But why limit that approach to storefronts and app stores?

Mobile operators can refine this approach to insert themselves at the center of our social media exchange, a trusted position that is the cornerstone of a sustainable business.

The advance of smartphones (and their new importance as a social media tool) turn up the pressure on mobile operators to get involved in that exchange. Offering a content locker that aggregates their subscribers’ social media accounts and contact lists, is an excellent first step.

But it’s more than storage. Mobile operators can also add value by enabling users to share content (stored in the locker) or allow customers to recommend content they’ve purchased to their friends.

It’s easy to imagine a scenario in which mobile operators harness artificial intelligence to automatically display and recommend content to consumers based on where people in their social networks browse and shop – on and off-portal.

Read the rest of my post on the Amdocs Interactive blog.

Matt Anderson is Head of product marketing for Amdocs Interactive, a distinct business within Amdocs focused on Value Added Services, which is the world’s leading provider of digital commerce, Mobile Internet and personalization solutions. Matt has over 13 years experience bringing products to market in the telecommunications industry. Prior to joining Amdocs in 2008, he directed marketing for Nuance’s mobile business unit, focused on market development of speech activation applications in the mobile, navigation and automotive industries. Previously he launched the next generation of T9 at AOL Wireless and was responsible for managing mobile VAS offers at AT&T. Matt also founded a start-up in the telematics business and managed marketing and sales for one of the first wireless data networking companies. Matt has an MBA from the University of Washington. You can follow Matt on Twitter (@matt6156).

Disclaimer: Amdocs Interactive is an MSG client and supporter.

Indeed, 2010 has turned out to be the year for multi-screen content services and – more importantly – for multi-purpose applications and solutions that allow consumers to call the shots. Nielsen Three Screen Report – a regular analysis from Nielsen’s Cross-Platform Audience Measurement initiative to analyze consumer behavior –reveals a steady climb in the number of Americans that use the Internet (in many cases accessing the Web on their smartphones) and their TV simultaneously.  As Nielsen observes: “New mobile devices and enhanced TV quality allow viewers to engage in more content than ever before.”

This increase in multi-screen services is enabled by the growing consumer adoption of fixed line and mobile broadband services.  High-speed broadband Internet access, now in over 60 percent of American homes, has created a better user experience for watching online videos. Nearly a quarter of households have smartphones, enabling consumers to “place shift” and watch video wherever they are.

While the growth in mobile online video viewing has increased over 50 percent year over year, the real story is the avalanche of applications and business models sharply aimed at bringing online video control and content to smartphones and tablets.

Center stage

The last months have seen a slew of apps from companies across the ecosystem. Media companies and content providers — including TV Guide, the one-stop destination for television listings — have released applications for iPhone, Android and iPad platforms.

At the other end of the spectrum, service providers and telcos are pursuing models to put them back in the center of our online viewing experience. Established players (such as carriers and cable TV companies) are extending their turf, while providers that focus on place-shifting products are just beginning to flex their muscles in mobile.

Satellite TV provider DirecTV has an app for its subscribers that lets them use their mobile phones to purchase pay-per-view programming and schedule how and when they record their favorite shows. Comcast, one of the leading cable providers in the U.S., has taken the wraps off their Xfinity TV app for the iPad, that allows digital subscribers to watch movies and TV shows on the tablet device, as well as program their digital video recorders, browse content by keyword or title, create a watch list of favorite shows, and share viewing choices with others via social networks. Additionally, traditional wireless carriers AT&T and Verizon are leveraging their “triple-play” bundles to deliver video content across screens and devices. And the list goes on.

Sensing a business opportunity online video service providers are also lining up to get in on the action. Hulu, a service that offers users online access to hit TV shows, has launched Hulu Plus, a premium-level subscription service that allows users to stream video to connected TVs, Blu-ray players, gaming consoles, set-top boxes, iPads, iPhones, and other devices. Not to be outdone, Sling Media, a provider of video place-shifting products, just announced the availability of the SlingPlayer Mobile player for the Apple iPad. This will allows Slingbox owners with iPads to change channels, control their DVRs and watch their favorite shows anywhere they have an Internet connection.

Granted, many of these companies are currently only active on two of the three screens. But their future objective is to be present across all three screens – and every other connected device their customers interact with as part of their daily routine.

Hypercompetition for the customer

These apps, services and enhancements don’t just encourage consumers to watch more video (in many cases outside traditional broadcast and cable TV airing times and places); they turn up the pressure on providers to deliver content users appreciate to the platforms they prefer.

As a result, the relationship between the users, the content they view, and the devices they view it on have become increasingly complex. Traditional viewing habits no longer apply to these new devices and consumers, already struggling to cope with hundreds of cable TV channels, thousands of movies, hundreds of thousands of apps, and millions of songs now must navigate these content choices against an ever more complex set of services and devices.

Part of the solution is simpler interfaces and easier access. However, consumers also expect more flexibility, greater convenience and less hassle. In this converged digital environment providers are forced to compete on how well they really know their customers, insights they obtain by harnessing information and data about their customers across multiple touch points.

Fortunately, service providers already have a handle on what is needed to construct a new and unified view of the customer across all three screens. Their arsenal of capabilities includes the ability to offer users a single sign on experience across devices, to collect and analyze customer data and anonymized data sets, and to wield complex content management systems that match content to context and interface with external APIs.

Service providers are also accustomed to following the clues we leave behind, such as browsing patterns and purchase records, to determine (and deliver) us content and services we are likely to appreciate.

However, delivering personalized recommendations for a multi-platform experience demands services providers master much more than content tagging and customer profiling. And it calls for approaches that go far beyond plain-vanilla personalization schemes that merely gather information during the interaction with the user to construct a TV guide matched to expressed viewing tastes, for example.

The convergence of TV, Web and mobile platforms demands providers harness a multi-platform approach that enables them to create a persistent and personalized experience across (and between) the screens to which they distribute their content.

Specifically, providers must enlarge their arsenal of capabilities to enable real-time learning (following the digital bread crumb trails we leave across platforms and devices to consistently deliver us content we’ll appreciate), device specific recommendations (understanding what content we access on what devices and then serving us content in ways that suits the device we are on at that moment) and situational methodologies (wielding all the approaches and algorithms available to deliver the right content to the right subscriber at the right time and consistently across the content delivery ecosystem).

Real-time rules

It’s a new game with new rules. Success requires customer-centricity and a personalization approach that get the right content in front of the right users. To achieve this, providers must create different and relevant experiences for each subscriber. They must also deliver timely recommendations based on users’ real-time behavior. It’s not enough to have a personalization system that updates every few days or even hours. We’re talking about minutes.

Why? Because delivering multi-platform personalization is a new paradigm that requires providers to accommodate changing relationships that involve both the content they offer and the customer segments they serve. Content, like produce on the shelf, must be fresh. Moreover, its delivery much be perfectly aligned with the viewing preferences of the individual.

Viewing habits are by no means static, nor are they always logical. In fact, they can change dramatically and unexpectedly as timeslots shift, shows ratings move and events happen. Excellent examples of these are live events such as sports tournaments, music concerts and political elections. They are hot when they happen and stale when they’re over. Recommending these programs to consumers after the buzz is has dissipated delivers more than a poor experience; it can cost you customers.

It’s equally bad practice to read too much into these mega-events. During the World Cup just about everyone is glued to a screen of some kind (TV, mobile, PC) to watch their team. But assuming that an individual is a die-hard soccer fan simply because they – like millions of other people – watched the games last summer is patently false.

Predictably, a plain-vanilla recommendation system will do just that. It will connect the dots to conclude that the individual is a loyal soccer fan. It will also recommend more soccer related content and possibly even suggest the individual download a World Cup-themed mobile game. Talk about overkill.

The correct approach – provided the recommendation systems understands and can accommodate changing relationships – is to track dynamic user behavior over time. The aim is not to suggest more of the same content; it must have the ability to learn and recognize that viewing a soccer game in the soccer season doesn’t mean the individual is a soccer fan.

It’s even better if the system learns so much that it can introduce some randomness into the equation, delivering users recommendations outside of what they would normally receive. This opens the door to machine-created serendipity and encourages consumers to fully explore content in the catalog, allowing providers to broaden and deepen our understanding of what users want and appreciate.

Powerful personalization

It’s also important that a system understands people generally access content on their own terms and using the device they prefer. A user may access content on a mobile phone during the daily commute, but prefer to watch online video on a laptop if the trip is longer. Or the user may watch all content on a tablet except sports, which the individual watches on TV as a rule – period.

One can imagine an infinite number of combinations because viewing habits and preferences are as individual as the users themselves. Delivering multi-platform personalization requires a system that analyzes user behavior across all these devices and uses these observations to ensure an optimal user experience every time and on every device.

In addition, content should not only be accessible and simple to navigate across the three screens (or how ever many screens the provider distributes their content to). The provider’s catalog should be effectively revamped in real-time to make every item shown relevant and personal.

Finally, a multi-platform personalization approach should not require providers to choose one model over another. Reams have been written about recommenders and the models providers can choose from. From collaborative filtering, to market basket analysis, and from social network analysis to Bayesian modeling, each approach has its merits.

But why should a provider have to choose just one? The best approach is the one that encompasses all the approaches. And the one a provider employs should depend only on the situation.

A good analogy is baseball. There each team has a bullpen of pitchers, and each has their talent. One pitcher might throw a killer curveball and the other might serve up an amazing fastball. The point is: the manager decides the right pitcher for the right job depending on what’s needed to strike out the player from the opposing team. The final decision depends on the situation.

In effective multi-platform personalization the winning approach is the one that uses the right combination of algorithms and methodologies to determine the best content for the user, processing the individual’s unique behavior, consumption patterns and preferences for each of their devices.

This is the ideal user experience. It’s also the vision that has guided our company, Sidebar, in the development of a new breed of personalization technology, one that takes a smart, modular, and multi-platform approach. Specifically, it breaks down the device and platform silos, leveraging mobile, PC and Web usage to create a global understanding of each customer.  It then uses this insight to deliver each user the best recommendation for every unique situation.

Content & conversations

But it’s not only about presenting people with recommendations based on preferences, opt-in interests, observed behaviors and demographics. It’s also about empowering people to participate in the provider’s ecosystem.

This is critical (and common sense) because people trust people, not machines. In fact, our requirement for human input and judgment is driving search engine giants to adopt new approaches and make way for new people-powered search schemes that effectively infuse human preferences into computer algorithms to deliver truly relevant results, not just search-optimized web destinations.

The importance of trust is even greater in a multi-platform environment, where people are  allowing providers to access their personal data and insights into what content they access on which device (information that is anonymized and cannot be linked back to a specific individual) in order to deliver relevant and useful content across three screens.

People must feel that they are in control of the data they volunteer, and they must feel empowered to contribute their feedback to the process. To this end recommendations systems must offer people the opportunity to become partners in their personalized experiences.

And these systems must show the tangible benefits that come from this participation, namely accurate recommendations that reflect a deep understanding of the individual, not the ability to group people into cut-and-dried categories. After all, there’s nothing more disappointing than a wrong recommendation, or having to navigate scores of inappropriate recommendations for horror films just because you’re hooked on Twilight and enjoy vampire-themed, romance movies.

Getting social

Moving forward, personalization is not just a feature of what providers offer. Soon it will sit at the center of everything they do.

A key driver will be Social TV – the extension of social media into the discovery, viewing, and interaction around television. Social TV is more than a pastime; it’s fast gaining traction to be the next megatrend.

In May 2010, Social TV was named one of the 10 most important emerging technologies by the MIT Technology Review. It harnesses the relationships we already have in social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter to inspire people to connect with entertainment, like movies and TV. It also allows people to share their feelings about what they watch – while they watch it.

Social TV also enables social exchange, allowing friends and followers to read updates posted on social networks such as Twitter and draw from these to decide what programs they themselves might also enjoy. Think of it as a new kind of content recommendation that people will consider because it comes directly from people they know or whose taste they respect.

And let’s not forget the ability of social media to make TV viewing social again. It used to be that families and friends sat down in front of the TV set at the same time every week to enjoy a popular sitcom and then spend hours talking about the best scenes or what made them laugh most. The advent of the Internet, the rise of the DVR and the advance of connected devices – platforms that allow people to place shift their viewing and schedule their content consumption — have changed this routine forever.

Thus, Social TV puts the tools in our hands to contribute to the discussion around TV programs – any time it suits us. We can also connect with friends, followers and people we trust to find out what shows they watch or record as a means of discovering new content we’re sure to like.

Against this backdrop, it’s easy to imagine new business models that will deliver new levels of interaction across screens and across the ecosystem.  We have already seen consumers move away from buying DVDs to renting movies instead (both in physical and digital forms).  Riding this wave Netflix already provides its library to subscribers across a variety of devices including connected TVs, Blu-Ray players, game consoles, and iPads.  With players including Hulu, Sling Media and Sony jumping on the bandwagon, it’s a given that 2011 will see multi-platform content services break on to the mainstream where people will harness Social TV to spread the word.

* * *

Editor’s note: Patrick Kennedy is the CEO of Sidebar, Inc., a company providing multi-platform personalization and recommendation.  Sidebar’s Smart Menu platform acts as a cloud-based brain that analyzes behaviors to learn how each user consumes content differently on each of their devices and makes  recommendations contextual to those devices. In addition, Sidebar offers a Smart Messaging tool that harnesses text messaging to create (and continue) interaction between the provider and subscriber.

Personalization – being able to present individuals with mobile content, services, apps and experiences that are in tune with their profiles and preferences – is shaping up to be the factor that separates a successful sales/marketing pitch from a FAIL.

Granted, people can use mobile search to find what they want. But standard (universal) key word mobile search is not personal. No matter if you’re a scientist, a student or a silver surfer, mobile search delivers the same results to everyone – period. There are some exciting companies offering search services that inject personalization into the equation (and I will cover them here on MSG in the next weeks), but much of the burden is still on people to know what they want. And knowing what you want (a specific piece of content as opposed to a “cool game”) is no easy task.

PERSONAL SHORTCUT

A much smarter approach is to harness personalization technologies to expose people to what they are likely to appreciate. Bubbling up stuff (content, apps, marketing offers) that is perfectly aligned with people’s profiles, preferences, past purchases) is a great way to making finding and buying stuff a no-brainer.

I began tracking and analyzing personalization technologies and the companies that offer them in the industry-first report on the topic (Mobile Search & Content Discovery) I wrote in 2006. I have always considered personalization core to competitive advantage (deploying these technologies either alone or in combination with a mobile search service). However, personalization is only today taking a top-notch spot on the business agenda, driven the recent explosion of content and apps across a maze of app emporiums and handset maker-managed app stores.

Indeed, the new paradigm is personalized content-push based on a deep understanding of the individual’s purchases, passions and past click-behavior. It’s even more compelling if the technology can learn users’ likes and dislikes over time to dynamically and consistently deliver the right content mix.

ASK FIRST?

A number of players – both long established market leaders and nimble newcomer start-ups – “get” it. They range from content companies with personalization (and recommendation) capabilities “built-in” to their offer (Gracenote); to companies powering content discovery on behalf of mobile operators and media brands (Aggregate Knowledge, AMDOCS Interactive, Qualcomm’s Xiam Technologies).

Much of the profiling is based on keen observation and excellent numbers crunching capabilities. Put simply, these technologies use implicit personalization to make sense of the digital bread crumb trail we leave behind. What we do on the Web, what we do with our mobile phones, and, in some cases, how interact with advertisers – all these interactions become variables in the algorithms these companies use to present us what we are likely to appreciate (even before we think to ask for it!).

Implicit personalization has clear advantages, but is it enough to get the 360-degree holistic picture of what we are and what we want? Wouldn’t a hybrid approach that asks people – even if only for a reality-check – be potentially more effective? It certainly works in permission-based mobile marketing, where companies (operators, brands, agencies) achieve impressive results by harnessing opt-in to ask people directly about the advertising they are willing to accept.

SIDEBAR SMART MENU

Which brings me to Sidebar, a California-based start-up that recently reached out for inclusion in the reports I am currently researching and writing on behalf of GigaOM Pro. The series of reports (soon to be released) focuses on topics ranging from permission-based marketing to the future of mobile search. Personalization naturally plays a central role in both. (My personal thanks to Caroline Diaz and the team at Brew Media Relations for introducing me to Patrick Kennedy, Sidebar CEO, and Kieran Hannon, Sidebar COO.)

To date the coverage about Sidebar focuses primarily on the company’s Android and BlackBerry apps, which enable content discovery based on people’s answers to questions aimed at determining demographic data and individual preferences. It’s a great story, and timely since content discovery is a hot item in the industry.

But the real story is the company’s shift away from D2C to B2B, and the unique focus on what I like to call participation marketing (a term Patrick and I came up with during our in-depth briefing).

Participation marketing sits at the sweet spot between determining what people want/will accept by following and analyzing their digital bread crumb trail and knowing what they want/will accept by asking them straight out. Sidebar calls this intelligent mobile merchandising because it uses personalization and robust analytics to make storefronts (the current focus) smarter.

I used my briefing with Patrick and Kieran to get the inside track on the company’s Smart Menu and Smart Messaging solutions and progress to date in Brazil and India, where content companies have implemented it to super-charge their content storefronts.

What is Smart Menu?

It’s the capability mix that allows Sidebar to take any WAP or app-based content and present it in a way that we are likely to appreciate. Think dynamic clustering and personalized presentation. Put simply, Sidebar’s engine learns from user behavior and dynamically clusters users into groups. But it also lets people input their personal preferences and rate content – additional information that can help hone personal content recommendations. The menu also has slots that can also be “programmed” by storefront managers to showcase specific content or fulfill partnership obligations with third-party developers/content owners.

How do they work?

Patrick is predictably tight-lipped on the nuts & bolts, but it’s enough to say that Sidebar collects partner metadata (via APIs) about the content/apps and any other information that has been collected about the people using the service. It combines this with what people volunteer about themselves and their interests (what they like and what they don’t), information they input while they interact with the portal on their mobile phone. Sidebar then uses its own technology to analyze the data and determine what users will want and appreciate (before they ask for it).

Interestingly, Sidebar can use this to optimize/personalize the complete storefront, or it can simply create a “Just For You” section category that exposes stuff that is aligned with what the user would likely want and appreciate. Moreover, the algorithm can be tweaked to optimize/personalize content and app suggestions based on ROI goals. Thus, people are presented with recommendations ranked by both purchase probability and how much each purchase would contribute to ROI. Put the two together and the highest ROI opportunity takes the top-notch spot in the recommendations.

And the list of options and combinations goes on. Personalized recommendations can also accommodate other variables such as price sensitivity (the price at which people will likely buy, or the level at which the service provider wants to sell), location (local recommendations) and even social network (what your peers and significant others on Twitter and Facebook like).

DRIVING (RETURN) VISITS

But dynamic personalization is just part of the picture; Sidebar also brings text messaging into the mix to reality-check user segmentation, gauge customer satisfaction and facilitate a conversation between the company (storefront owner) and the individual. As Patrick puts it: “It’s all about leveraging all the data captured for each user to deliver highly targeted promotional messages.”

The combination covers all the consumer touchpoints – and can also pull in data from other channels/platforms including PCs, games consoles, iPads/Kindles and set-top boxes. This might be why mobile operators are showing a particular interest in the solution. In the case of one operator, the strategy is to use personalization of WAP and website portals as a “launch pad to transition consumers, as they inevitably move from featurephones to smartphones.” The logic here: By providing users a personalized offers carriers can “come to be seen by the consumer as a provider of entertainment content they like.”

Another plus: a significant uplift in content consumption. Patrick reports that Sidebar’s own tests show personalization resulted in “a remarkable uplift that surprised even ourselves and more.” As Patrick puts it: The core value here is harnessing participation marketing to create a personalized merchandising experience, but the driver is the “realization by operators and storefront owners that they have a limited amount of time before people start to see app stores and other destinations as the place to get their digital stuff.”

Names and negotiations are under strict NDA (Patrick will share this news with MSG first), but one client Patrick can discuss is Indiagames, a leading Indian games publisher using Sidebar to offer personalized recommendations via its portal. Billed as the number one Indian mobile game publisher, Indiagames offers both mobile and online games. Its products are developed and published across all major technology platforms and are distributed through partnerships with mobile operators in over 75 countries.

MY TAKE

When it comes merchandising personalization is important – which is why companies in this space are in a good place. But it’s also important to get information about what people want/appreciate from the people. It’s not just about choosing the right content, although that is a BIG part of it. However, combining personalization with conversation is a powerful (and potentially lucrative) algorithm for success. Sidebar encourages this exchange, inviting people to participate and actually tell retailers what they like. Connect the dots, and participation marketing shows people what is appropriate and relevant for them. But this approach can do more than potentially allow storefront owners and mobile operators to cross-sell, up-sell and encourage the all-important impulse buy. It’s easy to imagine combinations of Sidebar’s smart messaging and menus that enable mobile commerce in the physical store, enhance mobile advertising campaigns or just give us a segment of the hundreds of channels on cable TV that we will really enjoy.

A raft of announcements and events from the Mobile Entertainment Forum (MEF) signals a new level of excitement and activity in the global mobile media industry. From the advance of smartphones and app stores to the widespread recognition that service enablers (offered by mobile operators and handset makers) are essential to the health and wealth of the entire business ecosystem, the industry is in a new phase of development and mindset. As Rimma Perelmuter, MEF Executive Director, puts it: “There’s a real sense in this $36 billion global industry that we are at a new stage of innovation. We’re seeing consumers around the world using their mobile phones as their key point of access to content and media, and the industry is evolving to make that user experience one that is more engaging and more holistic.”

PERSONALIZATION PLAYERS & VODAFONE 360

Against this backdrop, this year’s Meffy award is much more than a recognition of excellence and innovation. It’s a welcome confirmation that the industry is experiencing a true coming of age, striking out in new directions and defining new areas of opportunity around mobile apps, mobile commerce and cross-platform content and technology.

In fact, this year’s awards saw the introduction of seven new categories that reflect key industry trends and point the way to where the action is. A particularly important one this time around was content discovery and personalization, a category I developed together with Kim Arazi, Member Relations Director, and judged as part of my duties for the third consecutive year.

