Hello hello it’s James from mjelly again … last Friday we kicked off a new feature for Mobile Industry Review – highlighting a different Mobile 2.0 site or app each week, to give a taste of some of the great next generation mobile stuff out there.

The first mobile 2.0 service we looked at was the mobile site builder and community site Peperonity.  This week we are going to give a quick run-down of the very excellent mobile search service Taptu.

What is it?

Taptu is a search engine designed specifically for mobile devices and mobile users.  The service focuses on entertainment and content searches (video, images, music), but also covers the web, news, blogs and mobile-optimized sites.  There’s a strong social element to Taptu – you can share the searches via SMS, email or twitter and you can save a list of your friends on the site to make it easy to ping them with stuff.  The site also remembers the searches you have done and recommends things to you to cut down on clicks and browsing around.  Another interesting feature of Taptu is the “I’m bored” button that will serve up something to amuse you from some of the most recent popular searches.  The company is based out of Cambridge UK, was founded in 2005, launched in 2007, and has already won a number of awards.

Why is it interesting?

Taptu seems to be a very well funded operation and they are investing a lot of this money in really pushing back the boundaries of mobile user experience.  If you browse their mobile site you will see that an incredible amount of care and attention has gone into the navigation, design, layout and copy.  Taptu is perhaps the first mobile web site to really succeed in bringing the clean, functional but beautiful web 2.0 aesthetic to the small screen.  If you are building a mobile web site these guys are the benchmark for design and usability.

The other reason Taptu are worth watching is that they are taking on an absolutely massive opportunity in mobile search – with all guns blazing.   Sooner or later we’ll see the first billion dollar mobile 2.0 acquisition and Taptu could be it.

See you next week for another example of mobile 2.0 goodness.

You can find Taptu on on mjelly, which is a directory of mobile things at mjelly.com on your PC and m.mjelly.com on mobile

Each week we’ll be showcasing a different site or application for you to check out, either because its innovative in some way, has been very successful or it’s the sort of thing you might want to download or bookmark on your mobile.

To kick off, our mobile 2.0 service this week is Peperonity.

What is it?

Peperonity is a mobile site builder and community that lets the user create a mobile web site with text, images, files and interactive elements like a guestbook, voting and messaging.  The site is a bit like a hybrid of livejournal and myspace on mobile that makes it really easy to create a website through your phone as a personal page or in an area of interest.  There are also some central community services including a super-busy forum, live chat rooms, a media gallery and so on.  Whilst Peperonity is most definitely “mobile 2.0″ it was actually founded way back in 2001 and survived the mobile internet nuclear winter of 2001-7 without taking any VC funding.

Why is it interesting?

To be fair, most Mobile Industry Review readers are probably not the target users for Peperonity, which  mainly attracts a younger audience, particularly in the hyper-growth mobile markets like South Africa and India.  However, the site is worth getting to know if you’re in the mobile biz, based on the huge traction that it has achieved.

Pepperonity has the kind of mobile traffic that a lot of big media companies can only dream of, and is claiming over 400m page views a month, over 5 million personal pages have been created on the site and there are now over a million registered users.  (Source: Wap Review).  As a result it is one of the biggest, if not THE biggest driver of inventory on the admob mobile ad network and is rumoured to have a minimum guarantee deal on ad space for over a million US dollars a year.

Despite all this Peperonity has a fairly low profile, even within the mobile industry, and deserves to be more widely known, given that it’s a real benchmark for anyone looking to build a successful mobile internet site.

That’s all for now – see you next week for another mobile 2.0 service

You can find Peperonity on on mjelly, which is a directory of mobile things at mjelly.com on your PC and m.mjelly.com on mobile