The News

Mobile Industry Veteran Mitch Lazar Joins Taptu As Non-Executive Director

15/04/2010

Cambridge, UK – April 15, 2010 – Taptu, the mobile search engine that indexes the Mobile Touch Web, has appointed industry veteran and former Yahoo Mobile managing director Mitch Lazar to its board as a non-executive director.

With over a decade’s worth of experience in the sector, Lazar brings a deep knowledge of mobile search, distribution partnerships and mobile monetization to the Taptu business. Aside from heading up Yahoo Mobile’s European efforts for the past four and a half years, Lazar launched, ran and commercialized the mobile services and products of some of media’s biggest brands, including Time Warner’s CNN, Cartoon Network and TCM. He also led the international roll out of AOL’s mobile initiatives.

Lazar will work with Taptu to hone and expand the company’s commercial strategy for its two immediate goals: to make it easy for consumers to explore the fast-growing Mobile Touch Web, and to help Touch Web developers reach a larger audience more quickly.

Lazar said: “I am excited to join the Taptu board to help guide the company to commercial success. Taptu’s team truly understands that the biggest opportunities for mobile monetization lie beyond traditional app stores. Taptu’s unique platform and index differentiate the company from the search giants and more importantly, put it at the heart of a tremendous opportunity to grow its advertising revenue stream by taking advantage of this important and revolutionary consumer change in the mobile industry.”

Taptu CEO Steve Ives said: “Mitch’s experience in mobile content and search is going to be of great help to Taptu as we scale up our Touch Web index and take it to a much wider audience.  More than 360 million touch screen phones will be sold in 2010 alone and the appetite for new forms of made-for-touch content, including touch web sites and HTML5 web apps is really taking off.”

 

About Mitch Lazar
Mitch has more than two decade’s of experience in the media industry and has spent over 10 years building mobile businesses for some of the world’s largest media companies. Most recently, he was MD of Yahoo! Mobile in Europe, overseeing Yahoo’s mobile business and operations in the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain. Before joining Yahoo! in 2005, he spent 12 years at Time Warner where he drove AOL’s and Turner Broadcasting’s wireless strategy and mobile distribution efforts worldwide. In the role, he partnered with hundreds of mobile operators worldwide to launch CNN and Cartoon Network mobile services. Mitch was an early pioneer in digital media and one of the founders of CNN.com in 1995. He began his career as a broadcast journalist, working in the US and South Korea.

About Taptu
Since early 2009 Taptu has pioneered the index and crawling of media specifically designed for touch screen mobile devices. Consumers can now, for the first time, search and explore millions of mobile touch Web sites, apps, images and the realtime Web. Consumers can experience this for themselves by visiting http://taptu.com on any touch device or by downloading from the App Store or Android Market place.
Taptu is also making this unique index available to third parties via an API.  Taptu is privately held and capitalized by leading investors, Sofinnova and DFJ Esprit.

Taptu Links:
• Introducing the Touch Web on SlideShare: http://slideshare.net/taptu
• Read Taptu’s blog: http://taptu.com/blog
• Follow Taptu on Twitter: http://twitter.com/taptu

Media Contacts:
 
North America      UK/ Europe
Jason Harris       Charles Olive
+1 503 334 2574     +44 (0) 7989 449048
Jason.harris@taptu.com     charles.olive@taptu.com