The decision was a tough one as always, and the range and calibre of companies focused on technology to unlock the value in profile data (demographics, browsing patterns, purchases) to generate real revenues was impressive.

One entry that underlines the tangible business value of personalization was Vodafone 360, the Vodafone app store. Here a personalization engine (powered by Xiam, a Qualcomm company), which provides recommendations based on user behavior, was at the center of the mobile operator’s strategy to deliver a richer retailing experience. The impact of personalization was measurable and Vodafone later revealed anayltics to Mobile Entertainment that show four times more customers buy on the basis of recommendation than on promotion.

Other entries included CSL MyNet Personalized Mobile Internet Service (powered by AMDOCS Interactive), another exceptional example of how personalization technologies are allowing operators to offer value in the off-portal space, and Taptu, a mobile search and discovery company making its mark by indexing the Mobile Touch Web to expose touch-friendly content people can enjoy on their touch devices.

MEFFY WINNERS & FANCHARGE

Another category that shows the coming of age of consumer engagement was mobile advertising. I also judged the category and was struck by the shift in mobile marketing approaches away from sales pitches to enhanced experiences. Indeed, agencies and brands are correctly embracing mobile as a mass media and focusing their efforts on innovative ways to place mobile at the center of a 360-degree experience.

An excellent example of this was the winning entry. Go! Go! Lions, an integrated mobile campaign carried out with the Seibu Lions, a Japanese major-league professional baseball team, used the Fancharge platform, an integrated suite of mobile marketing and fan engagement applications for live sports and entertainment, to deliver everything from content to coupons to commerce. (Click on the image below to see this impressive campaign — and thanks to Fancharge for sharing and hosting this video.)

Other Meffy 2010 Winners:

• App Store Blockbuster
  CBS Mobile for ‘NCAA March Madness on Demand’ [Check it out here]
• Business Intelligence
  Motally for ‘Motally’
• Consumer Experience
  FindaProperty.com for FindaProperty
• Content Discovery & Personalization
  Taptu for ‘Touch Search’
• Cross Platform Content
  Zed Group for ‘Planet 51’
• Cross-Platform Technology
  MTS for ‘Omlet.ru’
• Games
  PopCap for ‘Plants vs Zombies’
• Innovative App
  CBS Mobile for ‘CW City-Wize iPhone App’ [Check it out here.]
• Innovative Business Model
  Mob4Hire for ‘Crowd Sourced Mobile Testing’
• M-Commerce
  Wau Movil for ‘First Gateway Service Offer in Latin America’
• Mobile Connected Device
  Novatel Wireless for ‘MiFi Intelligent Mobile Hotspot’
• Mobile First Innovation
  Tata Teleservices for ‘English Seekho’
• Music Service
  Shazam for ‘Shazam Encore’
• Social Media
  Handmade Mobile for ‘Flirtomatic’
• Technology Innovation
  Layar for ‘Layar Reality Browser’
• TV & Video Service
  CBS Mobile for ‘TV.com Android & iPhone Mobile’

The MEF Outstanding Contribution award went this year to Dr. Andrew Hsu, the inventor of modern touchscreen technology for mobile handsets. Thanks to Rimma, Kim and the excellent team at Hotwire PR (especially Morgan Evans) for arranging a briefing with Andrew.

Andrew and I discussed how touchscreen has revolutionized the device landscape and explore progress and learnings around the Fuse, a prototype device that brings together captive touch with tilt-sensing, squeeze-sensing and haptics. An awesome experience and more in the podcast next week!

PODCAST WITH RIMMA PERELMUTER

Meantime, I caught up with Rimma Perelmuter, MEF Executive Director, to connect the dots in a long string of MEF announcements and releases.

While the Meffys are certainly a good way to gauge what’s hot and what’s on the horizon, the Business Confidence Index (BCI), based on survey of MEF members, is an even better measure of revenue and business trends in the now $36 billion mobile media market – up from $32 billion in 2009. Rimma walks through the results and discusses the opportunities for growth around smartphones, apps, payments and commerce. She also discusses the top three challenges: consumer awareness and trust, fragmentation and operating systems.

Based on the survey it’s clear that the industry must collaborate to create the business models that will allow everyone to make money on mobile media. To provide companies a roadmap to navigate this new terrain the MEF released a Smart Enablers Guide that builds on the organization’s existing initiative to show how access to service enablers (such as location information) can provide business benefits.

It’s a meaty document chock full of case studies and member survey results on topics including the role of the mobile operator, the spectrum of smart enablers, and the battle looming ahead in the value chain.

Contributions and columns I will be writing for the MEF publications and newsletters will go into more depth, but Rimma starts us off with a high-level overview of why this initiative deserves the support of all the stakeholders.

And finally, Rimma discusses the global agenda and progress in the MENA region. In mid-June MEF celebrated the co-founding of its first office in the Middle East. The office,  based at the  Qatar Science & Technology Park, an innovation hub, will be responsible for localizing strategic MEF initiatives. The Middle east was identified in surveys as a key growth market for the mobile media sector.

MEF grows its global presence

LISTEN TO THE PODCAST [17:30]

The advance of the app store changes all the rules. But who would have thought that the arrival of this new business ecosystem would shift the balance so blatantly in favor of new platforms (primarily Android and Apple) and new players (Google)?

The must-read report from VisionMobile – the first to document developer attitudes and gripes – indicates that mobile app developers are breaking out in new directions after years of struggling with established platforms (such as Java and Symbian) and established players (mobile operators and OEMs).

ANDROID MINDSHARE

This key finding that should alarm bells ringing in boardrooms across the mobile industry.

“In the last two years, a mindshare migration has taken place, with mobile developers moving away from “incumbent” platforms, namely Symbian, Java ME and Windows Phone. The large minority (20-25 percent) of Symbian respondents who sell their apps via iPhone and Android app stores reveals the brain-drain that is taking place towards these newer platforms. The vast majority of Java ME respondents have lost faith in the write-once-run-anywhere vision. Moreover, anecdotal developer testimonials suggest that half of Windows Phone MVP developers (valued for their commitment to the platform) carry an iPhone, and would think twice before re-investing in Windows Phone.”

So, is Android the mindshare leader?

It sure looks it. The survey suggests that nearly 60 percent of all mobile developers recently developed on Android, with iOS (Apple iPhone) coming in a second. Both outrank Symbian and Java ME, which held the pole position in 2008.

Why the overall shift from platform incumbents (such as Symbian) to platform newcomers (Apple and Android)? VisionMobile points out that developers are trying to make money with their apps, so market penetration (addressable market) and monetization models (paid apps) are deciding factors.

Another reason could be platform complexity. VisionMobile’s benchmarks show that a Symbian developer needs to write almost three times more code than an Android developer, and twice as much code as an iPhone developer.

Combine that hassle with the significant differences in time-to-shelf for apps (24 days for Apple, 33 for Android and over 54 days for Symbian) and it’s easy to see why mobile app developers are voting with their feet.

Time-to-payment also plays in favor of the app store model and the platform owners that run them. And no wonder! Developers that choose to sell their apps via an app store generally get paid within a month of the application. On average it takes 55 days to get paid via an operator channel, 69 days to get paid when the app is preloaded by the operator an incredible 168 days (5.5 months) to get paid when the developer preloads the app via a handset maker.

Interestingly, the pay-per-download monetization model is the first pick for most developers (used by two-thirds of respondents). Despite the hype ad-funded apps are very distant second.

MOBILE OPERATOR OBSTACLE

Only 20 percent of respondents are using the mobile operators as a channel to market. Realistically, what role can the mobile operator possibly play in the emerging app economy?

Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of developers feel operators are bit-pipes that should clear the way for other ecosystem players. As one opinionated developer put it: “Operators should get out of the way of developers.” It may sound harsh, but it’s easy to understand this sentiment if we recall the miserable track record most mobile operators have in supporting their developers.

Kudos to VisionMobile for retracing this history and correctly observing that there are serious differences in the core ecosystems. The Internet/PC ecosystem has been about enabling developers to differentiate. Apple and Android take this to the next level. Meantime, the embedded software ecosystem has been about allowing handset makers differentiate. Mobile operators and handset makers continue to put their own differentiation first. Against this backdrop, mobile developers are taking matters (and marketing) into their own hands.

Indeed, the rise of the app stores has also impacted go-to-market strategies. Operator portals and on-device preloading through OEM or operator deals, once the preferred and popular channel to the consumer, are used by less than five percent of developers surveyed.

In fact, the vast majority of developers now uses native app stores (run by the handset maker) or offers their apps via a direct download from their own websites. Interestingly, Apple and Android app stores are the crowd-pleasers, with only 5 percent of Java and just over 10 percent of Windows Phone developers using app stores as a primary distribution channel. Java ME developers also use independent app store GetJar as a channel, followed by Nokia’s Ovi Store.

But it’s not easy money. VisionMobile finds that a minority of developers (five percent) reported very good revenues for their work. 24 percent said their revenues were poor and 27 percent said their revenues were as projected. (This dovetails with the recent post/rant from mobile authority Tomi Ahonen. He did the math and concludes the average developers will break even in about ten years.)

VisionMobile explains this could be due to platform-specific issues such as payment and refund policy. Android Market supports paid apps in only 13 of the 46 countries where it is available to users. What’s more, Android allows users to return an app for refund after 24 hours, a policy that Bango CEO Ray Anderson says spells trouble for developers wanting to track customers and calculate sales. [Listen to this no-holds-barred podcast here.]

POOR OPINION, RICH OPPORTUNITY

While developers may have a low opinion of mobile operators, their biggest business challenges (payment and content discovery through improved personalization and premium placement) could actually be solved by working more closely with mobile operators.

Sure, most developers think operators are a hindrance instead of a help. But ask them what support they need – or would be willing to pay for – and the answers place the mobile operator back in the center of the action.

Developers want – and would pay for – access to APIs. The same goes for marketing support. Specifically, half of respondents would be willing to pay for premium app store placement. And we have another confirmation that personalization and recommendation would go a long way toward helping app developers tackle the content discovery dilemma, allowing them to rise above the noise and expose their applications to the right customer segments.

MY TAKE

Connect the dots in this milestone report and it’s clear there are business models and approaches that would pay dividends for everyone in the ecosystem. It’s up to mobile operators to rebuild developer trust, abandon their command-and-control strategies and adopt a coordinate-and-cultivate approach. Payment, personalization and placement are sure-fire ways mobile operators can create value and keep their place at the table.

What’s at stake? I leave you with a quote from the report (via Peter-Paul Koch at www.quiksmode.org) that says it best: “The first mobile company to TRULY reach out to web developers will have an edge over the competition, but right now I don’t see any candidates. Except for Google, obviously. (And Apple, but they’re playing their own game.) If Google became an operator our problems would be solved.”

Disclaimer: Peggy Anne Salz is a VisionMobile Associate.

Give the people what they want? On traditional media – such as TV – it’s a guessing game. But on a fiercely personal device such as the mobile phone, brands can start a conversation (using SMS or MMS – or both, for example) with people to just ask. Research shows people will volunteer personal information if they perceive that they are getting value in return – and part of that value is getting advertising that is relevant. Even better if that advertising is also life-simplifying.

A prime example of this is Amazon, which cleverly includes recommendations (translated: advice about what you could/should buy) in its conversations with customers online. As Dan puts it: “That is where advertising has crossed a line at that point in time. It’s now become a service that I appreciate rather than an intrusion that I do not.” The challenge – and the opportunity – is all around harnessing “to communicate to people things that they’re really genuinely interested in. That’s when that advertising starts to become a service for people in helping making their life more convenient and connect[ing] them with the things they want, when they want them.”

Dan – who also hosted the global launch of Optism, a permission-based mobile marketing solution from Alcatel-Lucent that bridges gaps between operators and advertisers – also speaks frankly about what he calls the “relationship gulf” that separates brands/agencies from mobile operators. As he sees it: The key question is how well the network operators embrace their data. “While they offer an ability to communicate with people, they’re just really a pipe at the end of the day. The moment they open up their data and their understanding of the customers… allowing brands to utilize that understanding to communicate more effectively, they [mobile operators] suddenly become a very rich media partner.”

Among the highlights

ASKING PERMISSION: It’s imperative. Dan believes brands should ask people for permission to communicate with them. The customer information a brand gains as a result is “richer and more detailed.” Understanding it and linking it to relevant brand messages allows brands to “actually developing things that are going to be very, very powerful for both the consumer and the brand.” Dan also shares an excellent case study of a campaign his company did for Birds Eye foods that recorded a whopping 11 percent response rate (!).

By way of background, the Birds Eye campaign started off as a fairly straightforward text to win campaign – with the short code details printed on the package. Sponge used the information (it knew the food people bought because they were texting in the short code printed on the pack in the first place) to deliver a product related text. The agency created three different databases, each relevant to a product group.

The first was generic nutritional information. So, Sponge sent text messages such as: Did you realize that five chicken dippers have less fat than a pork sausage? The second was recipe information. So, Sponge sent a product-related recipe idea by text. The third and most interesting offer was product suggestions. Dan tells me that cross-selling technique dramatically increased sales of specific product ranges within the Birds Eye food categories. In the end, the database of people who opted in to receive ongoing communications from Birds Eye was well over 100,000 (!).

MOBILE BUDGETS: What Dan sees tells him the conditions are perfect for significant growth following a recession that saw brands put the brakes on mobile spending. “We’re certainly seeing a trend this year that says that the foot is coming off the brake….We’re seeing an immense amount of interest and we’re seeing people talk more seriously about their budgets and having proper goals and expectations of what they might be able to achieve with the medium.”

WHAT WE NEED?: “Results. I don’t think there’s anything more complicated than that, is that we need to show tangible results that says if you spend X, then you make Y because that’s the way of the world economy these days. I don’t think mobile is ever going to be able to offer quite the sort of exciting brand pizzazz that you get from a big glossy TV advert, but what it can do is put more people in your store, more people buying your product, or more people enquiring about your services. So, great case studies that show good results is what we need above all else in this industry.”

WHAT’S NEXT: brands have to get better at engagement marketing. It’s about using permission and context to deliver campaigns such as the Bird’s Eye campaign to continue the conversation with consumes long after the campaign is over. Re-marketing is therefore on the top of the agenda. Dan also sees excitement around apps and location- linked advertising – as long as it makes life easier for the consumer.

MY TAKE:

A welcome look at the issues from an agency passionate about the business imperative to deliver helpful information instead of annoying advertising. Mobile marketing is on the march again – and with that momentum comes the realization that the best way to deliver people advertising they will accept and appreciate may be to ask them first.

LISTEN TO THE PODCAST HERE. [14:36]

Editor’s note: The series continues in two weeks with the views of other companies in the engagement ecosystem. We’ll here from brands and agencies and delve into research that captures the view of the youth consumer.

Disclaimer: Optism is an MSG client and supporter.

Fragmentation, distribution, monetization. These are the headaches that plague developers everywhere. It’s all about reaching an audience of people who are mostly likely to appreciate and buy their apps. Or, if the model is ad-funded, it’s about an approach linked to advertising that people will accept. In both scenarios, the ability to bubble up apps we appreciate – or encourage us to discover the wealth of apps at our finger tips – is at the foundation of a sound and scalable business model.

This is the view of an increasing number of companies focused on connecting the dots in our browsing and purchasing patterns to enhance customer profiles and – ultimately – suggest apps and stuff we will likely download, buy and recommend to our friends.

In this podcast Colm Healy — Vice President of EMEA Services for Qualcomm Internet Services, General Manager of Xiam Technologies, and a frequent columnist/contributor on MSG – talks about the link between personalization and app stores. We also discuss a range of related topics including the outlook for HTML5, the challenges to the emerging app ecosystem and the potential role of the Wholesale Applications Community (WAC) in the scheme of things. By way of background, WAC brings together 24 mobile operators in a community to create an eco system for the development and distribution of mobile and internet applications irrespective of hardware device or software technology.

Among the highlights:

FRAGMENTATION & FRUSTRATION: Colm doesn’t have all the apps he wants on his device. They’re just not available for his Android phone – and that’s a shortcoming that tries his patience. His view: it’s annoying to him and to all users everywhere. “End-users want to be able to get the content they love, to engage the brands that they really find useful. If the industry fails to be able to allow them to get to that, then that’s a real missed opportunity by the industry.” The root problem is fragmentation – but HTML5 is shaping up to solve this. The new standard “brings the experience of a Web page closer to the experience of running a native application.” Overall the technology will “make the browser, which is effectively ubiquitous platform that everybody supports, more powerful and more like the kind of experience that people want on their phones.”

LIGHTWEIGHT APPS: Where HTML5 and other developments come together to pay off the most is what Colm calls lightweight apps. “If you’re trying to run a high-end game, you’re absolutely going to want to run it natively on the phone and frankly it’s very difficult for you to get away from the fragmentation there. Just as in the console game world, there’s a range of platforms you have to address, in the mobile game world the same is going to apply.” The solution – and the excitement – is around lightweight apps. “HTML5 offers the promise of being able to run all of these across multiple different devices with a single code base.”

WAC: There is a great deal of potential. But there are also challenges. “The key people, the people who ultimately decide what technologies end up on the handset, are the handset manufacturers and the WAC is clearly an operator-driven initiative. So, success will be down (1) to their ability to work together for a standard, which I think is something very achievable and (2), to quickly have that adopted by handset – supported widely by handset manufacturers, which I think is more of a challenge.

RETAIL & ADVERTISING: Personalization sits at the heart of a good mobile retail experience. “In my view is there’s a bit of a nuclear arms race going on in terms of the number of applications that a particular platform has. Frankly, for most end users, there are a finite number of applications. There’s a fixed or finite size as to what an application developer eco system needs to be for it to be found useful and enriching….So, once you get to a couple of thousand apps, you absolutely need personalization.” It matches people with apps they want and oils the whole retail experience. “This whole nuclear arms race will come to a bit of an end and it will become much more about how engaged are users with the particular retail experience.” Advertising is also a fit. “Instead of you having to advertise to 2 million people to get the 10,000 that you are likely to respond to you, you can get to those 10,000 people. It directly lowers the barriers to entry, the barriers to profit. The real issue here is [about] the barriers to a sustainable business model for the content developer.”

Editor’s note: Colm and I will be back on June 30th. The topic of the third and final part of this podcast series: Is discovery the new search?

LISTEN TO THE PODCAST HERE.[11:04]

Disclaimer: Xiam Technologies, a Qualcomm company, is an MSG supporter.

The Open Mobile Summit is only a day away and – if you can somehow manage a ticket – I suggest you head on over. There are just over 50 seats left and the line-up of a whopping 70 speakers, includes senior execs from major players including Google, Yahoo, Nokia, Spotify, Admob, Ogilvy, AKQA, the BBC, MTV, FT.com, Opera, Vodafone, O2, HTC – and the list goes on. A special highlight: the first public appearance by Alberto Torres, the former McKinsey consultant who has recently been appointed head of Nokia’s MeeGo smartphone operating system.

Kudos to Robin Batt, my esteemed colleague and the executive producer of this conference. Robin fully understands that doing business -and making money- in an Open Mobile world will require new thinking and business models. The caliber -and variety- of speakers from across the mobile business ecosystem that she has brought together for this event will undoubtedly deliver attendees some answers and useful advice. MSG is proud to support Open Mobile Summit as a media sponsor. I won’t be able to attend this event – but I have already booked my flight for the next Open Mobile Summit (San Francisco, November 8-9) and suggest you do the same.

INTERVIEW WITH ALISA BOWEN

To promote this event and give you a preview of the hot topics on the agenda, I caught up with Alisa Bowen, Senior VP consumer publishing at Thomson Reuters, who will speak tomorrow on the future of publishing in a three-screen world. Alisa oversees the sales, marketing, product development and operations for the company’s Web, Mobile and IPTV propositions in 12 languages and 17 markets globally.  From the start mobile has been at the top of her agenda, so I used the opportunity to ask Alisa what makes her so sure mobile is so powerful.

Among the highlights:

CONTEXT MATTERS: Thomson Reuters is sharply focused on the business professional, a customer segment that is increasingly mobile. “We need to do a world class job of providing them with the information they need wherever they are, whatever context they’re operating in and on whatever device is most convenient to them.  Thomson Reuters provides intelligent information which means both information that you can make real business decisions on, but it also means information that it contextually aware.” Moving forward, that means much more intelligence built into the services. “It’s essentially just beginning.  I think contextual awareness we’re seeing begins with location awareness…but I think there is tremendous opportunity in the future for the technology to become so much more sophisticated, to understand what your mobile consumption habits have been, and then customize your applications around that.” Alisa envisions a linkage between technology and context resulting in services that “know” our moods or the appointments in our calendar and then uses this insight to serve up relevant information.

READING & RELATIONSHIPS: “We spent a lot of time last year researching how business professionals were using mobile devices and what we discovered was that there is no generation gap. There’s been a seismic mind shift in terms of people’s adoption of mobile technology.” But it’s more than just information access on the fly; Alisa says mobile also has to help them connect with their peers in new ways. “For many of our professionals, their jobs are now much more about managing relationships.” They need information but they also need to be “a part of a community internally within [their] own organization and externally within [their] own client base.”

MOBILE VS DESKTOP: It’s not a case of “either or” – it’s a matter of creating content that harnesses the best of both. “In previous eras of our mobile strategy, there was a tendency for us to try and cram everything that somebody would use on a desktop onto a smaller screen.  We’ve seen the light, so to speak, and I think we understand much more clearly that the mobile information consumption is not just the same stuff on a smaller screen.” This recognition has prompted Thomson Reuters to “split a desktop companion product from what we call task-oriented, bite-size applications that are very focused on executing a specific task. In the case of consumer media, that’s news awareness, browsing and reading, and so we’ve developed applications that just do that superbly and they don’t try to do everything else.”

