenever a shift of this kind occurs there is a big risk for incumbents that don't adapt.
The obvious first thing that touch screens mean for mobile internet players is that they need to create new front-ends for touch devices, either as an application or a mobile internet site. For example, most of the major mobile and online players have all developed iphone-optimized mobile internet sites or applications.
Taptu iphone-optimized mobile site
Taptu appear to be taking things a bit further than this - with the launch of a new version of their search engine which takes touch optimization a lot further. Their new service is still under wraps but Peggy at the excellent MSearchgroove has a post providing some preview information.
In the mobile ad space admob has been investing heavily in creating new kinds of ad units for the iphone and android - at the moment these don't seem to use touch that heavily, but no doubt new touch mobile ad formats are in the pipeline.
So the question is - how big a shift is the move to touch screens? What is this going to mean for the mobile internet? Could this be the sort of shift that lets a player like Taptu emerge to defeat Google and Yahoo in mobile search?
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