APPS & ROADMAP: Alisa is predictable tight-lipped about the details, but hints that apps such as the News Pro for iPad is a prime example of where things are going. Video is another focus, which is why the company’s financial services division recently released Reuters Insider. “It’s an extremely innovative new video platform for financial professionals; it aggregates content from third parties but also showcases Reuters’ world class financial reporting on video.  It has a number of interesting usability features and functions and essentially allows users the ability to create their own channel by dragging and dropping — from their desktop and from their iPad and from their iPhone — different video clips that fit their profile.” In addition, the service provides a transcript of the video content in “almost real-time” and allows users to search those transcripts and jump using touch gestures to the specific place in the video that contains the relevant keywords they’re interested in following.

ADVERTISING & M-COMMERCE: “I think customers have some cultural sensitivity to paying for the content. But they’re not just paying for the content, so my plea to publishers is to understand that balance between content and experience. One without the other is worthless, but both together is extremely powerful….I think it’s up to us as an industry to make of it what we can and I think you will see advertisers follow in and marketers follow in behind that.” But it’s not just about stock-standard banners and ad units we know from the Internet. “I think the [iPad] platform is a canvas for much more creative and rich advertising and marketing experiences [such as video].” So how can publishers make real money? Alisa is bullish about the potential for the iPad, in particular, to drive sales of real stuff.  “I think that we forget sometimes that the iPad platform represents 125 million users with their live credit card details entered into a store, one click away from buying real stuff. I think that is incredibly powerful….I think if publishers can think about how to harness that opportunity around commerce for buying real goods and services, as well as virtual ones, then that’s a pretty interesting space that I don’t think is being well discussed yet.”

My take: Publishers and media companies are well-advised to embrace mobile. But they must also factor our “state” into the equation. Thomson Reuters has created robust services that effectively split the desktop chores from the task we have to perform on the move. Mobile optimizing content is not about whiz-bang stuff; it’s about understanding what we want to do and providing us the tools (information and access to our communities) to do it well. I was also struck by the sharp focus on video moving forward (for both rich advertising and exciting content presentation). Will video be the next big thing? A tough one to call (and fraught with bandwidth issues we also need to consider). Nonetheless, this bodes well for an announcement we can expect soon: the launch of the industry’s first mobile video ad network. I’ve signed up for a pre-briefing and will report back once it’s prime time.

Listen to the podcast here. [15:07]

EDITORS NOTE: MSearchGroove (MSG) – named a top 50 influential technology site by Konector – provides its platform to showcase select events that set the bar. In addition to standard media sponsorships, MSG produces interviews and podcasts free of charge for select event partners to boost promotion and create buzz. Contact me directly (peggy@msearchgroove.com) to explore ways we can collaborate to make your event stand out.

Next in the series: An interview with Paul Reddick, Handmark CEO, in the run up to M-Publishing, the premier mobile publishing event (London, June 1) organized by James Cameron and the team at Camerjam.

In brief:

The avalanche of apps and app stores (nearly 70, according to WIP Connector) turns up the pressure on developers and other ecosystem parties to find ways to make money selling apps. How are apps discovered and promoted? And more importantly, how are these app emporiums and boutiques going to handle the simple CRM to encourage the all-important return purchase?

After all, it wasn’t so long ago that a study from Pinch Media, which analyzed over 30 million downloads from Apple’s App Store, reported that just 30 percent of people who buy an iPhone application actually use it the day after it was purchased. And the numbers plunge from there: after 20 days, less than 5 percent of those who downloaded an application are actively using it.

A lot of open questions. But one thing for certain: competitive differentiation is in the business model. And we know from the findings of a recent Netsize Mobile Trends Survey of +1,000 professionals and practitioners that the 4-Cs (Convenience, Compatibility, Choice and Charging) are key requirements for a winning app store (and so for the developers that hope to make a living selling their apps). Netsize is gearing up to release new (unpublished) survey results and a new report that reveals attitudes toward business models and what will enable real and significant app sales. Watch this space!

MAXIS, ONDEEGO & AMDOCS

What is the app store landscape and what are the monetization models?

This was also the topic at Mobile Web & Apps World Forum, a CTIA partner event organized by my esteemed colleague Ajit Jaokar. (Again, I congratulate Ajit on organizing a standing-room-only event dedicated to answering the tough questions around app fragmentation, monetization and how to make it all work. Thanks also for inviting me to speak during the SuperSession looking at mobile advertising and in-app opportunity moderated by mobile authority Chetan Sharma. It was an excellent session with Joe Lally from MTV Networks and Jerry Rocha from Nielsen and Gary Schwartz, CEO of Impact Mobile, and one that provides a great deal of material for future MSG analysis and follow-up.)

However, it was the session on personalization and content discovery, presented by Mike Lurye, Amdocs Interactive, Director of Product Marketing, that got people thinking about the business value of granular subscriber intelligence (anonymized) and ways it can be used to get consumers to the content they will appreciate and without making them search for it. To drive home the point Mike didn’t use marketing-speak. He used case studies from mobile operators in the U.S., Europe and Asia Pacific. (You can download all the speaker presentations here.)

I used the opportunity of our in-person meeting to discuss the larger issues around app store marketing and pick up on a fascinating conversation we had weeks earlier (in preparation for Mobile Monday Austria) delving into the tough choices facing developers.

Certainly, developers can jockey for position in the Apple App Store (and others), where getting featured (placed where people can find you easily) is the only way to build a business. But developers can also align themselves with retailers/operators that seek differentiation through innovative business models emphasizing customer service, easy discovery or local culture.

The latter works for Malaysian mobile operator Maxis. I am a great admirer of the carrier’s app store focus and mission: “to nurture and foster interesting developer applications for our community.” (This and more in this must-see video interview with Nava Wathan, Director 1Maxis, Maxis Communications.) Maxis has become the place to go for “something that is Malaysian.” Surely, many more mobile operators can pursue a similar strategy to stand out from the crowd (and build a successful business for their business ecosystems of developers and customers).

At the other end of the spectrum, Ondeego also “gets” it. It launched AppCentral, a mobile app store for the enterprise last fall becoming the first mobile application store meeting the unique needs of the enterprise workers and their IT departments. For enterprise employees a one-stop shop means that they can select what they need (serious apps) to do their job. For developers it means a channel to a difficult to access market and a chance to sell their productivity and enterprise apps direct to professionals who will likely buy.

PODCAST INTERVIEW WITH MIKE LURYE

First, credit where credit is due here. Although people have tweeted about the simplicity and originality of my views on the evolution of the app landscape and the marketing strategies that will help everyone make money, it was Mike who came up with the popular Supermarkets/Farmers Markets analogy.

I caught up with Mike in-person following the Web & Apps World Forum event to talk about marketplaces and ideal models for making money – now.

Here an excerpt:

APP STORES & STOREFRONTS: “The main difference between an app store and a traditional digital commerce storefront is actually not that it sells apps, but that it is based on a certain business model that’s been pioneered by Apple. Stores selling apps have been around for a very long time but Apple changed the game because they set up a business model that opened up the opportunity to get to market for a much broader range of developers and they did so by establishing very straightforward business terms that are the same for everybody.” But not all app stores must sell apps. China Mobile, for example, sells traditional digital merchandise (ringtones and wallpapers and so on) on the storefront they call their app store.

MAXIS MODEL: This mobile operator has cleverly defined the segment it will go after: the local population and local developers. “So, their store is never going to be very big, they acknowledge that. They are not trying to compete, they are trying to co-exist….This is a good strategy because when you know your customer and when you know what you want to offer to your customer that is valuable to them, and you know who is going to build it which is a local developer community, you are poised for success.”

FARMERS MARKETS: The close customer relationship is what makes a farmers market special. And mobile operators have a close customer relationship they can build on – if they recognize their real role. “The owner of the farmers’ market doesn’t get in between [the] transaction…There is a direct [customer] relationship and the owner of the farmers’ market acts as a facilitator. They make it work.” How? Through payment services, personalization insights and scale.

CALIFORNIA GOLD RUSH: If you are about to pack, think again because it may have peaked. Apple found gold in apps and now everybody is moving to California (literally). “Now, guess what, not everybody who came to California at the time of gold rush became rich, some people did, but most actually didn’t, so that is what is going on right now. Everybody and their brother wants to have an app store; some people have a well thought out strategy. Maxis is an example of that. Some people are doing essentially a ‘me-too’ kind of a thing, and there is actually nothing wrong with that in principle as long as you realize that that’s what you’re doing.”

WHITE LABEL: Mike says it’s a low-risk model. The not-so-good news: it’s unlikely to build subscriber loyalty. “There is no leverage of the operator’s unique capabilities, there is no more value for the subscriber to purchase an application in that app store versus the original app store from the white label supplier themselves. There might be some cost advantage…but fundamentally it’s not a model that will differentiate the operator.

TAKE A PAGE FROM AMAZON: Personalization has made Amazon a success. “This is the business they are in: the business of personalization. They are offering it now as a platform to others. You do that search, you bring results not only from Amazon, but [also] from Amazon’s competitors and that’s OK by Amazon because they build such a sophisticated platform that now empowers [the] ecosystem.
***
MY TAKE: Are we on the brink of new business models or is history repeating itself? And — even if it is very much a repeat of the mobile portals – what will guarantee success for the developers and retailers this time around? At the moment, developers have a handful of choices: boost word-of-mouth promotion (tough and tedious, which is why Mob4Hire’s peer app recommendation is an interesting one to watch), mobile advertising (complicated and unpredictable, which is why we are all searching for better ways to deliver the right advertising to the right demographic) and placement (tricky and transient, which is why GetJar has cleverly created a model where developers pay for shelf space). What role will personalization play (even in a pre-paid environment)? My ongoing research into recommenders brings me together with mobile operators already wringing value out of granular analytics to help people discover content they’ll likely appreciate. A prime example is Hong Kong’s CSL, an operator I showcase in my upcoming report, that has harnessed personalization to support My Net, its own (branded) mobile Internet service. Clearly, personalization is moving up the business agenda (as it should) because it’s a way mobile operators can generate revenues (helping people find and buy what they want) and stay in the game.

* * *

LISTEN TO THE PODCAST HERE: [13:00]

Disclaimer: Netsize is an MSG supporter. Amdocs is not an MSG supporter.  However, ChangingWorlds, a company acquired by Amdocs, has published a by-lined thought leadership column series on  MSG. Peggy Anne Salz has also spoken at invitation-only  thought leadership events organized by Amdocs for its operator clients.

Last year was one company milestone after another: Nimbuzz updated the app on iPhone, released a version for Blackberry, introduced VoIP for Android and launched Twitter for Symbian handsets. It also sealed deals to be pre-installed on the T-mobile Tap Phone in the U.S. and on the Toshiba TG01 handset offered by O2 in Germany.

To connect the dots in last year’s accomplishments and get the inside track on Nimbuzz’ next moves I caught up with Tobias Kemper, VP of Nimbuzz Inc. USA. Many thanks to Tobias for a straightforward interview and unexpected insights into the product roadmap.By way of background, Nimbuzz – winners of the Techcrunch, Webby and Red Herring awards – counts over 14 million users in 200 countries, a number growing at around 40,000 new users per day (that’s 1 every 2 seconds). It counts over one million voice calls per day (over 300 million per year).

Other podcast highlights:

PLATFORM STATS: Nimbuzz supports all the usual suspects: Symbian, J2ME, Android, iPhone, iPod touch, Windows Mobile and RIM. So what flies? “Symbian is definitely our number one, directly followed by Java and the iPhone.  We’ve only just launched a native RIM client with massive uptake….The iPhone has definitely done a tremendous amount and continues to, but Symbian is the most dominant player.”

USAGE & BEHAVIOR: There are distinct and interesting differences depending on the geography. “In the Middle East, for example, people use our products like nothing else to meet people [and] enter the chat rooms. They treat those like mini-social networks, so it’s really going beyond the technology of just making a free call….In the developed countries — Western Europe and North America — it’s all about being able to monitor your friends, having everyone in the same place, reading everyone’s status messages and being able to tap in and say ‘OK I want to get in contact with this person right now.’”

BUSINESS MODELS: Mobile marketing and advertising are candidates, but mobile CRM is highest on the radar. Even better if it involves brands. As Tobias put it: “A mobile social messaging application like ours is perfectly positioned to foster brand engagement.  It is something that we’re looking at because it’s an always on product, it’s a very intimate device that the product is based on and it is something that we are going to be exploring more in the next year.  It definitely makes sense, it has to be done right and it has to be with the user focus.”

NEW FEATURES IN THE PIPELINE: Look for some surprises and more mobile operator partnerships. Again, Tobias is understandably reserved. What we know: “There’ll be a whole bunch of features that are going to be built on top of location-based services that are being built out and become more contextually relevant.”

My take: Hmmmm… contextual relevancy is an element of a range of exciting – and potentially lucrative –services.

So, will Nimbuzz join the group of hot mobile location-sharing services that includes Foursquare, Gowalla, Brightkite and Loopt – to name a few?

It’s a tough one to call, but Nimbuzz could make the move.

What does Nimbuzz think? Tobias is understandably tight-lipped but his admiration for companies like Foursquare and plans to add “similar features” comes through loud and clear. As he puts it: “It’s about moving beyond the technology and doing that face-to-face meeting. [It's about] what we can do to make that easier and aid users in using that feature and making real-life interactions happen through our application.”

Communication and community are baked into the app, and a whopping 98 percent of people who use it recommend it to a friend. That keeps Nimbuzz’ marketing budget down and boosts its viral appeal. Surely those metrics lay the groundwork for a more ambitious strategy and a new ecosystem around personal recommendations of real-life places and establishments…

Listen to podcast here [15:50]

The bottom line: For quite some time, there’s been a lot of hype about operators being able to aggregate and utilize subscriber information to allow for better personalization of services – but also to generate better targeted advertisements and offers. Perhaps it’s now actually on the horizon, though tying it to IMS seems odd when some solutions (such as from ad tech provider MADS, or any number of recommendation vendors) already exist.

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THIS MOBILE INTERNET THING IS GOING TO BE BIG, says the latest piece of research from famed internet stock analyst Mary Meeker at Morgan Stanley. She and her team have released a 424-page report along with a 659-slide deck, coming to the conclusion that the mobile internet will be twice as big as the desktop internet. Perhaps a bit more interesting is the prediction that smartphones will outship notebook and netbook computers in 2010, and will outship the entire PC market in 2012. Source

The bottom line: Welcome to the party, Mary.

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THE ANDROID MARKET NOW FEATURES 20,000 APPLICATIONS, according to AndroLib.com, with about two thirds of them free for users to download. Keep in mind that the iPhone App Store offers about 100,000 applications, but the Android Market’s growth is impressive, having doubled in size since June. November was its biggest month for new apps, with over 3500 added. Source

The bottom line: Another reminder that all the app action isn’t on the iPhone.

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FIVE BILLION MOBILE APPS WILL BE DOWNLOADED IN 2014, says ABI, up from 2.3 billion in 2009. But it’s not all good news: the firm says that app sales revenue will decline by 2013, as competition pushes prices down. It also says that the iPhone App Store’s market share will peak in 2010 as more competitors enter the scene, with the Android Market in particular expected to grow its market share from the current 11 percent to 23 percent in 2014. Source

The bottom line: That’s nearly one app per every human being on the planet. Or, in other words, a lot.

—–

MOBILE DATA REVENUES WILL DOUBLE OVER THE NEXT FOUR YEARS TO 100 BILLION EUROS, according to Screen Digest. Revenues from rich media content like mobile TV, video, games and music will generate 8.6 billion euros of this, with the balance coming from operator data fees. The company also says that the iPhone will generate more than 7 billion downloads in 2013, a much more optimistic prediction than the one from ABI above. Source

The bottom line: Full speed ahead for the mobile data business.

—–

THE NUMBER OF TEXTS SENT IN THE US MORE THAN DOUBLED BETWEEN 2007 AND 2008, according to figures from the US Census Bureau, jumping from 48 billion to 110 billion. At the end of 2008, the US had over 270 million mobile subscribers, spending an average of $50 per month on their mobile bill. Source

The bottom line: US subscribers aren’t all thumbs when it comes to texting.

In the first of a series of quest columns Colm Healy – Vice President of EMEA services and General Manager of Xiam Technologies, a Qualcomm company – dissects the discovery dilemma.

Search, recommendation and discovery tools are commonplace on the web. We are used to having an intermediary between us and the content that we will eventually consume.

There are many ways in which that intermediary can appear, how we access it, and how it can go about its business, but its role is the same – to enable us to find content. Content that we are looking for; content that we might be looking for; and content that providers want us to see.

The reason that these tools exist is, quite simply, because there is too much content available to do without them. We need some service in place to help us find what we want.

The same now applies to mobile content, be it content designed specifically for mobile, or web content accessed via the mobile. The amount of content available has exploded in recent years to the point where the search, recommendation and discovery tools essential on the web are equally important in our mobile experience.

Key drivers for this explosion in content creation and availability have been led, first and foremost, by the adoption of mobile as an ever-present attachment to our lives, and, in turn, the reliance on the mobile device as a device for more than simply communications.

Evolving from this is the increasing sophistication of mobile handsets – from now so-called ‘Vanilla’ phones, to feature phones, to the emergence and unremitting growth of the smartphone category – users now have mobile handsets that are capable of processing any of the content out there on the web, including HD video. Enabled by the network developments to support increased bandwidth capacity and faster peak data rates, users are now capable of consuming almost any content through their mobile handset.

The user behaviour that this creates represents an incredible opportunity for content developers and publishers. And for the retailers that provide access to that content.

Yet the challenge for all players in the mobile ecosystem is centred on enabling users – buyers – to find the content that they want.

User Research

At Xiam, we recently commissioned TNS Global to carry out transnational – UK and US – research into the experiences of mobile content users which found clear evidence that discovery was standing in the way of a satisfactory mobile user experience. More importantly for the players in the mobile ecosystem, discovery of content is standing in the way of significant revenue opportunities, and creating a user experience that deters customers and will, ultimately, lead to increased customer churn.

The study, which began with a representative sample of 2,666 mobile content users and derived quantitative and qualitative research by focussing more closely on the most active users, revealed an enthusiastic but frustrated demand for easy to use content and applications.

A key finding of the research highlighted that content discoverability was a significant issue, with eight out of ten users reporting a problem obtaining content on their mobile handsets. When it came to finally finding the content for which they were searching, mobile Internet users were, on average, unsuccessful 27% of the time.

Users were frustrated by the time required to find the information they were searching for, and access the specific content that they wanted. Slow page loads, too many layers on websites, and too much irrelevant information are frequent annoyances for mobile content users.

Yet the opportunity presented by mobile content was reiterated by the fact that almost two-thirds (63%) of consumers surveyed indicated that they would spend more time browsing and purchase more content if it was personalized and easier to find.

How We Search

Though mobile content is a relatively new arrival on our plate of entertainment and services for consumption, users are already set in their ways, accessing the same types of content and doing so via the same search tools. Both, more often than not, an extension of their traditional, online content and search habits from their laptop or PC.

Mobile web browsers tend to use search engines (with Google the most frequently referenced), bookmarked sites or to enter URLs directly.

This reflects, very clearly, that there is no significant, regular influence on users as to the content for which they search:
• Search engines are a powerful tool for giving you specifically what you were looking for, though they are far from flawless
• Bookmarked sites are sites that the user has previously visited and had a productive experience of using
• Directly entered URLs indicate that the user knew precisely where on the mobile they wanted to go

Using the mobile network operator’s content portal is one of the less often used methods for accessing content, and was rated in our survey as least effective for finding desired content. Respondents reported that the service provider’s portal was often poorly organised, and that relevant content was not easily and directly accessible.

Those same users reported that they would increase the time and money spent on mobile web browsing if relevant content was easier to find. 59 percent said they would spend more time accessing content – translating to, on average, 65 minutes more per month. And 37 percent said they would spend more money on content purchases – translating to, on average, £5 more per month.

A further criticism of service provider portals was focusing too much on content downloads (i.e. sales) rather than on providing information and a service. Information on events and special promotions, as well as relevant recommendations based upon previous choices of the individual user would enhance the operator’s value to end users significantly.

This element – recommendation enabling discovery – is primary to any mobile content service as it cuts through the time consuming search procedure, and improves the experience of the user. The model adopted and made famous by Amazon – ‘if you liked this, you might also like this’ – is a simple and effective one. The more sophisticated this can be, the more effective the results will be.

And with the myriad different types of content and applications available, a tool to enable the discovery of content that is highly relevant but might otherwise go unnoticed can be especially valuable. Valuable to the user; valuable to the manager of the portal or store; and valuable to developers and publishers of the content, who will focus their efforts towards a provider that can enable their offering to be discovered.

One of Qualcomm’s key messages to the industry is that the mobile experience has to evolve beyond simple search and move toward personal discovery, making the user’s experience more intuitive. These results point to a huge opportunity for operators to increase mobile data usage and sales by providing personalized mobile apps, content and services.

Colm Healy is vice president of EMEA services and general manager of Xiam Technologies for Qualcomm Internet Services (QIS).  QIS helps accelerate consumer adoption and consumption of mobile content across all networks and devices by delivering a more engaging mobile experience that is contextual and relevant to consumers’ personal interests. In his current role, Healy manages all business relationship and deployments of Qualcomm’s services solutions within the EMEA region. As general manager of Xiam Technologies, a wholly owned subsidiary acquired by Qualcomm in March 2008, he continues to lead the team’s efforts in selling and deploying Xiam’s discovery and recommendations products to a worldwide network of mobile operators including Vodafone, Orange, O2, AIS and Globe.

Disclaimer: Xiam is an MSG supporter.

I suspect his thought-provoking blog will do more than set the tone for my book; it will impact the app store debate that will likely dominate 2010. Just look at the recent raft of app announcements: Analyst firm IDC predicts there will be more than 300,000 iPhone apps by the end of next year, compared to 75,000 Android apps; Samsung takes the wraps off its Bada app platform; and (just today) Orange officially opens its app store to users in the U.K. and France, offering more than 5,000 apps for Java, Android, BlackBerry, Symbian and Windows Mobile.

Connect the dots, and the avalanche of apps turns up the pressure on providers and mobile operators to be good retailers and put stuff we’re likely to appreciate where we can find and buy it. Common sense really.

Or is it? Not is we consider the statement from Nenad Marovac, Managing Partner, DN Capital, who was speaking at Heroes of the Mobile Screen earlier this week, In his view, “Operators should be pipes and shut up.” Hmmm… not much room in that model for mobile operators to wield the stockpile of analytics they collect (such as our browsing patterns and past purchases) to present us with a selection of apps we’re likely to appreciate.

In preparation for my own industry report on personalization and recommendation I have spent the last weeks interviewing a who’s who of industry players and their customers (mobile operators/service providers) who are convinced  the company with the most (and best) data wins. It’s a battle between operators (really smart pipes) and aggregators (Google & Co.) – and personalization and recommendation could just be the capabilities that distinguishes the leaders from the also-rans.

With that in mind, we continue MSG’s special podcast series on the top players in personalization, and conclude with Part 2 of my interview with Stephen Oman, Amdocs ChangingWorlds Worldwide Director Sales Engineering. Changing Worlds is an Irish provider of personalization technology that was recently acquired by Amdocs and is now part of Amdocs Interactive.

In Part 1 we dissected the content discovery dilemma, looked at on-portal challenges and examined the results of the company’s recent study that underlined the importance of personalization in determining and delivering mobile advertising.

In part 2 we explore personalization off-portal and across app stores.

ROLE OF THE MOBILE OPERATOR: As Stephen sees it: the operator has a spot at the “center of the Internet.” Their job: “helping the subscriber to go on to the Internet, helping them find the right content, helping them with additional suggestions which they might be interested in, and so on.  In doing that, they’re becoming if you like a partner to the subscriber when they are browsing the internet.” So, there’s an opportunity here for the operator to “set themselves up in essence as the home page for the mobile Internet for their subscribers.”

APP STORES: In many ways, it’s a repeat of the content discovery problems we know from on-portal. But it’s also an issue that independent developers will also face as they try to engage people and compete with similar, rival apps across the store. As Stephen puts it: Making an effort to personalize the content will “help people find more niche types of applications that may exist, and that would never appear in the what’s hot today or what’s in the top 10 for today.”

LONG-TAIL VERTICAL APP SCHEMES: Reports show that many apps downloaded are actually productivity apps. Additionally, apps are being downloaded by professionals in line with their professions. So, will we see a plethora of app stores split across lines such as task (apps to do “x”) or jobs (apps for doctors, for example)? Stephen was intrigued by the idea and agrees that we will likely see the launch of vertical app stores (similar to the vertical content portals that offered only ringtones or wallpapers). “It’s pretty much the same as you see in retail, you do have retail stores that sell pretty much everything, but you also have niche retail stores that cater for particular audiences.”

THE GROWTH OPPORTUNITY: In a word: convergence. “Increasingly the mobile operators’ customers are expecting and demanding that if you like connected lifestyle….Crucially, they’re looking to be able to access services across many different devices: their mobile phone, online, through their TV, through digital TV, and that convergence of access is essentially going to improve and drive growth in the mobile digital economy.”

Editor’s note: This special focus on personalization and recommendation continues in the New Year with a look at a cool new recommendation company coming out of stealth mode and an analysis of Novarra. I had to reschedule this one a few times, but this time it is timed to some important news. Not one to miss!

Disclaimer: ChangingWorlds is not an MSG supporter.  However, MSG has published a by-lined thought leadership column authored by a ChangingWorlds senior executive. MSG has also participated in an invitation-only  thought leadership event organized by Amdocs.

Listen to the podcast here. [15:12]

Related posts:

PODCAST: ChangingWorlds Reveals Real Impact Of Personalization On Mobile Advertising CTRs; Google Shows Mobile Advertising Is Hot (Again), But Will Personalization Make The Market Sizzle?

SPECIAL REPORT: GETTING PERSONAL Openwave Adds Mobile Analytics; Are Gateway Providers The Ones To Watch? PLUS New Report/Project With GigaOM Pro

PODCAST: Bytemobile CMO Adrian Hall: Operators’ Can Win On Personalization; Does A Widget Bar Do One Better Than An App Store?

MSG DEBUT VIDEO: Xiam Talks Targeting & Filtering; Make Way For The Personalized Web!

GUEST COLUMN:Using Personalization To Pump Up The Volume & Increase The Value Of The Mobile Internet

At first, the endgame was about boosting personalization to improve the mobile operator portals (that forced us to navigate through multiple menus) and cut the clicks to content that we genuinely appreciated. Typically, operators implemented personalization tools to bubble up cool content to the idle screen, taking the hassle out of finding and buying content on the device.

Fast forward, and on-portal is no longer where (all) the action is. The explosion in the number of app stores — software applications supermarkets run by handset makers, operators and independent players such as GetJar – increases our interest in finding stuff we like, and the sheer abundance of apps turns up the pressure on companies across the emerging ecosystem to make finding cool stuff a no-brainer.

By way of background, the content discovery dilemma was expertly outlined in a recent post by Alfred DeRose, who heads Tego Interactive, a Web and mobile product and services company specialized in integrated solutions for converged businesses determined to get more out of their digital assets. Working with clients to address a variety of issues around content discovery has allowed Tego to create a series of “cheat sheets” and white papers describing the problem and offering suggestions/solutions. So, watch this space.

PERSONALIZATION FOR THE PEOPLE

Put another way, content discovery is back at the top of the agenda and interest in personalization/recommendation technologies (to expose people to apps they are likely to appreciate) is also on the rise.

I know this from my interviews with vendors and operators, and from studying a raft of recent stats confirming (through app downloads) that we do indeed want more mobile stuff than ever. However, a disturbing hole in the argument has been (until this week) a lack of insight into what the people want.

Indeed, the underlying assumption has been that poor discovery (and even more miserable mobile search, as this in-depth post from my last mobile search master class shows) frustrates us (because we can’t find what we want) and forces mobile companies (operators/content owners and now developers) to leave money on the table.

So – how serious is the content discovery dilemma, really? Are people really frustrated? And would they buy more if it was easier?

NEW SURVEY

Thanks to a new survey of 2,666 mobile users in the U.S. and the U.K. — conducted by research firm TNS Global on behalf of Xiam Technologies, a Qualcomm subsidiary providing discovery and recommendations solutions to mobile operators – we finally have some thought-provoking stats.

The key data point: 80 percent of people experience some sort of problem getting stuff. The three biggest barriers: stuff is hard to find, phone and interface issues are a pain and the content is just plain irrelevant.

MOBILE SEARCH DOESN’T CUT IT

People are relying on mobile search to discover content, with some 68 percent using search engines to find what they want. 58 percent type in the URL. But – when it comes to effectiveness – people report URLs (83 percent) and bookmarks (89 percent) are the best ways to find content. Mobile search comes in a close third. Interestingly, 67 percent said the handset manufacturer portal was an effective way to find content; 67 percent said operator/service provider portals were effective.

Overall, people complained they are unsuccessful in accessing/purchasing (!) content they want 27 percent of the time.

WOULD PERSONALIZATION HELP?

In principle, it would. Assuming it was easier to find personalized stuff, almost 60 percent would spend more time accessing content and almost 40 percent would spend more money. Would people accept customized recommendations to find stuff they like? Approximately half of people survey in both the U.S. and the U.K. would accept suggestions.

HOW MUCH MONEY CAN BE MADE

Specifically, people said they would spend over an hour a week (55 percent increase) more accessing stuff with their mobile phones and over $8 per month (148 percent increase) if finding and buying was a no-brainer.

In addition to these consumer insights, the report is chock-full with interesting stats about the type of content people download (apps lead the pack) and pay for (games); top mobile sites (service provider destinations/portal trail the likes of Google, Yahoo, Facebook and the BBC); and the gripes people have about their providers (too pricey, too difficult to use and un-cool content).

MOBILE SOCIAL FUTURE

My personal thanks to Martin Clancy, Xiam Marketing Manager, for bringing my attention to the report (in a pre-briefing) and for arranging an interview with Colm Healy, Xiam CEO, to connect the dots. Naturally, much of this analysis is reserved for my report.

However, one exciting observation I can share is the pivotal importance of “significant others” (peers, friends, like-minded people) in the content app suggestions we can expect moving forward.

As Colm put it: The space is “in the eye of the storm.” App stores up the ante and force companies across the ecosystem to focus on personalization and recommendation as means to expose people to the stuff they are likely to appreciate and – ultimately – purchase.

App stores are the place to go – but what is going to keep us coming back for more?

Colm believes that social discovery will provide that stickiness. As he puts it: Recommendations from our friends will be the way we find apps.

But the challenge is not just in harnessing rants and raves from our peers to complement personalization and drive discovery. The real work is in creating recommendations that will work across the plethora of app stores coming on line. “There are unique challenges related to app store fragmentation. If I’ve discovered a great app on an iPhone, obviously what I want to do is let my friend know about that great app. But – if they have a different phone – then the question is how to direct them to the right app for that particular phone.”

Another trend high on Colm’s radar: apps to discover apps. As Colm sees it: Smartphones are chock-full of features and functionalities — clever technology that providers could/should harness to sell us on the wealth of apps at our finger tips. It’s all about taking advantage the interface and features such as location, the compass and the accelerometer (to name a few) to help people get to apps they would likely appreciate.

My take: Personalization has been at the center of mobile since the start. First people bought content (such as ringtones) to personalize their devices. Then companies implemented technology to deliver personalized suggestions and idle-screen takeovers as a way to help people navigate the avalanche of content and cut the clicks to content. It’s work in progress. Now the explosion of app stores pushes the content discovery issue back to the top of the agenda for operators, handset makers, developers – everyone. As this report shows, people would spend more time and money accessing stuff on their mobile phones if it were easier to do. Moving forward, people will likely not only appreciate personalized recommendations (particularly if they come from their peers). They may even come to expect them.

Disclaimer: MSG relies on Tego Interactive for the creation and integration of its online and mobile destinations/strategies. Xiam has aligned with MSG to publish a sponsored series of thought leadership columns and contributions beginning in December 2009.

It was great to have the last few days off and even better to map out an exciting line-up of MSearchGroove projects for the next few months. One that I am particularly honored to announce: my collaboration with GigaOM Pro, the new research arm of the highly respected tech blog GigaOM. By way of background, GigaOM Pro has brought together an impressive roster of industry authorities and analysts (including my esteemed colleague Chetan Sharma) to “address the gap that exists in real-time expert industry analysis on emerging technology markets.” The GigaOM Pro solution: Make timely, highly relevant analysis and insights accessible and practical.

I’m on board to write an in-depth examination of personalization and recommendation technologies and business models, a natural next step given my long track record analyzing mobile search and my deep involvement in the recommender space. (This includes work with Strands, a major provider of recommender systems, on recommender industry events including RecSys 09 – October 22-25, NYC.)

The report is an ambitious undertaking and I am naturally interested in connecting with personalization/recommendation companies –so please contact me directly if you wish to be considered for inclusion. peggy@msearchgroove.com

Why the buzz about personalization?

The advance of Internet-specific smartphones and the spread of app store schemes turns up the pressure on mobile operators (and their content providers) to decipher data transactions (on and off the network), combine it with location and demographic data and use the results to create a 360-degree view of the individual.

Where does this shift leave mobile operators?

They are hard pushed to turn analytics into competitive advantage. Sensing this business opportunity (that execs tell me they estimate hovers in the hundreds of millions of dollars), a slew of companies (such as Amdocs, Bytemobile, Novarra and Qualcomm) are among the first out the gates with revamped offers to arm operators for the ultimate battle with Web giants for the mobile customer. This special series profiles the players jockeying for position in the marketplace.

This week we look at Openwave, which has recently productized its existing analytics capabilities and business intelligence know-how, and packaged it up as Mobile Analytics.

The solution – designed to aggregate usage data and behavioral information across a variety of sources, including on-portal surfing and open Web browsing, to generate meaningful reports –dovetails with other Openwave offers (behavioral targeting, profiling, usage pattern analysis) to lay the groundwork for the delivery of relevant content and advertising.

I caught up with Mayur Pitamber, Openwave Product Management Strategist, to discuss the role of the mobile operator, debate the value of personalization and what we can expect next in the Openwave product roadmap.

AN EXCERPT OF OUR Q&A

Q: Let’s talk about the fit with mobile advertising. You have just launched the complement to your own mobile advertising solution, which is Mobile Analytics. What’s the level of interest in mobile advertising? I’m hearing some operators get it, but many more don’t…

A: There was some hype about it at first, but operators are starting to see the value of it now and they are also beginning to understand the real value of the data they have. The last months have been marked by a surge of activity and RFIs and RFPs specifically for mobile analytics solutions, which is new in this market. We didn’t see this last year.

A lot of what happened and the initial excitement around mobile advertising industry was quite premature. It’s not just about offering targeted advertising; it’s about offering relevant products and services based on the user’s behavior. The operators can use analytics to gain profiles of these users, the sites they frequent and what they do while online. It’s when this information can be aggregated and provided to media agencies and brands that it really becomes valuable.

It’s all about helping operators to provide the mobile audience metrics that the brands are looking for. Not necessarily going through the GSMA, because they have some of that [covered in their] initiative, but doing that directly. With the solution we’re offering the operators can provide those metrics directly to the brands, to the media agencies, to the publishers, and be a vital part of that mobile advertising ecosystem. And with our solution there’s no need for us to insert tracking or cookies or JavaScript, or anything like that. Every Web page goes through our gateway and we can basically track on that. So, that’s a key differentiator.

Q: There are, of course, other solutions in this space. A long list of gateway providers: Qualcomm, Amdocs, Ericsson, Nokia, Bytemobile, Novarra. And the space is getting crowded.

A: Obviously, there are competitors out there.  All gateway providers can provide parts of this sort of solution. However, I haven’t come across a solution [similar to ours] with this [breadth] out there in the market at this point in time. Being a gateway provider for the last 10 years, we’ve been providing this type of reporting to operators. But now we’ve added more features and made it more user-friendly. So, it’s a mature business intelligence product that we’re bringing to the market.

Q: In early August, Telstra announced it had implemented your Mobile Analytics solution. The press release says it’s all about providing Telstra a “dashboard view of intelligent analytics and rich reporting capabilities across its mobile device portfolio.” To start, how many of your operator customers have this solution or perhaps the analytics solutions that preceded this?

A: We have deployed previous versions of this analytic solution to some six tier-1 operators around the world.

Q: Let’s say I’m an operator and I don’t have a solution from Openwave, but I like the analytics.  Can I just have that, or is it a package deal?

A: Previously, the solution was just built around Openwave products. But obviously, we want a bigger market share, so we’ve designed the solution such that it will work with any other gateway, any other vendor of gateway products.

Q: You said before competing on analytics is the way for operators to be “a vital part of the ecosystem.” Can operators really play this central role?

A: That’s a really good question. I think it’s quite difficult to answer as well. The operators have traditionally been sluggish. Their bread and butter has been voice revenues and SMS revenues. To really get them incentivized to offer new services such as mobile advertising, you need a compelling business case. I’ve spoken to dozens of operators around the world. Some of them are in advanced stages of creating any-time mobile advertising organizations. Others have only one or two mobile advertising product managers. For these operators, the business case – for whatever reason – is just not compelling enough for the decision makers to say okay, let’s really invest in this.

Q: This jives with what people told me while I was conducting interviews for Mobile Advertising Research UK. As one executive at a mobile infrastructure company that counts over 300 network operator clients observed: Mobile advertising only becomes interesting for an operator when “the type of revenue they can envisage is around 2 percent of their overall revenue to 5 percent, and with an opportunity to grow to 10 percent of revenue. This is the revenue that will really make them sit up and make it work.” Another figure that stands out: GBP 28.6 million, which is what the IAB reckons was the mobile ad spend in 2008. What’s your take?

A: I can believe the ad spend for the U.K. I think the hold up is the thinking about the role of the mobile operator. We have to be clear about what they can do. In my view, the role of the mobile operator will be to provide incentives for people to use new services so that additional inventory and mediums become available to insert ads. And obviously, once those mediums become available, that becomes attractive to brands and advertisers. But, right now, it’s difficult for operators to manage their inventories. They have SMS inventory, MMS inventory, on-portal, off-portal. All of these are different systems and it’s difficult to provide brands and advertisers a consolidated view of what is available out there. So, it’s when there is a clear view of the different inventories out there and the tools to manage these inventories, and make these inventories available to third-parties such as the brands and media agencies, that I think mobile advertising will really take off.

Q: Are you convinced operators can start acting like media companies? Or are there going to be a lot of carriers that focus on access over audience?

A: The tier-1s I talk with have created organizations to manage mobile advertising. They’ve created sales forces to go out and sell inventory. So, they are already acting as media agencies and helping brands identify which inventory they want to use. But again, these are just the big tier-1 operators.

Q: Advertising is messaging – and loads of it. Or it could borrow from TV and be video-centric? We don’t know. In any case, we have more data usage – both from people surfing with their smartphones and brands that want to reach them. What is the potential impact on the network side of things? What are you seeing?

A: We’re seeing huge increase in data traffic volumes. A data tsunami is going to hit operators within the next 12-24 months. And some operators are quite oblivious to this. So, [with Mobile Analytics] we’re helping the operators to identify trends on the operational front as well. We’re saying ‘Hey, you need to do capacity planning and optimize your networks because this is going to be your traffic in 6 months or 12 months.’

Q: Let’s move to the report on North American mobile Internet trends you issued that may have got lost in the CTIA shuffle. It made some interesting points, and I understand you are about to release another one soon. What were some of the key observations and what were the surprises?

A: That report was basically based on data from one of our customers in North America. Many of the trends we saw confirmed what the market was thinking. For example, everyone is doing social networking on mobile. The top sites, as you could guess, were Facebook and MySpace.

In terms of search, we were able to also track some keywords. Something that was interesting: people – when they wanted to find Google — wouldn’t enter Google on their mobile phone and go to Google. They would actually enter ‘Google’ in a Yahoo search engine. This operator had Yahoo as a search partner. Anyway, that tells us that a lot of search use may be because of usability. It’s easier to type it [a destination] in a search box than to navigate to it on the Web.

Q: Finally – what about app stores? They’re hot. What is the value-add, if any, from analytics?

A: One of the operators we’re working with is in the process of opening an app store. They know that not all users are going to go through the apps. If you figure the iPhone app store has tens of thousands of apps and growing, users would lose patience sifting through all that. This operator wants to analytics specifically on this [operator] app store to identify the top ten apps. But it goes beyond this to include how many times have the apps been downloaded; who has consumed them; and whether the users have shared apps with other people. More importantly, the operator is providing this app store data to the application developers, so they also have insight into how their apps are being used and how many people have downloaded their apps. So, Mobile Analytics can be used to identify the audiences going to these app stores – and that can be used to build the business.

WHAT’S NEXT?

Generally speaking, the value of data is not in the data itself, but in the mashups we create when we combine it with other data stores. Put another way, the way to wring the value out of analytics is to combine it with location and demographics data, which is why Openwave is keen to feature both in its Mobile Analytics solution. Mayur tells me we can expect location in the next months. (Openwave is also gearing up to announce another customer win for its analytics offer in South East Asia.)

Likewise recommendation capabilities are moving up the list to take a center spot in Openwave strategy. As Mayur put it: The next version of Mobile Analytics will come with recommenders “bolted on.” No word yet on what the recommender will allow (delivery of content or advertising – or both?), how it will achieve this (based on item-to-item or user-to user – or both?), or how it will integrate with Openwave’s underlying Integra platform. But read between the lines, and the sharpened focus on recommendation is at least a welcome testament to the timing and importance of my upcoming GigaOM report on the same topic.

Openwave, unlike some of the gateway providers I’ve examined/profiled in this series, is also bullish about mobile search. The company demo points out that Mobile Analytics potentially improves mobile search, allowing operators to deliver relevant results individuals will find useful.

I am reminded at this juncture of a related post I wrote about the potential for operator-centric, operator-powered, operator-controlled mobile search. With the right tools and technology mobile operators can follow our virtual breadcrumb trail to optimize our mobile search (and advertising) experiences, using our actual usage patterns to give us the answers/results we will most likely appreciate.

My take: Personalization is a hot topic but personalized recommendation and search are even hotter. The space is crowding with gateway providers that are using their position in the network to give their operator customers insights into what people are doing on the network (on- and off-portal). The end-game is about helping operators make business decisions based on new subscriber behaviors and trends. Openwave is one of a number of companies in this space – but it has its eye on the prize: drilling down in the data to help operators manage bandwidth allocation, deliver targeted mobile advertising AND fine-tune recommendation and mobile search. What better way for operators to compete against Internet and search engine giants, and potentially win?

Next in the series: We discuss personalization with Novarra.

But this time it’s more than warm-and-fuzzy lip-service. This time it’s hard-nosed business. Two developments – flat sales of  more traditional mobile entertainment offers such as games and ringtones (albeit at a high level), and the phenomenal popularity of apps and app stores – exacerbate the content discovery dilemma, forcing companies and operators alike to admit that better personalization is a must if higher revenues are the goal.

Last week I directed your attention to this excellent column from Mark Lowenstein, who drives home a point the significance of which I cannot overstate: “The most important way to differentiate in this growing but increasingly crowded market is to deliver a more personalized, contextual applications experience.” He was referring to app stores, where we are forced to sift through thousands of apps. (Déjà vu! It was our frustration with scrolling up and down mobile operator portals and hierarchical menus that opened the door for a variety of mobile search and content discovery solutions and providers that promised to take the pain out of finding and buying content.)

Put simply, personalization is not just central to app store schemes. It is critical to the delivery of content and advertising we will likely appreciate because it is in tune with our lifestyles (through profiling) as well as the important clues we leave behind though our browsing behavior, purchase patterns, and download history. (JumpTap, for example, has built a business connecting the dots between these data points to match relevant advertising to relevant consumer segments. As this MSG post recounts, the company  first released tapLink, a platform that builds targeting intelligence from multiple sources including search queries, browsing history, demographic and location data, and then followed up with the recent launch of tapMatch, its pay-per-click (PPC) performance mobile ad marketplace.)

As I have written many times on MSG, the new paradigm is personalized content-push based on a deep understanding of the individual. It’s even more compelling if the technology can learn users’ likes and dislikes over time to dynamically and consistently deliver the right content mix.

One company making its mark is Xiam Technologies, a Qualcomm company that I have tracked from the start. I recently caught up with Colm Healy, Xiam CEO, in a video interview to discuss the role of recommendation and personalized discovery techniques. (My personal thanks to Martin Clancy, Xiam Marketing Manager, for arranging the interview, and to Curtis Shmigelsky and the rest of the great people at bnetTV for including it in MSG video jukebox!)

I encourage you to check out the video interview in the sidebar. A highlight: Colm’s comments on the opportunities in personalization for mobile operators. As he puts it: “Mobile is a uniquely personal device and if you [operator/service provider] aren’t taking advantage of that by building in recommendations and personalized discovery techniques, you’re missing a beat.”

Almost as exciting as the array of business opportunities Colm describes, is his view of filtering. To cover all the material we did in a reality short video didn’t allow us the time to explore this topic as deeply as I would have liked. However, Martin has kindly offered to set up another interview following this week’s debut to delve into Colm’s vision for filters and systems that will – as he hinted in the video interview – “filter out the noise around us to focus in on the things that really make a difference to me.” His vision: “What you need is to get to a situation where a service becomes like a personal assistant that’s helping you get through the clutter and find what you really want.”

My take: Colm’s sharp focus on improving our mobile experiences – through improved personalization and, moving forward, the development and implementation of better filters – is the way to go. It’s also a perfect fit with a milestone, must-watch keynote speech by Clay Shirky, aptly entitled It’s not information overload. It’s filter failure. In this address, Clay puts his finger on the problem of our times: “What we’re dealing with now is not the problem of information overload, because we’re always dealing (and always have been dealing) with information overload…Thinking about information overload isn’t accurately describing the problem; thinking about filter failure is.” If we apply it to mobile, content and apps aren’t stalled because we don’t appreciate them or want to purchase them; we are confronted by a content overload problem and we need better filters that will help us find and buy what we – as individuals (hence the critical role of personalization) – appreciate even before we know we want it.

BTW: Qualcomm, which recently beefed up the personalization element in its Plaza suite of solutions to include Plaza Retail, has also reached out for a briefing to walk me through improvements to the storefront, and the nuts and bolts of the modular toolset it introduced for creating or managing app stores, and personalizing the content experiences they offer.

Disclaimer: Xiam sponsored the creation of the video, but did not influence the questions/topics covered in the interview.

In fact, this new breed of services, which combines mobile social networking fun and community with the utility of mobile search, potentially creates new forms of interaction and new opportunities for the delivery of relevant mobile advertising. Granted we aren’t there yet, but there are some signposts that I believe mark the way. One start-up that that stands out is HeyStaks (www.heystaks.com).

The company, based in University College Dublin, Ireland, was founded by Dr. Maurice Coyle and Dr. Peter Briggs, and is a spin-out from the research group of Prof. Barry Smyth, who is perhaps best known as co-founder and Chief Scientist of ChangingWorlds (now a Unit of Amdocs Interactive), a company that has pioneered personalization technology. I recently caught up with Barry for a guided tour of the service and an update on the company’s mobile ambitions.

I am also proud that Barry recently partnered with me to publish a series of thought leadership columns exclusively on MSG. Understandably, Barry took a break from the series (which kicked off with this exploration of the “hidden interaction costs” associated with surfing and exploring the mobile Internet) to develop his path-breaking HeyStaks service – now in Beta. But he’ll be back soon with a typically cool column focused on the intelligent delivery of personalized content and advertising, so watch this space!

What is the problem?

As the company cleverly points out in the cartoon strip below, we waste a lot of time searching for things our peers are also searching for (or may already have found!). To make matters worse, we have a lot of trouble sharing what we find with people once we find it. A solution is to make search a social activity (and that goes double for mobile search, in my view) and provide people the tools to create and communicate the searches that matter to them most.

What is HeyStaks?

HeyStaks is a search utility (a browser toolbar for both Firefox and Internet Explorer browsers) that adds collaboration features and a host of social networking functions to your favorite search engine. (It currently works with Google, but Barry tells me that Yahoo and others are in the pipeline.) The beta service is squarely focused on enhancing Web search, but an iPhone app is also on the roadmap.

In a nutshell, HeyStaks allows people to collaborate while they search. With the toolbar, people can create and share what the company calls search staks, which act as repositories for search experiences. HeyStaks also improves the results list because it promotes the results that have proved to be relevant to friends/peers during similar or related searches. (More further down in the Q&A.) As Barry put it: “A search stak is like a folder of your search experiences. You can create as many search staks as you like to cover your different interests and activities.”

To show rather than tell, Barry, a long-time MSG reader and supporter, has created a search stak around MSG content. In addition to keeping all the searches together in one place, HeyStaks also “reminds” us of searches we have found interesting in the past (and previously forgot to bookmark) by highlighting them within the search results delivered and listed by Google. HeyStaks can also make recommendations by inserting other results that Google may have missed or simply buried too deep in the list of blue links for us to find. (Thanks for using MSG Barry! You’ve given me a great idea. The sceenshots below illustrate this new stak. The next step is to make the MSG stak public and so create an MSG search community where readers can join, add their recent related searches, or simply keep up to date with the search activities of the wider community. After all, knowledge is most powerful/valuable when it is shared.)

***

Q: Creating and organizing the searches in HeyStaks is pretty straightforward. How do people share them?

A: Let’s take the example of you planning for a vacation. You create a search stak, call it “Vacation,” and store all your searches there. Suppose the vacation you’re planning will involve family and friends. You can share your Vacation stak with them, so that they can benefit from what you have found as they search, and vice versa. You can do this directly from the HeyStaks toolbar by selecting “Share active stak” in the staks menu. You then enter their email address and each person you invite will receive an email invitation that, if they accept, will add your stak to their own list of search staks in their toolbar. Sharing search staks in this way means that the search knowledge can rapidly grow because relevant searches from your friends and family are added to the Vacation search stak.

Q: HeyStaks can also highlight results in the search results from, say, Google and promote these to the top of the ranking. How is this possible?

A: We have a couple of ways to help people get more out of search. Once you share a stak you have essentially created a search activity feed that will provide you with a live update of searches carried out related to the stak – or staks – you have chosen to share.

At a deeper level, HeyStaks is looking at the various searches that different members of your staks are performing. It’s looking for patterns in those searches, and it’s looking for results that are related to those patterns.  So, you’re not just reminded of results that were clicked for the exact same query by other members of the stack. HeyStaks goes one further and actually figures out that certain results may be relevant to similar queries that haven’t been used before.  So, it’s a way of helping people to understand the sort of things that you’re finding interesting in a particular context, and making sure that everyone else who is sharing in that context is getting the benefit of your finds and you’re getting the benefit of theirs. Put another way, the stak is gradually learning more and more about your interests and is able to better predict those interests and better highlight the results from Google that are likely to serve those interests.

Returning to the Vacation stak example, the  screenshot below shows a typical search using Google and how HeyStaks has highlighted two particular results and promoted these to the top of the ranking. These results were previously selected by other members of the stak for similar queries. HeyStaks has picked up on these being results that others in the community have found interesting and therefore promoted these at the right time and within the right context.

Q: How else can I promote results in what Google delivers to me and others in my search community?

A: Using the toolbar’s tagging function, users can manually add any Web page to a stak. This makes it easy for users to add important pages that would not normally appear in Google’s results, for example. So, going back to the Vacation example, let’s say you find an offer at a hotel after clicking down deeper into the site. Finding this result again is going to require some extra effort, and the others in your community are sure to miss it. How do you make sure the result you found will catch their attention? HeyStaks solved the problem by letting you tag the page from the toolbar, using a tag you choose. You add it to the Vacation stak and – when you search using similar queries in the future or your fiends and family search – HeyStaks will promote this previously hidden result for all the stak members in the search community to see. This tagging feature is a practical way for HeyStaks to mine the deep Web that is all too often invisible to major search engines such as Google and Yahoo.

Q: What are the opportunities and use cases highest on your radar?

A: There’s a very important enterprise search opportunity here, particularly when we look at those enterprise 2.0 tools that promote collaboration within the enterprise as a side effect of capturing certain important pieces of knowledge. Some studies estimate as much as 10 percent of salary costs are effectively wasted because people aren’t able to find what they’re looking for easily. So, there’s lost productivity there and a huge opportunity for HeyStaks.

Using HeyStaks in the enterprise would allow an organization to capture all of that latent search knowledge that is lost as people perform the searches. HeyStaks allows searchers to share that knowledge, so that novice searchers in the organization can benefit from the expertise of more practiced searchers. It’s a way for organizations to start to parcel up the various different types of search knowledge that they have. You could also imagine that, as a new project starts in an organization, it’s just a matter of creating a new search stak to capture the relevant information that is found during the course of that project.

Q: Search results become content. Do you see opportunities in publishing and social media?

A: Yes, there are also huge opportunities in what I’ll call the consumer space. Individuals can create a small number of staks and share them with a small number of friends. You can even envisage larger staks being created by special interest websites or media portals, for example. They could create a stak, populate it with relevant search results, and share that stak with their subscribers, readers, or website visitors.

In the context of MSearchGroove, for example, you can create an MSearchGroove stak, feed that stak with relevant information, and share it with your readers. This way, any time they perform a search which happened to be relevant to MSearchGroove, MSearchGroove results would be promoted within the result list that comes back from Google. So, it’s a way of helping your subscribers get a more personalized version of the Google results list that takes account of the sort of interests they have as subscribers to your site.

CREATE MSearchGroove stak

TAG cool content

PROMOTE pages in Google results for everyone to share

Q: You are focused on your Beta, but iPhone is also in the pipeline. Describe the fit with mobile and how it might intersect with social networking.

A: HeyStaks has created a whole social networking site based around your search activities and if you go onto HeyStaks.com, you will see the social networking that is built around people’s search patterns.  Just like Facebook provides you with social networking services around your friends and your interests and what you do on a daily basis, HeyStaks.com provides you with social networking around your search interests, what you’ve been searching for, the various stacks that you have created, the people that you’ve shared stacks with, and what they have been searching for.

That sort of information can be readily made available as part of a mobile interface so that people can have access to their search communities on the go and they can keep up to date with what other people [in their community or organization] have been finding, for example, especially in projects that are related to their work interests.

Q: What are the business models that would make this possible?

A: I think what’s appealing is the sort of software as a service model. We would envisage keeping the basic service free of charge for all to use. However, for certain types of users who wanted to take advantage of more sophisticated services, if they wanted to create a very large stack and potentially share it with thousands of users; there might be a subscription-based charge.  Ad-funded is another potential source of revenue.

My take: There is plenty of room for innovation in the search space. HeyStaks provides us a glimpse of the future of social search and an important confirmation of the increasing importance of people in the equation. HeyStaks isn’t mobile yet, but when it is it could be game-changing. (Indeed, social search, sharing and community go hand in hand. Taptu, a socially-assisted search service “gets” this – which is why it has recently introduced features and functionality that allow people to share their search results.) Although HeyStaks is aimed at turning our simple search queries into serious content, I also see opportunities for brands to enhance (rather than interrupt) the information flow. In this scenario, search queries and results, created and maintained by tight-knit social networks passionate about their quests, could provide a starting point for brands to get actively involved in the exchange, and even lend a hand in the search by suggesting related answers/products/services members are likely to appreciate. But why stop there? Brands could also post search staks around topics where we need and appreciate some solid advice (such as recipes for food manufacturers, how-to tips for repairs around the house, or remedies for colds/flu or whatever ails us). What a great way to add value for a change!

With all the excitement (check out this recent report on CNN) around location-based advertising, it’s a given that coverage of this trend will have a top-notch spot in both research projects I outlined above, as well as MSG analysis going forward. (A great example is an upcoming column from Nate Janewit, computer scientist, location expert, and frequent contributor to thinking spaces and websites such as ReadWriteWeb. I just went over the draft with Nate yesterday and greatly look forward to the industry discussion it will spark when I post it later this month.) Another indication of how big location is: MetaPlaces 09: How to monetize location data and services (September 22-23 in San Jose, CA), an exciting industry event that will discuss context-enabled content and the service models that will benefit advertisers. MSG is proud to be a premium media and marketing partner and will circle back with exclusive pre-event promotion content, such as podcasts with keynote speakers and in-depth Q&As with key players.

A company that has caught my attention, with a potentially path-breaking approach to location-based advertising, is BipBip, the brainchild of Lasse Larsen, Chairman of the Board, WIS  International. (Wireless Information Services). The company – headquartered in Riga, Latvia – has an impressive stockpile of patents around the service, and ambitious plans to  launch BipBip worldwide (including the U.S., China, India, and 21 cities across Europe) following a successful pilot in Denmark last month. (My personal thanks to Lasse for contacting me on Twitter (@peggyanne) and for giving MSG the exclusive.)

What is BipBip? On paper the ad-funded service fulfills the criteria mobile advertising evangelists Andrew Grill and Jonathan MacDonald would no doubt agree are essential to delivering effective advertising services. I’m thinking here of the 3Ps: Permission (people will decide what brand messages they interact with); Privacy (people will decide where their data is collected and how it is used); and Preference (people will decide what content they find relevant).

The permission-based BipBip advertising scheme requires users to log onto the service via their mobile or PCs to provide personal data (gender, location – zip code), but there’s a twist. It also collects information from consumers (Preference) who sign up for the service on what products they are interested in (a sort of combination shopping list/wish list), and the price range that would make them buy, and a proximity that would clinch the deal. (Privacy, because users decide what happens to the data. It is passed on to retailers, who can only deliver a coupon discount on the wish list item when it matches the conditions (price and proximity) the user said they would accept.

At the other end of the spectrum, BipBip has pulled together retailers and advertisers that have the goods/services and discounts to make consumers an offer they are likely to appreciate. The back-end system makes a match, and location technology closes the loop, alerting consumers via free SMS to when they are in the vicinity of an item on their list at a price they are willing to pay.

But the real differentiator is an even cleverer feature that turns greed-is-good bargain hunting into a mission to make the world a better place.

This is because BipBip donates up to 50 percent of its profits (what it earns when a user agrees to receive a text ad/coupon) to a good cause that the user has chosen (as part of the opt-in process).

Do the numbers add up? Lasse tells me they do. Because BipBip has cut deals to buy text messages in bulk at good prices (and developed IP that prompts the SMS gateway to send cheap texts (from advertisers) to users on the move. With no mobile operator to feed in the value chain (even payment is outside the operator with transactions handled by PayPal and credit card companies), the company only spends 5 percent of its income (from advertising) on sending SMS advertising and coupons on behalf of the advertiser. Plenty left over to donate to the user’s favorite cause, organization, or local soccer league.

My take: Give consumers what they want? It’s possible because BipBip plays the role of an honest broker, bringing people together with the nearby offers they want most (otherwise they wouldn’t have put them on their wish list). Supply and demand are in synch, and BipBip makes its money in the middle. What’s more, BipBip doesn’t pay lip-service to the causes and concerns that motivate a large number of today’s empowered and socially responsible consumers. It pledges to spend real money on real non-profit organizations (in fact, no user can sign up for the free service without naming the organizations that should benefit from them accepting text advertising and coupons). I’ll reserve judgment until the service is live. However, a mobile advertising model that allows consumers to do good while they do their shopping sounds like a good deal all around.

Just two weeks after release and my new white paper (Mobile Advertising For The Masses) counts 500+ downloads. (Again, I am honored that Bango (white paper sponsor) refers to me as a “mobile guru.”) I always endeavor to communicate complex ideas in a way that everyone will understand, and am told people enjoy my accessible and entertaining writing style. But the real reason behind the popularity of this hands-on analysis of campaigns across three mobile social networks (BuzzCity, itsmy.com, and Peperonity) is timing. Mobile social networks are on the rise (a recent Informa report counted 200+ of them) and open for business.

Where is the money?

I was fortunate to speak at Mobile Advertising & the Rise of Social Networking: What does it mean for Brands, Agencies and Service Providers?, a Knowledge & Networking Seminar organized by AIME (the Association for Interactive Media and Entertainment) last week in London. I enjoyed the opportunity to network with mobile professionals in a casual atmosphere and will most definitely participate in future AIME events. Andrew Darling, AIME Director of Communications, tells me upcoming events/topics include: WAP publishing, mobile payments, mobile coupons, and mobile widgets.

My session looked at the nuts and bolts of mobile advertising in social networks, and the real results, revenues,  and strategies first-mover companies such as pioneer mobile flirting service Flirtomatic and brave consumer brands (via full-service mobile marketing agency Inside Mobile), have to share.

As I am currently conducting my own mobile advertising research, I was particularly interested to learn from Eric Mugnier, Inside Mobile Product and Innovation Director, that the agency has also done its homework in the form of an in-depth survey of 80 key decision makers in the global mobile advertising value chain. The report won’t be released for a few weeks/months but Eric, who is also interested in my input and ideas, has promised MSG will have it first. (Thanks Eric!)

In his presentation, which included video interview excerpts from a selection of interviews, Eric outlined a few clear trends/requirements for effective mobile advertising in a social network. Mobile advertising must be targeted and relevant; the industry has no shortage of good ideas, but it must address issues around scale; and finally, brands and agencies have built the proper foundations, and  now the priority must be to create a toolkit approach that will allow more companies to execute on the lessons they have learned.

“Killer app”

Where are the brands?

Further along than I thought if we consider the example of a major sporting goods and sports apparel company, an Inside Mobile client gearing up to release an iPhone app that combines creativity, communication, and community to deliver a compelling advertising experience that users can make their own.

In a nutshell, the app allows people to customize their shoe and share it with their friends. In the next phase, people will be able to buy what they created with their phones, share what they created with the community (and this is where it gets really interesting), geotag their creation to add another dimension to the discussion (this is what I created and where), and have the ability to post their creation as part of their Facebook profile. (More next week when MSG has the exclusive on this innovative campaign.)

As Eric put it: Allowing people to customize, share, and – most importantly – make the end-result a part of their own digital persona paves the way for effective and enthusiastic viral marketing. He’s right!

It was refreshing to hear Eric describe the campaign elements in these terms. I read it as proof the advertising ecosystem has moved a giant step forward in understanding that: 1) The emergence of empowered individuals, the advance of so-called digital natives (individuals who have grown up with the Internet), and the abundance of applications designed to give consumers more of a say in how they create, access and enjoy content have transformed communication and, more specifically, the business of advertising; 2) Advertising has become content, and brands and agencies must find ways to turn their one-way pitch to “consumers” into invigorating and effective two-way conversations; and 3) Advertising in a social network is all about active participation in the community and developing ways to interact with members and enable them to interact with each other.

My take: The principles I have discussed and debated with Jonathan MacDonald, mobile advertising activist and close friend/colleague for almost a year now, are no longer just ideas; they are the building blocks of ideal business models. Well done (!) – I’m sure Jonathan’s many presentations, trips, and workshops play a role somewhere in this transformation.

Mobile metrics

Speaking of progress, Henry Stevens, Director of Media and Entertainment, GSMA, updated us on the Mobile Media Metrics (MMM) initiative to use independently aggregated and audited metrics from operator network data to develop a common methodology (what to measure) and common process (how to measure). Agreement on these key points would enable media owners to measure performance of their media properties across mobile networks, and help media planners better understand audience trends and behavior.

Where are we now?

As we know, all five U.K. mobile operators are on board. Now the GSMA is well on its way to a commercial launch in the U.K. (the feasibility study is complete) and working with operators in other European markets to duplicate this across other regions. A technical solution for the anonymization and aggregation of operator data (allowing a persistent and unique ID), as well as integration with other relevant databases and third-party demographics, top the agenda.

But the real news is how all this can be integrated into existing reporting tools. The GSMA is currently seeking the input of brands, agencies, and media owners to ensure the process meets the long-term objective of the organization to drive the growth of mobile as a multimedia platform.

Another presentation that underlined the pivotal importance of analytics in the scheme of things came from Nandi Gurprasad, VP of Alliances, Bango.

In a case study of Tapatap, a Bango customer that was recently acquired by women’s social network LimeLife, Nandi showed how the social gaming community used analytics to measure the success of its mobile Web ad campaigns and refine advertising pitches and presentations to target countries, networks and handsets which it determined (through analytics) yield the best conversion rates. Accurate tracking of response rates across different ad networks also allowed Tapatap to better plan campaigns and, more importantly, determine customer acquisition cost.

As Nandi put it: The example shows how and why companies should leverage tools that “give them an edge” – specifically, tools that provide real-time and reliable information on users – and which provide answers to the all-important questions: Who (are my customers)? What (did they look at)? Where (did they come from)?

Vendor spin aside, mobile social networks are here to stay and grow. They offer opportunity for advertisers and drive demand for analytics solutions. (As I point out in my white paper: When the end-game is all about getting a big(ger) picture view of what you achieved and where you missed the mark, then a more comprehensive analytics solution is a must. In practical terms, the two (offered by mobile social network ad networks and independent vendors) are complementary – not competitive.)

Flirtomatic’s phenomenal numbers

Saving the best for last, a real highpoint was the inside track on Flirtomatic, a combination mobile social network and mobile flirting service with the ability to monetize mobile users through conversation with content such as virtual flowers, chocolate, and kisses.

Matt Dicks, Flirtomatic Commercial Director, reported the community counts over 1 million U.K. users and outlined how Flirtomatic turns people with a passing interest in flirting to spending customers.

The trick is retail 101 all over again: Delight the customer.

In a nutshell, Flirtomatic “makes newcomers feel welcome when they come in.” Some 55 percent of daily new users go active and send a Flirtogram (signaling they want to flirt); some 20 percent of users go on to spend with Flirtomatic on items such as virtual gifts or features to enhance their own profiles. Flirtomatic chalks up revenues of $10 per month per spending customer.

At the other end of the spectrum, Flirtomatic counts “over 100 million WAP impressions per month.” Where does mobile advertising pay dividends?

A whopping 84 percent of page impressions are generated on-portal (where Flirtomatic essentially plasters operator portals with banner ads). Next are ad networks with 12 percent, followed by paid search with 3 percent (a category Matt said shows significant growth as more users go off portal and explore mobile search services to get where they want to go).

So, operators have the volume now, but will this continue? Matt expects operators will rule the roost for another 2-3 years. After all, operators are the gatekeeper and the billing agent. An envious position between the content company and the customer indeed!

Flirtomatic has also made the move from virtual gifting to the real thing (overcoming a logistics nightmare to let members give the objects of their affection chocolate and sexy underwear). The results: 500 gave chocolates and 300 gave underwear. More important than the numbers, the experiment proves members are willing to give and receive real gifts using their mobile phone.

Read between the lines, and this behavior bodes well for brands and advertisers.

As Matt pointed out: It’s a golden opportunity for brands to get involved. Think of the sponsorship and sampling opportunities. Encourage members to send flowers (and plug Interflora in the process, for example.) Cross-sell and up-sell chocolates (you just sent your loved one Cadbury Creme Eggs, have you thought of trying a milk chocolate bar?).

The possibilities are endless – and the conversions can peg the needle. Matt walked us through the example of an early experiment Flirtomatic conducted with a popular brand of cider. Members could “shout a pint” to their buddies using their mobile phones. The recipients got a voucher on their mobile phone for a free pint of cider and the location of the nearest pub that would redeem it. The results: 348,000 members sent a pint to their friends over a two week period; CTR peaked at an impressive 10 percent.

Should mobile advertising stop at delivering a message? Or should it seek to unite the virtual and physical worlds (a topic I also examine in detail in the Netsize Guide 2009 on offer in the MSG sidebar)? The jury is out on this one, but the discussion will continue at MSG.

What do YOU think?

BTW: Matt kindly invited me to visit Flirtomatic during my next trip to London, an offer I will gladly take him up on. I have long admired the company and Mark Curtis, Flirtomatic founder and author of this  well-known book on disruption culture, whose views I also hope to capture in a thought-provoking podcast. If there was ever a mobile social community success story worth telling, then Flirtomatic is it!

Disclaimer:  Bango is an MSG supporter.

When Peggy recounted the main points of her recent – and extremely pragmatic –mobile advertising white paper and hinted that the next step might be to mobilize MSG, we decided the timing was right to provide publishers with a how-to guide to mobilizing their content using MSG as a real-life example.

And what better time that the week of Mobile World Congress (MWC), an event that showcases the best in the mobile space and celebrates an astounding 4 billion connections. According to Wireless Intelligence, the GSMA’s market intelligence unit, this milestone underscores the continued strong growth of the mobile industry and puts the global market on the path to reach a staggering 6 billion connections by 2013.

In addition to this impressive subscriber growth, we’re also seeing a similar upswing in mobile Internet usage. In July 2008 a comScore report counted nearly 13 million mobile internet users in the U.K. alone - translating to approximately 25 percent of the U.K. population. Though this number is less than the 70 percent of the U.K. population using the PC internet, it represents a seismic shift in the absolute number of mobile Internet users compared with 2007.

This increase in interest, coupled with the impact of the iPhone and the introduction of cheaper data tariffs and new off-portal mobile services, positions the mobile Internet for phenomemal growth.

What is the impact on publishers?

While they could continue to focus on the PC Internet rather than tackle the task of creating a mobile site (reasoning that the emerging nature of the mobile market, a set of different technologies and standards, unknown potential set-up costs and lack of certifiable return on investment make this a smart business move), we strongly advise against this inertia.

Waiting is a mistake for two reasons. First, mobile users are already exploring the so-called PC Internet, turning up the pressure on publishers to deliver a good experience. Second, they would be foolish not to take advantage of the opportunity to increase incremental revenue by targeting new users with a mobile-optimized site.

Of course, websites designed for viewing on PCs don’t always render particularly well on tiny mobile phone screens. For this reason, many publishers are pursuing a strategy that requires them to develop a second site, specifically optimized for mobile screens, thus providing the mobile traffic that arrives on their PC websites with a mobile-optimized destination.

It’s too early to tell whether users with smartphones or touchscreen devices (iPhone, G1 and BlackBerry, for example), who can view full PC websites, actually prefer the full PC experience to accessing a mobile-optimized website. But even if they are, these users still do not represent the mass market. As AdMob shows in its monthly metrics report, the vast majority of mobile phone users own low-end and mid-range devices, a large sector that can indeed benefit from being able to view mobile-optimized versions of the websites they know and love from the PC.

To be clear, not all websites require a mobile version to reach their audience. Sites such as Twitter, some text based blogs, and some listings websites for example make the jump from PC to mobile quite easily. However, at the end of the day, there is no easy way to tell whether a specific PC site will make for great viewing (as is) on a mobile phone. This depends on a variety of factors including the choice of mobile browser, the nature of the website content, the actual handset capabilities and latency (amount of data transferred and bandwidth available), each playing a role in determining how well a PC website converts to mobile viewing.

This is where Mippin and other similar services come in. Mippin Mobilizer enables publishers and content owners to build a mobile site for free and customize it in line with the PC equivalent website design. Mippin Mobilizer also provides the ability to promote the site for free, by either creating a custom mobile URL so that traffic can be redirected to the mobile version of the site, or by taking readers through to a PC-based mobile site emulator (more on this in the Mobilizer “how to” section further down in this column).

Finally, Mippin enables publishers to monetize their mobile-optimized destinations through mobile advertising, returning 100 percent of the revenue generated around publishers content in many instances.

Granted Mippin is not the only company offering this sort of service – FeedMate, Wapple, mobiSiteGalore, Mofuse and Wordpress plugins also go a long way toward helping publishers optimize their content for mobile. However, Mippin goes one decisive step further, incorporating sites mobilized with Mippin into the Mippin mobile portal, a top destination that generates significant traffic. This way the burden isn’t entirely on the publisher to boost visibility or discoverability through investing in SEO or paid search schemes; they benefit from being part of a portal – and an ecosystem — that generates traffic for all its members.

Other providers – such as Mofuse – also allow publishers a place on their mobile portal. With Mippin, however, the added emphasis is on discovery (through the use of tools and technologies) to further match publisher content to the right user.

To this end Mippin has purposely drawn from a  range of web 2.0 principles and added new features including portal auto-personalization, content recommendation and social likeness features (in the form of a “similarity meter” identifying common interests, or lack of) to connect users to relevant publisher content based on preferences and passions. It’s a virtuous cycle: Publishers can connect with new readers and users get the content they want most.

Whether a publisher chooses to use Mippin Mobilizer depends on their business case and objectives. But it’s important to know what is involved if you want to mobilize your content.

At Peggy’s invitation we have mobilized MSearchGroove and documented the steps in this process in a simple how-to guide.

There are four quick steps to launching PC content as a live mobile site: Mobilize, Customize, Publicize and Monetize.

The first step was to re-render content from the msearchgroove.com website. This needs to be in the form of a feed, in an RSS or Atom based format.

The msearchgroove.com feed here is mobilized in a few seconds, where it appears in the emulator on the same page. This takes us through to the second step, customizing the new mobile version with branding that reflects the website. As you can see, the process is pretty straightforward.

It’s easy to spend time trying out design combinations with the adjacent emulator; you might want an individual look for your mobile site, or a design that resembles your website. Either way the colour palette provides a good selection of colours, and can additionally handle any hex or colour value that is currently available. The msearchgroove.com site was completed in a few minutes, with the logo uploaded and colours reflecting the website easy to find and replicate.

Once the msearchgroove.com site was branded, the next step was to get the word out to existing and potential readers. To assist publishers Mippin Mobilizer offers a vriety of tools and feaures such as reader auto-redirection (directing readers to the new mobile-optimzed destination). Mippin Mobilzer also helps publishers promote the new site from their PC website by providing a “Make It Mobile” button (which publishers can add to their site or blog) and the option to create their own mobile URL.

In this case, we chose www.mippin.com/msearchgroove. (If you wish to go one further and automatically redirect PC traffic to a mobile site you must change the DNS settings for the website. Mippin provides step-by-step Information explaining this procedure here.

As I noted, publishes have the option of embedding the “Make It Mobile” button by selecting the relevant blogger platform (Mippin Mobilizer is currently integrated with Blogger & Typepad), or using the html code generated. Embedding this also links the msearchgroove.com website to a PC emulator demonstration of the mobile site. We recommend this highly as it also provides publishers access to QR codes (or 2D-barcodes), which can help users navigate quickly and simply to the new site by just capturing the QR code with their cameraphone.

Another way to get the word out and generate interest in the mobile-optimized website is through tags. With Mippin Mobilizer it’s possible to assign a selection of predefined tags to the mobile site, thus improving the number of times the site is returned within Mippin mobile portal site search results.

It’s possible to create an infinite amount of tags, but it’s important to note that Mippin’s portal search algorithms also rank search results on that basis of other factors such as relevancy (determined by tracking the sites a user has visited previous) and user recommendations (similar sites and content recommended by like-minded peers).

Almost there! The last step is all about monetizing the traffic you get, whether that traffic is direct to consumer (users found you on their own) or acquired through a presence on the Mippin mobile portal. To enable monetization, Mippin authorizes the site feed and provides the publisher with a  validation key. In this example, the process requires the publishers to submit a recent blog post to verify that the real owner of the site authorizes the destination to deliver mobile ads.

Once authorized, advertising from AdMob will be inserted in to the site at the top or bottom of the pages, though not within stories. (Note: Mippin doesn’t take a revenue share if the publisher uses their own AdMob ID. Click here for more details.)

And that’s it – the msearchgroove.com mobile site is live! It’s now optimized for any mobile traffic arriving on the site and can be viewed at www.mippin.com/msearchgroove!

Peggy adds: Hope you enjoy the MSG mobile-optimized site. MSG will also be a test case for a cool new product Mippin is slated to launch a little later on this year, so please check back. MSG will also  road test a variety of solutions for a new how-to white paper on mobile publishing, so watch this space.

· 16 percent of users don’t have an email account

· 90 percent would increase mobile internet usage if they had a flat rate tariff, a quicker connection and a more capable device

· Average page views per day is 160

· On average 50 percent of users access itsmy.com more than 5 times per day

· Users send from 12 to 34 community messages per day

These results reinforce the widely held belief that the mobile device is the first and only, truly personal, mass media and also signal the decline of email as a communication channel. What is clear (given that some users are accessing their social networks in bed, first thing in the morning) is that any brand wishing to use this medium as an advertising channel cannot simply broadcast or spam in this personal space – it comes as no surprise that users are turning their backs on email given the prevalence of spam, junk and marketing sent over email.

In fact, engaging the user on their terms is really the only way to sustainably create brand equity on mobile. People are more media savvy than ever before and can spread bad brand experiences like virtual wildfire through social networks, twitter and blogs. Any interaction must be on ‘our’ terms – when we want it, where we want it and how we want it. It must not, it cannot invade our privacy otherwise we are ignoring the personal nature of the medium and killing this market before it has even got going. And it must also be based on our interests.

This is where itsmy.com have got it right. They consistently ask their users what they want, what they use itsmy.com for and are therefore able to leverage their single biggest asset – the users themselves. By asking users what they want/think/need, itsmy.com have placed user preference in its rightful place – firmly in the hands of the user. This avoids making usage based assumptions to produce a handful of user segments, and instead allows each user to exist in a segment of their very own. After all we are all individuals.

The survey was carried out from September to November 2008 with users of 30 different operators, across a full range of devices and aged between the age of 16 and 52.

For further analysis of itsmy.com, circle back here soon for Peggy’s in-depth look at the tie up between social search pioneers, Taptu and itsmy.com

But the news today is the acquisition of ChangingWorlds by Amdocs, a company that has quietly and cleverly added capabilities that build on its billing expertise to deliver the right content to the right user in the right context. As I observed in this earlier analysis of Amdocs, the company isn’t there yet (no one is), but they have correctly placed personalization and relevancy at the core of their competitive strategy. The decision to acquire all of ChangingWorlds’ shares for $60 million in cash is a brilliant move – and one that makes Amdocs the one to watch.

A larger trend at play here is the run on personalization companies. Think of Qualcomm snapping up Xiam, a company specialized in personalization and recommendation technology. Go further back, and you might recall Real Networks acquired Sony Network Services (a company that had perfected personalization to stream mobile music according to your mood), or that Microsoft-owned FAST also bought AgentArts, a personalization and recommendation company based in Australia. And the list goes on…

In fact, my standard PowerPoint presentation, which I have presented at several mobile search seminars and a recent master class in London, contains a slide explaining the pivotal importance of recommendation and personalization (aptly titled Was it good for you too?) which also recounts the recent raft of M&A that has transformed the space.

Personalization companies are hot – and with good reason. If the end-game is about delivering advertising, apps, content and even search results that I am likely to find both genuinely useful and interesting, then technology provided by the likes of ChangingWorlds, Xiam and others I have high on my radar is crucial. (It’s all about relevancy here, but frequent exchanges with Ogilvy’s mobile advertising evangelist Jonathan MacDonald have broken me of the habit of using the term too loosely. Read his rant and you’ll understand why.)

Connect the dots and Amdocs’ acquisition, coming on the heels of a strategic decision to bundle its search and advertising capabilities in one division, is on the money.

By way of background, ChangingWorlds, an Irish provider of personalization technology, is best known for its ClixSmart platform. Designed to provide individual consumers with “proactive recommendation of content based on their preferences and context,” the platform has been deployed by 50+ mobile operators around the world.

(In a nutshell, ChangingWorlds’ ClixSmart platform includes a variety of solutions in areas such as content recommendation, mobile search and mobile advertising. Sitting at the core of this platform – and taking center stage in all ChangingWorlds does – is a profiling and personalization engine that is capable of capturing subscriber intelligence by automatically monitoring the implicit behavior of how users use and navigate the mobile Web.)

As Barry explained it to me a while back, the combination allows ChangingWorlds to create richer preference profiles and combine this profile information with external sources of complementary data – ranging from user demographics to mobile billing records. (Little wonder billing giant Amdocs snapped it up.)

And let’s not forget the recent tie-up with Sprint Nextel in the U.S., which sees the mobile operator launching ChangingWorlds’ ClixSmart technology both on the carrier’s own portal, Sprint Web, as well as providing advanced personalization solutions for a number of Sprint’s cable partners and wireless wholesale customers. (I was scheduled for a podcast with Sprint and ChangingWorlds’ CEO David Moran to get the inside track on this deal, but I can imagine this project is on hold indefinitely.)

Nonetheless, we get an idea of the use case from Kevin Packingham, senior vice president of product and technology development for Sprint, in a recent press statement. In his view, the aim of the deal is to “automatically learn what content the customer likes and put it on their homepage,” thus enabling Sprint customers to access genuinely useful content they will most likely appreciate. In this scenario, ChangingWorlds’ ClixSmart solution automatically generates personalized, dynamic content teasers that enrich the user experience of Sprint Web and stimulate increased click-through. ClixSmart teasers, which include text and images, are rotated dynamically and personalized according to the ClixSmart user profile to provide a compelling and relevant user experience designed to encourage Sprint Web users into using more mobile data.

ChangingWorlds and Amdocs share several customers including Sprint, the Vodafone Group and Telefonica O2.

During a recent industry event, David told me the company was preparing to broaden its focus beyond mobile operators and content companies to address the wider opportunities around content discovery such as voice-activated content portals, online destinations and electronic program guides for digital television. This is no doubt attractive to Amdocs, which has its eye on the bigger prize: Personalized and converged services.

I just this minute saw an email from Jessica Francisco, Account Executive, Weber Shandwick, with the news that James Patmore, Vice President of Amdocs Advertising, Content and Entertainment division, is available to speak with me later today and discuss the growing importance of mobile personalization. I’m excited about the opportunity and will have more after the call. Thanks for the prompt response Jessica!

BTW: MSG is still setting up a few features including a search box – so apologies that you can’t find the reports on Xiam and others easily. But be patient – we’re on it.

Regular readers will know I consistently track developments in mobile search, but it’s recommenders (companies and technologies that take the Amazon.com people-like-you-liked this/content-you-liked-is-like-this to the next level) that really excite me. Why? Because mobile search is primarily about delivering users what they want. Recommenders, however, are about picking up the clues we leave behind to suggest content and services we are likely to appreciate. The bottom line: Recommenders encourage cross-sell, up-sell, and the all-important impulse buy. Of course, the combination with mobile search is the most powerful indeed.

But don’t take my word for it. Orange, which has harnessed recommender technology provided by Xiam, a Qualcomm company specialized in this space, reports higher sales in this podcast. Likewise, content retailer/aggregator FoneStarz tells us in this podcast that its in-house recommender technology has led to a significant uplift in content sales.

It’s early days – but that’s why it’s important to watch this space carefully. A “Google” hasn’t emerged yet – but it’s only a matter of time, which is why I am so honored to take part in Recsys 2008 (held this year in Lausanne, Switzerland). Even better: I have been asked to judge the best early-stage project in the area of recommendation technologies. More about these super-cool companies further down in the post.

This bleeding-edge conference, sponsored by companies including Unilever, Telefonica ChangingWorlds and Strands, a recommender company MSG has tracked since the start, highlights recommender trends and technologies sure to have an impact.

I say this from experience since my participation in last year’s Recsys gave me the opportunity to connect with Aggregate Knowledge long before the company made their mark on mobile. In fact, I’m pleased to say MSG had a head start on this one, publishing in-depth analysis of the company and interviews with senior management just weeks before the company announced a tie-up with CBS Mobile.

Knowing the caliber of companies that attend this event, I am confident that I’ll uncover some great material for MSG. I’m also greatly looking forward to demos from the five finalists that have been invited by Strands to present during the conference as part of their first-ever $100K Call For Recommender Start-Ups. True to the name, the winner will go home with a $100,000 investment from Strands. According to the company blog, 68 scientists and entrepreneurs from 24 teams in 15 countries presented 26 projects.

The five finalists are:

Gravity R&D, which has developed a “magic button,” providing TV viewers instant personalized entertainment at any given time with relevant program tips instantaneously on customer demand. It automatically schedules recordings with the highest probability on user’s interest. (Hmm – I’ll have to check if the team is also thinking about mobile TV.)

SentiMetrix, which has designed (and automated) a method to extract and quantify the huge and growing number of text-based opinions expressed by users across online media. Get this right and the implications for all media – including mobile – are profound. Understanding sentiment is the first step to understanding and engaging with people on their terms.

Iletken, which has created a hybrid recommendation engine for services like news and RSS feeds, allowing users to share and pass on relevant information to their friends. In contrast to traditional social networks, it maintains weighted graphs of social proximity among users for different categories of interest.

Reccoon, which harnesses location information to help people discover new places based on their input, current location and current time. Reccoon responds to the simple question: What are my options for tonight?

Commendo, which uses recommendation technologies to optimize the drug design process in the pharmaceutical industry, including speeding up drug development and the minimization of adverse drug reactions.

I also look forward to the opportunity to catch up with Oliver Bremer, VP Mobile, and get the inside track on Strands’ strategy and roadmap. Earlier this week I spoke with Gabriel Aldamiz-echevarria, Strands VP Communications, who filled me in on some new – and very intriguing – developments.

Strands has quietly and cleverly sharpened its focus on life-streaming, developing tools and techniques to sift the clues to our preferences/tastes we leave across platforms, devices and virtual spaces to help us discover stuff we’re bound to like across the Web. At another level, this same technology helps Strands’ clients (banks, retailers, content providers) improve sales, engagement and CRM.

As Gabi put it: The key is to organize all the information we leave across the Web into one integrated profile, and facilitate the sharing of our tastes and behavior. “This way discovery does not only happen in one site, it will take place across the Web.” (The scenario: When I buy a product from an online retailer, I can share that purchase event on Strands.com for my friends to discover. They will be exposed to that product, as well as seeing similar products I liked. I can broadcast my purchases to my friends and we can discover new stuff together. The retailer is also part of the conversation – and there’s a direct trail to the store where it all started.)

It’s easy to imagine that these approaches – when adapted to mobile – will go a long towad solving some of the problems we face in mobile advertising. Could recommenders allow brands to be part of our conversations without dominating them?

Mobile advertising evangelists Jonathan MacDonald and Andrew Grill remind us that brands must ask our permission and preferences before they deliver advertising. My take: Maybe intuiting our preferences (by following the clues we leave behind) and making some helpful suggestions based on this insight (with user opt-in, of course) is a great way to get the dialogue started…

I want you to lend your voice to MSG and join this conversation.

MSG is a multiplier. But, more importantly, MSG is an amplifier, helping a broad and eclectic mix of companies, executives, columnists and pundits deliver their message loud and clear. The response has been overwhelmingly positive – feedback that encourages me to break new ground and extend these opportunities to you. As a rule I will post all projects and deadlines at MSG, and always be open to your ideas and input.

Next on the list: The Annual EContent 100. From now until August I and the other judges will compile and review a list of the 100 companies that matter most in the digital content industry. I have been chosen to judge the categories Mobile Content, Search Engine & Technologies and Social Media.

EContent judges are the first and last word on companies that will be considered for or named to the list. However, companies in these categories are most welcome to provide me with information and arrange telephone briefings/demos. Whether or not you’ve been on the list in the past, I invite you to reach out to me directly at peggy@msearchgroove.com.

The list of EContent 2007 winners can be found here. It included Apple (Mobile Content), Automatic (Social Media), Autonomy (Search), Awareness (Social Media), Bango (Mobile Content), Basis Technology (Search), Business Objects (Search), Coveo (Search), Digg (Social Media), Drupal (Social Media), dtSearch Corp. (Search), Endeca (Search), FAST (Search), Google (Search), Groxis (Search), ISYS (Search), LinkedIn (Social Media), LTU Technologies (Search), Medio (Mobile Content), Mondosoft (Search), Nexidia (Search), Nokia (Mobile Content), Quattro Wireless (Mobile Content), Recommind (Search), RIM (Mobile Content), Six Apart (Social Media), Technorati (Social Media), TikiWiki (Social Media), Vivisimo (Search) and Wikia (Social Media).

(Please note that your contacting me does not compel me to put any company name on the final list of contenders and, of course, in no way guarantees that any company will be named to the list.)

A special thanks to George Yaryura, Strategic Marketing Manager, Netsize, who helped me present the awards and brought enough copies of the Netsize Guide for everyone. It’s an invaluable resource and mobile industry almanac packed with the data and events that made 2007. (You can download it on MSG by clicking the top left-hand flash ad.) I collaborated with Netsize on the 290+ page tome, but even if I hadn’t I would still urge you to download it.

I was fortunate to sit at a great table with Bango, which also received the award for the Best Contribution for Mobile Content, and Tony Keaveny, Head of Sales UK at SnapNow, a cool camera search service I very much look forward to showcasing on MSG in the coming weeks. Ditto for Cellent, one of the few companies that “gets” the power of recommendations. Thanks to James Hales, Cellent VP, Business Development, I’ll have a great case study involving Sony BMG.

Happy coincidence: I already recorded a great podcast with NewBay CEO Paddy Holahan – and owe a lot to Amanda Campbell, NewBay Marketing Executive, who helped make it happen. (NewBay won silver for the category Best Handset App.) BuzzCity won gold for the category Best Progress in Emerging Markets. I’m proud to report BuzzCity CEO, KF Lai, has also consented to a podcast for MSG, only closer to a big announcement – so watch this space…

The Winners’ Circle:

Best Entertainment / Information Service

Twistbox – Gold

Omnifone- Silver

ShoZu- Bronze

Best Handset Application

Garmin- Gold

NewBay Software- Silver

XS 2TheWorld- Bronze

Best Progress in Emerging Markets

Buzz City – Gold

TaTa Communications- Silver

Thomson Reuters- Bronze

Award for Best Technology Innovation

InfoGin- Gold

Cellent Technologies- Silver

dotMobi – Bronze

Best Start-Up Company

CanvasM Technologies – Gold

DeviceAnywhere – Silver

cVidya Networks – Bronze

Best Advertising or Marketing Campaign

Buongiorno – Gold

M Factory – Silver

Rhythm Media – Bronze

Award for Enriching Search & Discovery

Bytemobile- Gold

Medio System- Silver

SnapNow- Bronze

Most Innovative Business Model

Camsense – Gold

Spin3 – Silver

Picsel Technologies Ltd – Bronze

Overall winner: Best Contribution for Mobile Content

Bango – Gold

CONFERENCE HIGHLIGHTS:

The MCA conference was also chock-full of worthwhile presentations and revealing stats, and I will summarize these and more when I return from Brussels later this week. In fact, I’m currently working on a detailed post/analysis of what was by far the high point of the sessions: A controversial presentation from Andrew Bud, mBlox CEO, arguing sender-pays data can reinvigorate the mobile industry.

In his view, the mobile content industry has become old and stale. (Ringtones and wallpapers? Been there, done that…) The next big (and profitable) thing is rich media in the form of video shorts.

The reasoning: Content, advertising and everything in between can only capture eyeballs, imaginations and wallets if it is presented as rich media. So, don’t bet the farm on the appeal of banner ads and text. Retail 101 dictates that effective advertising must grab our attention, excite our emotions, and inspire an impulse buy. Mobile advertising – alone, in search results or tucked in our ad-funded content offers — does none of the above on mobile, which is why the major brands are not rushing to embrace it…

If video covers the bases – then why can’t content companies give it away? The costs are prohibitive. Flat-rate data rates offer some relief, but even they indirectly require consumers to pay for a supply of ad-funded rich media content. It’s a raw deal that is unacceptable.

Andrew’s novel solution: Sender-pays data. In this scenario, the brand buys delivery data from the operator and, hence, no consumer pays transport charges. Mobile operators also benefit from a sender-pays model because they receive revenue on all ads – including off-portal.

I’ll have more on this model – as well as a surprising new study that proves operators can make billions by providing value-added and enabling services (translated: sender-pays data) to off-portal publishers – later this week. Sender-pays…You can bet it will pay dividends.

In fact, I rarely turn down an invitation – except in the case of the Mobile Web 2.0 Summit 2008. I enjoyed brainstorming topics/speakers with Andrew Mowbray, Marketing Manager, Osney Media and his colleague Sara Higginbottom in the run up to the event. However, in the end, it was more important for me to attend my husband’s birthday. (I’ve celebrated my last two birthdays at mobile search conferences!) So I won’t chair or attend the event today. However, MSG is proud to be a media sponsor of this and future Osney Media events.

Next week you can look for me at Mobile Content Awards & Conference 2008, a Visiongain event sponsored by InfoGin. In addition to chairing the first day of the conference, I will lead a mobile content workshop I have specially organized to provide content companies with an introduction to the mobile search and discovery tools/techniques/technologies they can/should harness to deliver the right content to the right users. To ensure content companies are also getting the right results, I’ll be joined by Andy Bovingdon, VP Product Marketing at Bango, who will walk us through the company’s mobile analytics offer.

Rounding out the day-long workshop, Abraham Joseph – Founder, Device Management Forum, an organization MSG proudly promotes in the Knowledge Sharing section of the site – will tell us what it takes to deliver a good user experience across a myriad of devices and operating systems. Abraham is fresh back from a handset conference – so I’m sure he’ll share valuable and practical advice, as well as insights into the new Apple iPhone strategy and what it means to content companies up and down the value chain.

If you want to schedule a briefing or meet-up during the event, then please contact me directly.

BTW: MSG is a media sponsor of two excellent events, where I’ll also be speaking: Mobile Advertising 2008 (June 23-26 in Brussels), and Mobile 2.0 Europe (July 4 in Barcelona). Hope to see you there!

At first glance, BooRah may appear to be a straight-forward restaurant search engine. But take a look under the hood and you’ll find a patent-pending system at work that effectively analyzes user-generated content (restaurant reviews, blogs etc…) to pick up on positive and negative sentiment. Hence the name: Boo refers to negative opinion (what people don’t like), and Rah tells us people gave it a thumbs-up – as in Hoorah!

Equipped with this information – which the technology gleans from semantic and structural analysis it performs on every sentence to identify the adjectives, verbs, and nouns that tell us what others really feel – the search engine lets users find restaurants they’re sure to like (based on factors including food, service, and ambience).

Pair this with mobile, as BooRah did just a few weeks ago, and you have a smart service that is location-aware and buzz-sensitive.

The service is in Alpha and will need a few more features before the company can call it a full Beta. Nagaraju tells me he just added directions and will continue to add features. “Basically, anything you can search for at BooRah.com, you can search for using mobile search.”

MOBILE DECISION-MAKING TOOLS: BooRah taps the wisdom of crowds to bubble up relevant answers and recommendations. “When you are looking for a restaurant, you want to do more than eat. You want to know if it’s a hip place where you can gather with friends for a casual meal, or an upscale restaurant that would be a perfect place to take your date. You want to know that without reading lots of reviews. And on mobile, the relevance that we can bring to results is even more critical.” To avoid information overload, BooRah presents 10 mobile search results. The presentation is neat and clean, and leaves room for related advertising – when the time is right.

NUTS & BOLTS: By way of background, BooRah’s semantic smart search system is built from the ground up to let users perform natural language search for specific experiences, moods and sentiments, and personalize the results. A query for “anniversary in Palo Alto, CA” would search for all relevant comments associated with categories such as “romantic”, “upscale”, “trendy”, “Live-music”, “view”, etc… and lets users filter results based on their preferences.

BooRah’s Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology processes vast amounts of plain English text from user-generated content such as user reviews, opinions, and blogs. It extracts specific user sentiments expressed within the content and generates scores, summaries, and customizable search responses relevant to the consumers. Results are ranked first and foremost according to popularity, and BooRah purposely ignores stars and similar vague and subjective forms of user ratings. A wise move since people rarely give out one star or five – it’s always somewhere in the middle. Rather than wade through this – and risk skewing results in favor of hyperactive contributors or users with ulterior motives for giving thumbs-up or thumbs-down – BooRah hones on opinionated reviews that say why a restaurant is good or bad.

LOCATION: BooRah on mobile handles several different types of queries, including street name, full address, zip code, points of interest. One I wasn’t expecting is searching by cross streets and intersections. “This is how we believe people will search. Let’s say you are standing at the intersection of El Camino and Castro Street, then you will want to know what is nearby … and we can present results according to distance as well as user review sentiment.” BooRah will also leverage GPS on mobile devices and “provide an option where people who are integrating with our content will be able to leverage that (GPS) as well.”

Ironically, BooRah started out in mobile and with a strong emphasis on local search, so expect more features that go far beyond plain-vanilla (what’s nearby) local search. Functionality high on Nagaraju’s agenda is mobile social networking and a way to show and share searches as part of the user profile.

LONG TAIL SEARCH: During the demo, this feature stood out from the rest. Long tail search meets local to tell me where I can get the XXX (fill in the blank). In our demo, we searched for “foie gras”. The results only included restaurants where users had had a positive experience related to foie gras. To be clear – this wasn’t a search that turned up where a user referred to foie gras; BooRah’s technology exposed results where users specifically liked the food. It all goes back to BooRah’s patented summarization algorithm that combines statistical NLP techniques with knowledge-based methods of processing simple text – and it’s a far cry from what Google & Co can deliver.

SYNDICATION: BooRah mobile is a destination, but the company has aspirations that go beyond becoming a household name for restaurant search. Nagaraju tells me the best strategy may be one where BooRah is never mentioned. “We can power the companies [search engines, content providers, etc...] with the content [reviews]. We don’t want to be the one that has to get the experience right on the mobile phone, because there are a lot of people who can do that better. We want to be the content provider for those companies, the company they partner with, because then the pie is bigger for us both.”

This model is so new that Nagaraju had to come up with a name for it. He chose “Mobile Search Syndication Provider.” As he sees it: The model is quite similar to the one already in place between BooRah and newspapers online. “The approach carries over to the mobile phone…. They [partners] get the content and we do a rev-share.” BooRah is already in discussions with search engine providers, as well as one start-up company, working on an iPhone app. Nagaraju declined to give more detail, but he did note that BooRah is “definitely leaning toward integration with Google, especially on the iPhone.” When? No set timeframe – but we can look for maps and a few other cool features in June.

MONETIZATION: It’s early days, so Nagaraju is looking for some proof points before thinking about how to make money through search advertising. “Local is a gold mine if you can figure out what the product is, because these companies (restaurants, local businesses, etc…) are willing to pay.” To date, BooRah is in discussions with directory providers and mobile operators, but nothing to report just yet…

How would BooRah monetize its search service in practice? We mused about several approaches, including click-to-call and other mechanisms that would yield likely high CPMs and pave the way toward a pay-per-transaction model. But it doesn’t stop there. “We have discounts for about 20,000 restaurants. And people are actually looking for restaurants, so we can put a discount certificate to a user when they are in the proximity and say, hey, why don’t you walk into this restaurant and then you can get a restaurant.com discount certificate; a twenty-five dollar certificate for ten bucks? That’s highly relevant to the user experience because they’re actually getting something that they’re looking for. We get a cut off of 10-20 percent of that, the restaurant gets the customer, and the affiliate has made money as well.”

SOCIAL STUFF: Nagaraju has some cool ideas about community and gave me a preview of where his thinking could soon lead BooRah. He showed me a prototype service where he has listed himself as a fan of a particular restaurant. “First, we can abstract that data and very easily provide that as a recommendation.” Take it a step further and the restaurants I search for – and the results I get – are part of my profile that I can share in a new kind of social recommendation.

A light goes click in my head. We have mobile search with more than a community-feel; we have a feedback loop and no need to always start from square one with every new search. We can refine our search results. How does this work? Let’s say Nagaraju goes out and does the heavy-lifting, searching until he gets the best list of places where I can enjoy classic Lebanese cuisine. The search results are spot-on and now I don’t have to duplicate the search. I can use his results and use that as a starting point to look for more of the same – or explore what else he likes since I feel we have similar tastes. Nagaraju tells me BooRah is several months away from harnessing some sort of social search and recommendation. But it is the direction the company will go. Smart social search – a combination sure to yield relevant results every time…

EXPANSION: Nagaraju sees a “horizontal opportunity to take the engine to other categories such as travel and hotels.” It’s also possible to reach out beyond the U.S. to other English-speaking countries. (BooRah currently delivers information gathered from over 1 million online restaurant reviews in the top 20 metros across the U.S. including San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York, and will expand to cover all of the U.S. in “the next month or two.”) Nagaraju says there is keen interest from Asia – particularly Korea – he’s also exploring.

Thanks to the many “Alts” (alternative search engine companies) that have contacted me to set up briefings. (My PA Andrea Henninge – andrea@msearchgroove.com is your point of contact.) The line-up over the next weeks comprises cool companies including Ziva, Hiogi, and Wispoon, as well as a fresh look at established mobile search engines such as Taptu, Medio, and JumpTap. I encourage you to check back regularly!

Regular readers will know that I’m excited about what MSG and ASE, widely regarded as the “voice of alternative search engines” can co-create. Charles Knight, a respected analyst and “reformed SEO” (as he likes to call himself) has built relationships with hundreds of alterative and niche search engines, or Alts, for short. His site rocks (!) and together we will create THE destination for alternative mobile search coverage and analysis.

We kick off next week with BooRah’s mobile offer. After a deep-dive with Nagaraju Bandaru, BooRah Co-founder & CTO, there’s lots to tell…

Through primary research, C-level interviews and podcasts MSG will track mobile search companies and critique their cutting-edge innovation. BTW: The timing couldn’t be better. Each day I pick up on a new Alt. Take today’s post from India Times on Ziva Technologies, a company determined to be another Google. The social search element actually reminds me more of Yahoo’s Answers, which is a new feature of its mobile search offer…But I’ll reserve judgment until after I’ve spoken with Ajay Sethi, Ziva founder.

As an industry analyst I have a long list of Alts to reach out to, but I think this should be a two-way conversation. If you have a mobile search/recommendation offer, or have concrete plans to launch one soon, then please contact my PA Andrea Henninge (andrea@msearchgroove.com) to set up a briefing.

In preparation for yet another contribution to Mobile Media, an Informa Telecoms & Media mobile intelligence publication slated to appear next week, I have turned my attention to a new piece of mobile real estate I’m convinced will super-charge mobile advertising efforts and schemes: The widget. Nokia has quietly made its bid for a leadership position in this space, one that it may well claim when high-profile brands go public with their mobile advertising campaigns.

But Nokia, as I said, has company. Goojet has quietly and carefully put together its own approach that goes far beyond mobile advertising to deliver users a virtual mobile content/apps superstore with a long list of attractive – and potentially lucrative – extras. There’s a place for advertisers, an opportunity for partners, and even a spot for Google.

Goojet – which refers to good widget – is currently in a private beta, but look for it to break onto the scene soon. It’s a complex concept to explain, so my thanks again to Guillaume for walking me through it from end to end, and for providing MSG the cool slideshow below.

What is Goojet?

It’s going to be promoted as a super- user-friendly way user can get content and apps on their mobile. In fact, Guillaume tells me the word “widget” won’t even appear in the marketing. The focus will be entirely on “fixing what’s wrong with the mobile Internet and that is first and foremost that few people use it.” This is partly to blame on high data charges, but Goojet has bet the farm the real reason is the “lack of compelling and easy things for people to actually do with it [the mobile Internet].”

SPECS: The widgets are Java apps and the gateway to Goojet is also a Java app. “It’s exactly the same on the PC as it is on the phone, and it enables your phone to access the widget catalogue and all the functionalities of Goojet.” Users can forward the Goojet by SMS to friends and it is delivered a link to click, for example. In a nutshell, users can click a Goojet to send an SMS (messaging is more or less built-in to the Goojet, another way to tap the social graph) or they can also choose to include the Goojet in the message to pass around. A final option: Users can access the messaging capability to invite a user into a Goojet app/service to join in a game, for example. Plenty of opportunities to build and refine a social graph essential to effective and viral advertising…

USERS: Users can create their own personalized space or their own page by assembling different widgets with the services they want to use. To do this they look through the widgets in the catalogue using their PC and then choose widgets for the PC or the mobile – or both. “Right now, they just pick what they want and then decide what they want to have with them all the time (on their mobile devices) and what remains on the PC.” It will soon be possible to do all this via mobile, but Goojet has its eye on the prize of convergence. “The benefit of being on PC and mobile is we can engage the consumer wherever they are. The idea is to crate a space that lets users do what they want – when where and how they want.”

ITUNES FOR WIDGETS?: Well, the analogy would be perfect – but Guillaume tells me there is one caveat. “We’re an agent for widgets where people can not only get some new widgets, but also share them with their friends and engage, communicate, and create a social network. You can’t do this with iTunes…So, imagine that iTunes was offering music for free and letting people share and blog and comment about music; then I think you would have the right analogy.”

SHARING: Enabling users to pass cool widgets (and the advertising contained within!) to their friends sits at the core of what Goojet is about. “Sharing and communication is what got the Internet going. You could send a link to a friend or pass on a piece of cool content via email. Not being able to this on mobile stunts the growth of the mobile Internet.” To this end, Goojet will make it possible for users to share widgets and “use them in a collaborative manner” to enhance the exchange.

BUSINESS MODEL: Goojets start out free – period. “The money is going to be coming from a second phase we’re introducing: Premium widgets that will quite simply deliver users a premium experience.” That could be any number of perks/advantages including buying content, making calls or sending SMS. But the key focus in both scenarios is advertising. “With this widget concept we can create a new form of advertising and we think that’s really in the power of what we’re doing and what we’re bringing to market.” Put another way, Goojet’s goal is to combine all the benefits of the social network (they have a view into the social graph because they have encouraged users to share the widgets in the first place) with the benefits of widgets to create a brand experience that permeates all aspects of the user’s personal mobility experience.

ADVERTISING: Mobile advertising will be inserted into the widgets, but Guillaume reckons new forms of advertising will also emerge. Because widgets can be services, RSS feeds, games, and even brand messages, the way is clear for interactive advertising.

PERSONALIZATION: There is a profiling aspect to the service that will enable Goojet to leverage what they know about a user’s choice in widgets and the clues to the social graph to segment users and suggest additional widgets accordingly. An advertising model fits on top of that to close the feedback loop. The profiling will also power content recommendations. No word yet if Goojet will create its own recommendation engine or partner with a company for this capability…

OPENNESS: The aim is to be “totally open” and allow anyone to post a widget and promote it to their audience. However, Goojet will also pursue partnerships with companies that “goes beyond that.” As Guillaume puts it: “We’re going to have some partnership deals where we are also going to help the company create and promote the widget in return for the promotion and traffic they can bring to us.” So, how would this work in practice? Take maps. Would a partnership with Google for maps block the way for other providers? “No, it will be totally open and we would not prevent another map company from offering a widget on our site.” The only hurdle might be getting user attention (since a partnership does entitle the partner to some top placement), but no one is excluded (another huge difference to any Apple analogy…)

BUSINESS FOCUS: But it’s not all about enabling users to explore the mobile Internet. Goojet will also work with businesses to help them build their own widgets. “They can do that internally without engaging with us. However, we have a lot of businesses involved in activities and partnerships where they use the Goojet platform to accomplish this.”

MOBILE SEARCH: Look for it! “We’re going to be indexing all the widgets, allowing them to show up in mobile search results as well as Web search results (via Google, Yahoo, Microsoft).” Each of the icons [that represent a widget] will be “a little HTML site (!) that can be referenced by Google….You will eventually be able to use Google to search for new widgets and we hope – that as they become more popular – to see them higher in the Google search results on Web and mobile.”

DISCOVERY: To help users navigate the categories and “channels” Goojet will also create directories and menu trees. “We’ll have mobile search, but we’ll also have easy categories like news, sports, entertainment.” No rocket science here, but Goojet will also harness the wisdom of crowds to let people create and populate their own categories. Another input will be the actual popularity of the widgets themselves. Human judgment will be a factor in deciding which widgets are promoted in a kind of “top ranked” list (along with the widgets promoted because the companies are active Goojet partners, no doubt). Overall, popularity will be a mix of the stars that users give the widgets plus a weighting based on the actually popularity of the individual widget. Data points like this one will “automatically” figure into the equation that essentially bubbles up widgets to the top of the catalogue.

From our first meeting at a mobile content panel I chaired I recognized Dave was more than an industry practitioner with valuable industry insights to share; he is a fair critic with firm views we should consider carefully. With this in mind I contacted Dave for a podcast to discuss the current state of the content industry, the content-selling value chain, mobile search and (in his own words) the “cut throat old business using Google AdWords to try and get people onto your site.”

In addition, Dave let me in on his own mobile search ambitions and impressive results since creating and implementing his own recommendation engine. A simple content-to-content recommender added a whopping 12 percent to sales (!) (Suggesting content based on peer preferences is a way away for FoneStarz, but this “simple and remarkably effective feature” has more than paid off.)

Listen to the podcast here. [11:00]

By way of background,  FoneStarz have evolved from a media company to a mobile service specialized in image-based download services (image, video, animation, infotainment) managing content across 25 networks in 22 countries. The company, which sees itself as a content retailer, handles the licensing, aggregation, distribution and real time management of mobile content.

FoneStarz at a glance:

• • licenses and aggregates content from over 130 companies – including many globally recognized brands;
• • specializes in personalization products, mobile entertainment and information services;
• • has a global relationship with Vodafone and works extensively with other mobile operators including T-Mobile and 3;
• • hosts, manages and publishes multiple content formats for over 2,300 different handset types;
• • analyses real-time usage data to help drive revenue from content sales and advertising by maximizing traffic on its sites;

Traditionally, FoneStarz does the heavy-lifting for content providers/brands and mobile operators. However, the rise of off-portal and the rousing success of FoneStarz’ own D2C offer, kazzip, creates a new dynamic: “Some of the new operators that we’re talking to [who are interested in the WAP portal] are thinking about moving from solely on-portal models to a sort of hybrid on- and off-portal [approach].

STATS & CHALLENGES: On-portal (across the sites managed worldwide) FoneStarz sees “around 500,000 downloads a month” of wallpapers, animations and videos. “That’s from about a million unique visitors and we generate around 50 million page impressions on all our sites. That obviously plays into a very interesting advertising play as more and more operators look to put ad banners, sell ad banners on those pages.” On the D2C destination kazzip, Dave sees a “steady conversion of between 25 and 50 percent of people, who come onto our site every day, buy something. The average purchase is 1.5 pieces of content, so it’s a great business model.” But it has its challenges. “Basically, if people give us the traffic or we find the traffic, we can convert them into customers. But, buying the customers off-portal at the moment is very difficult. It’s a cut throat old business using Google AdWords to try and get people onto your site. There really isn’t much of a future in that.” The real revenues come when content off-portal can be more easily discovered. Make it a no-brainier and customer volume will increase as well.

MOBILE SEARCH: Is it the silver-bullet solution? Maybe – but right now it’s more like work in progress. Dave gives high marks to Google and Yahoo, but adds they aren’t there yet. “Unfortunately, the basic mobile search products that are out there off-portal tend to give and be dominated by Web results. So, we have the unfortunate situation where you get the people [content companies] paying on Ad Words or the equivalent products to get the three sponsored links that do appear on the page, and that’s cut throat. But apart from that, you’re then very quickly dropping down into just standard Web pages. They are either not transcoded at all for the mobile or very poorly transcoded, and it’s just an awful experience.”

MOBILE ADVERTISING: It’s early days for banner ads. However, a few sites have launched them and the results are encouraging. “We’re seeing a pretty good uptake on the banner ads. There’s around a 3.5 percent click-thru rate … that is quite good in terms of what the market was expecting.”

PERSONALIZATION: “What we don’t do yet – [although] we could – is target individuals or males versus females with different portal design. We do allow people to customize the portal themselves, so that we retain the user agent….But I think the most important piece of the data for us is actually knowing what the general user behavior and the conversion rates are at different times of the day so that we can actually improve the results for everybody.”

VERTICAL SEARCH AMBITIONS: “If the statistics are true and 25 percent of all mobile search terms – in one way or the other – are content based, then any search company that properly integrates content companies into their search products so that users who are looking can find content that they like and that is appropriate, then that’s going to be (A) a huge step forward for the industry and (B) a huge winner both for the content companies and for the search firm.” Sensing a business opportunity FoneStarz has developed it own search engine (based on its own IP) that lets uses search all the content on its WAP site, for example. “But we are working with the big search companies to plug in our content.” Such cooperation would boost the ability of Google & Co to deliver mobile content results rather than Web pages.

Will FoneStarz become a vertical mobile search provider for indexed image-related mobile content? It’s on the radar. As Dave put it: “It’s quite possible that we will try to plug in a vertical search product into other places because it’s another way of funneling traffic through.”

Regular readers will recall that MSG has tracked the rise of exciting mobile vertical search engines from the start. Why? Because the mobile screen real estate is limited and so is users’ patience. Combine these factors and we have the perfect Petri dish conditions for vertical mobile search. In my view, there’s no need to “out google” Google (and Google is so good at what it does that any efforts in this direction waste resources.) Instead, carve out a niche, develop some clever algorithms and maintain a sharp focus on the customer, and you’ll have much of what it takes to play in this space.

Many companies are rising up to embrace this model, which is one reason I so look forward to cross-posting my pick of super-cool search engines and services at MSG and AltSearchEngines come June. BTW: If you are a vertical search engine active in mobile – or have ambitions in the mobile space soon, then I encourage you to contact my PA, Andrea Henninge (andrea@msearchgroove.com) for a briefing.

One vertical search engine that I have placed high up on my must-watch list from day one is Veveo. This recent article in BusinessWeek is a good primer but it only scratches the surface of why we’re sure to see much more of this mobile video search engine over the next months. I know from my briefing with Daren Gill, Veveo VP/GM responsible for the company’s flagship mobile search offer vtap, that the company is set to offer paid search results soon. It’s also going to announce a tie-up with a major European mobile operator “as early as this summer.” Search advertising is also on the roadmap.

Thanks again to Daren for walking me through a demo, being forthcoming with answers to ALL of my questions and helping me create a personalized mobile channel/feed that alerts me to all things related to Into the Wild (my current fav movie). I should add that creating the channel was a piece of cake – so high marks for usability in my book.

By way of background Veveo – with HQs in Andover, MA and Bangalore, India — was founded in 2004 by Murali Aravamudan and Ajit Rejasekharan. The company is VC-funded and, in May 2007, reported that Promod Haque, managing partner, Norwest Venture Partners, invested another $7.8 million in the company. (This post from Unwired India picks up on the investment and puts it into perspective into perspective.) That brings total investment to $28 million.

Speaking of assets, the company has a strong IP position with 33+ patents and patent filings. Indeed, Veveo’s vtap mobile search service is built from the ground up using the company’s own search and recommendation engine technology – so there is no need to partner with a search engine provider. If anything, we may see mobile search giants tie-up with Veveo to plug holes in their own video search capabilities. In fact, Veveo is actively exploring options to have its search box “syndicated to as many sites as are interested in using it.”

To date, Veveo has indexed a whopping 160 million videos – and counting…

Veveo purposely mines the lucrative long tail of the millions of freely available videos on the Internet to offer users more choice and create an association in users’ minds between Veveo and mobile video content. “There is no dominant player in mobile video. YouTube has a great brand in the Internet but this hasn’t carried over into mobile. People’s mindset is not that YouTube is mobile, they aren’t one in the same, so there is a huge opportunity for a company to claim that position.” Veveo aims to be that player.

As Daren puts it: “Today, most video offerings are coming through the mobile operators. These offers are limited – usually under 1,000 titles – and involve a licensing agreement between the operator and the content owner. They [these offers] can’t possibly meet users’ expectations [for the service] because the choice is limited.”

What does Veveo do & how does it do it?

NUTS & BOLTS: Veveo regularly crawls over 100,000 Internet sites to index video content – between 7,000 to 10,000 sites are crawled daily. This exposes fresh content, but it also lets Veveo detect shifts in how users are interacting with the content. By tapping this so-called social graph, Veveo not only picks up on all the usual metadata that describes the content; it gains a deeper understanding into just how users think of the content. (It’s smart to make room for human judgment and several mobile search companies, including Taptu, abphone and ChaCha, have tweaked their algorithms to accept some form of user input…)

What’s the benefit? Improved accuracy, relevancy and breadth of search results. As Daren put it: “We want our index to mirror how people think about the content. This has allowed us to build up to over 3 million global content topics. In a way, we follow their (users’) lead and let them categorize the content for us.”

Put another way, Veveo sees how users categorize content – and what content they say falls under each category. It then compares these keywords, tags and associations with the wealth of content available on the wider Web, looking for matches and similarities. “We can go beyond a static index to create content channels on the fly.” The result: Relevant content genres and groups on-demand and devoid of an over-reliance on popularity. Milestone research from Kartik Hosanagar, Wharton professor of operations and information management, proves an over-reliance on popularity is self-perpetuating and self-limiting because it tends to plug popular content – allowing it to become even more popular – and force less popular content into obscurity. Not a great approach if you are serious about cashing in on the legendary Long Tail of niche content…

RECOMMENDATION: Tapping the social graph also allows Veveo to create content associations and deliver relevant content recommendations. Want to find out what artists are related to, say Eddie Vedder? Follow the bread trail of users who checked out Eddie Vedder videos and see what else they liked enough to view, recommend, share etc… (It also helps that vtap has its own “share” feature within the search service that encourages users to pass on search results and provide vtap yet another view into how users think about the content.) The service also displays why a video was chosen (it is relevant to what category/interest) and the nearest and freshest related content. My search for Eddie Vedder, for example, bubbles up a LastFM-like list of similar artists and tracks. It’s a virtuous cycle that Daren says allows Veveo to improve its own offer. “We’re experimenting with recommendation and this will be a big focus in our service. We started by recommending recent and similar videos [from the same artists] but have found that users like recommendations that draw their attention to related content that they might have missed.”

PRESENTATION: Veveo’s vtap is a WAP site, but it is also a client that can be pre-loaded on a handset to let users search, browse, discover, keep and share Web videos from any source on the Internet, as well as create, personalize and update content feeds on the fly. To date Veveo has sealed deals with Motorola and Sony Ericsson. In the case of Motorola, it’s pre-installed on the MOTO Z10 and for SonyEricsson it’s in the Fun & Downloads store on Java Platform 8 (JP8) enabled handsets models: Z770i, K850i, W910i, K660i, W890i, Z750i and Sony Ericsson’s JP7 models: W880i, K810i, T650i, K530i, W580i, K770i, W660i. Daren tells me another deal with a major handset is in the works, so watch this space.

PERSONALIZATION: This is a big part of vtap, which lets users create and personalize their content channels/feeds. The technology also picks up on (implicit) clues users leave to fine-tune the personalization and deliver relevant content. “In video it has to be personal because users will literally turn off if they must tune in to a one-size-fits-all offer.” In the demo Daren and I played around with a beta feature of vtap search that can fine-tune its suggestions/results over time to match individual tastes. In my case, I like SNL’s Amy Poehler and I also like Amy Winehouse. These two Amys are the ones that will automatically complete my search query and top my list of results. (I know of other search services that incorporate similar features and functionality to make inputting queries easy and intuitive. Look for it to become a source of competitive advantage moving forward. After all even power search is powerless if users have to go through hoops to tell it what they want…)

USER EXPERIENCE: A word about content adaptation. Daren says there are no issues or hiccups because Veveo does its own transcoding. “Users either load the vtap client on their phones or it comes pre-installed. When a user selects a video to play, we connect to the sites, hit the web servers with the video and transcode it on the fly so that the media player can play it on the phone.” In a WAP scenario, the experience is similar.

MONETIZATION: For the moment the videos are chosen from what is freely available on the Web and Veveo is “faithful to the advertising that is a part of the video stream.” Put another way, Veveo “hits the content servers and gives the content owners impressions for their ads.” The service is free, but ads will be a part of the WAP experience “as early as next month.” Translated: Look for banners and text ads to show up with the search results. Veveo isn’t interested in pre-and post-roll ads because it doesn’t want to weigh down or slow down the user experience in any way. The end-game is about delivering relevant mobile advertising, but that will have to wait until the ad networks can handle this. “Everybody agrees the ads have to be targeted, but no one has the capabilities and customer data to do robust targeting at this time.” In the meantime, Veveo is in talks with mobile operators and expects to “announce a deal in Europe as early as late summer.” The operators “get” the mobile search value prop; the challenge is mobile advertising. “We are showing the ads that are in the original Web videos, but mobile operators want their ads. Recently, we’ve seen movement toward a more open system and greater interest [by operators] in trying to figure out a way to make it work for all parties.”

CONVERGENCE: Veveo isn’t talking about it much, but it can also provide its search technology to power IPTV services, laying the groundwork for search and content retrieval schemes that will literally allow users to access their vtap feeds and search results across devices and platforms. But it’s more than a vision; Veveo already supplies its know-how to a top North American IPTV provider for use in its IPTV offer, which has been implemented across some 2 million set-top boxes.

The Mobile Internet is a case of good news and bad news. The good news is that it’s chock-full of compelling content and data services that could more than make up for the worldwide decline in mobile voice revenues. The bad news is mobile data revenues are relatively low – and will remain so – until mobile operators demonstrate the value of the Mobile Internet to subscribers. This is tougher than it looks, since accessing the Mobile Internet is neither enjoyable nor affordable, and no amount of marketing to the contrary is going to encourage usage until mobile operators understand and address the hidden costs.

Put simply, there are two costs that drain both users’ wallets and their patience.

There are the obvious monetary costs associated with Mobile Internet access. These are the direct costs that the subscriber bears, in the form of charges levied by the operator, each time they access the Mobile Internet from their phones. This is a clear direct cost to the user they are faced with each billing period – and it’s the one charge that causes “bill shock.” Common sense tells us high data tariffs will never encourage high data usage. The fact that mobile operators such as Vodafone have recently introduced flat-rate data packages is evidence that monetary costs are indeed a barrier to usage that operators can no longer ignore.

The second type of cost, what I call interaction cost, is perhaps less obvious than a line item on a monthly mobile bill, but it is far more central to the health and continued growth of the Mobile Internet and must be addressed.

These interaction costs reflect the time and effort required by the average subscriber to access the content they consider relevant and genuinely useful. While these costs are less visible to subscribers, they are manifest in the frustration that subscribers routinely experience when they try – and often fail – to find and access the content they want.

Recognizing the role that both monetary and interaction costs have to play in the Mobile Internet is critical for mobile operators and other companies in the mobile ecosystem, to better understand what defines a positive user experience and how they might deliver it.

One route to better value is to reduce these costs, and it is no surprise that many mobile operators have introduced “all you can eat” fixed-price rate plans. I mentioned Vodafone, but there are many more. In the U.S., Verizon Wireless, AT&T, and T-Mobile USA have championed flat-rate data packages. In the U.K., O2 has likewise introduced a flat-rate plan to drive Mobile Internet usage.

While the majority of such plans are not yet attractively priced for the majority of subscribers, they do show an important and welcome shift in the mobile operator mindset. The collective wisdom is that reducing the monetary cost of the Mobile Internet will drive usage and lead to many other significant revenue opportunities, with premium content and mobile advertising leading the pack.

But cutting tariffs – and hence addressing only the monetary costs of accessing the Mobile Internet – does not get to the root of the problem. Granted, customers spend less money to access the Mobile Internet, but they still lose time and patience when they try to access the content they want.

To be clear, these interaction costs effectively negate the savings in monetary costs and seriously damage the customer’s perceived view of the value of their Mobile Internet experience. It may be cheap to access, but this doesn’t take the pain out of getting to the content they want.

Over the last years, subscribers have said they are increasingly frustrated by the challenges they face when they attempt to access relevant mobile content. Their main complaint: It takes too long. And, keep in mind, this is not a bandwidth issue; it is an interaction issue.

Put simply, it takes too many clicks – or interaction steps – for users to locate the content they want. This has been documented in a recent analysis of mobile portals conducted by Mobile Metrix & ChangingWorlds. It revealed that the average mobile operator portal requires an average of 20+ interaction steps (menu scrolls and option selections) for the subscriber to navigate from the portal home page to content of interest.

To put this in context, other studies have argued that the average user expects to get to content within 30 seconds, which corresponds to no more than 10-12 interaction steps. Taken together, these studies highlight a huge gap between user expectations and the reality of the Mobile Internet. And let’s not forget, more interaction steps mean more time is spent navigating the portal. The upshot: Up to 75 percent of mobile content is all but invisible to the average subscriber.

When we look at mobile search, we find similar interaction problems. ChangingWorlds’ own research (based on an analysis of 10 million mobile search sessions) reveals that only 10 percent of mobile search queries result in actual result selections. This means that 90 percent of mobile searches fail to deliver results that the searcher finds useful and relevant enough to select.

Conventional Web search delivers a much more satisfactory end-user experience, with approximately 50 percent of user search queries leading to result selections. Put another way, the Web search results set offers users results they consider relevant in one out of two cases, against one out of 10 cases in mobile search. Consequently, Mobile Internet search currently lags far behind its Web cousin in terms of this basic click-thru measure of effectiveness.

Given the pivotal role of mobile search in off-portal discovery (mobile search is effectively the only means to find mobile content since there are no mobile operator menus to point the way), these results suggest that off-portal interaction costs are prohibitive and problematic.

As this illustration shows, personalizing the Mobile Internet can significantly reduce the interaction costs for users. By automatically learning about individual user preferences, it is possible to provide users with a more proactive and relevant Mobile Internet experience, whether browsing or searching for content, on or off portal.

Clearly, the interaction costs of accessing the Mobile Internet must be reduced. But how can the industry achieve this?

The answer lies in personalization technology that can effectively learn about the requirements and preferences of individual users, and communities of users, as they interact with a wide range of Mobile Internet services. Many mobile operators are beginning to understand the critical role personalization plays in their content-selling strategies.

What’s more, an increasing number of mobile operators are harnessing personalization technology to improve their portal offers and the quality of the overall user experience. This is possible because personalization technology enables mobile portals to be fully and intelligently personalized to the user’s individual needs and preferences. Even better, personalization technology – if it is dynamic – can learn through clicks, patterns, and interaction with the user over time to adjust their structure – that is, the content on offer and the order in which it is presented on portal – to answer, even anticipate, the individual user’s mobile content requirements.

Indeed, our own research and mobile operator implementations have shown that personalizing the Mobile Internet can significantly reduce the interaction costs for users. As the figure above shows, by automatically learning about individual user preferences, it is possible to provide users with a more proactive and relevant Mobile Internet experience, whether browsing or searching for content, on or off portal.

Allow me to provide an example.

If Ashley regularly accesses movie listings on a Saturday evening, then the personalization technology will pick on this to gradually promote what’s on at her local cinema, as well as relevant movie reviews that are likely to interest her, to a higher position within the portal. This obviously reduces the number of clicks to content as well as the number of interactions to book a movie, for instance. Critically, reducing the interaction costs associated with accessing the Mobile Internet also increases the quality of the user experience and the value-add delivered by the mobile operator. In short, the Mobile Internet experience is vastly simplified, interaction costs are dramatically reduced, and the chance that Ashley will make accessing the Mobile Internet part of her regular routine skyrocketed.

Our own internal research, based on the experiences of more than 50 mobile operators around the world who have implemented our personalization technology, clearly demonstrates that interaction costs can be reduced by half. This leads to significant incremental improvements to Mobile Internet usage; our customers have seen this usage increase by approximately 30 percent per year.

The user behavior and content preferences collected and learned by personalization technology also have a fortunate and formidable effect on other Mobile Internet applications and services. An example of this is mobile search.

Indeed, applying learned user preferences to the ranking of search results ensures that individual users are presented relevant and genuinely useful results. The fact that users find what they are looking for naturally encourages them to use mobile search more often, thus creating a virtuous cycle of use and utility.

Personalization also improves the relevance of mobile advertising and ensures that users are not “spammed” by messages they consider irrelevant of or just plain annoying. This is critical if we consider that operators count on mobile advertising to provide them a new and significant source of revenue. Here again, harnessing the learned preferences of mobile users enables mobile operators to offer highly targeted advertising messages and offers.

The result is an advertising experience that is far superior to traditional “one-size-fits-all” approaches. Indeed, our own research shows that personalization yields real and positive results. Highly targeted, personalized advertising can increase click-thru rates by up to 150 percent.

I began this series with a discussion of how the value proposition of the Mobile Internet can and must be improved. As I have demonstrated, there are two costs the industry must address: the real monetary cost of accessing the Mobile Internet, and the interaction costs that place the burden of finding and accessing relevant and useful content entirely on the shoulders of the user.

Flat-rate tariffs are welcome, but they are more of a quick-fix than a long-term solution. The success and survival of mobile operators is a measure of how well they manage to reduce their interaction costs. Personalization technology is a proven and practical approach that cuts interaction costs while stimulating Mobile Internet usage across the subscriber base. As in all industry sectors, giving the customer what they want and how they want it is the superior strategy.

The next in this series will examine the success factors imperative for effective mobile data personalization. It will deliver answers around what we really mean by personalization for the Mobile Internet and provide examples of best practice for the implementation of personalization strategies to deliver measurable results.

What the industry can do is match content recommendations with keywords. At least, that’s what I assumed when I began my study of mobile search/recommendation on the T-Mobile USA and Verizon portals. However, I am forced to conclude that the industry has a long way to go before it properly implements content recommendations. To be fair, the industry has to get search right first, (which it is currently struggling to do), but I believe the industry should tackle these issues in parallel as the technologies are intertwined and mutually beneficial.

In response to my earlier post Luni correctly pointed out that the searches were performed from within Verizon’s Vcast Music application. He stated that “for a better experience on a Verizon phone, subscribers (today) must download the “Get It Now Search” application, which will search not only the VCast Music catalog, but also the ringtones, ringback tones, wallpaper, games, and applications catalogs, all from a single search box.”

Curious to see if there would be a vast difference in the quality of the results I downloaded the Get It Now app to my handset and conducted mobile searches for a variety of content, the results of which I have documented in this post.

To be clear, the Get It Now experience – which is powered my Medio – is much improved over the Vcast service. However, I am still concerned that the filtering technology, which delivers 200+ items in response to a music search for “Frank Sinatra”, presents the user with too much choice.

And finally – in view of the excitement around approaches such as Yahoo’s Search Assist that enable users to input search queries faster because they complete the query for them based on a few letters – I decided to take a hard look at what Verizon offers. My take: The mobile operator is leaving money on the table by not making it clear how the partial word match works – and how users can accept the suggestion in the first place.

I took some time off yesterday to work on my presentation for Search Goes Mobile, an invitation-only workshop from April 28-30 that brings together senior search company execs, mobile operator representatives and top academics to discuss the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead as we create truly mobile mobile search. (More about this closer to the date.)

I also used the “downtime” from MSG for a long overdue mind-meld with Eric Chan, mobile evangelist, thought-leader, blogger and Adjunct Lecturer in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. Eric also founded Caboodle Networks, a company that developed the know-how and the patents to deliver recommendations based on the user’s context. He later sold the company to mobile search platform provider MCN, a move I reported here.

(I’m also proud to report Eric, who shares the MSG vision, will be a regular contributor to MSG, providing us with his take on content recommendation, key players and offers aimed at content cross-sell and upsell, as well as the delivery of relevant and useful mobile advertising. He has also agreed to collaborate with me and Peggy Albright as we develop a series of mobile search performance reports. I’m honored to have Eric on board and greatly look forward to what we can co-create. )

In January/February 2008 Eric compiled some remarkable data on recommendation, research he agreed today to share with MSG.

Before analyzing the results, which he gathered by testing the ability of the T-Mobile USA and Verizon portals to deliver search results and content recommendations, I wish to make it clear that this is not a judgment of T-Mobile USA/Verizon abilities. It is an objective look at service performance and plea to all companies to push the boundaries of what is possible. In fact, Eric commends both operators (and their search provider Medio) for improving content categorization and successfully tackling the issue of query ambiguity. Good progress, but there’s still a long way to go – for everyone…

The methodology: 100 searches with a primary focus on music (artists, genres, instruments and partial song titles). A special focus on the recommendation feature and how often the service suggested similar content based on an intelligent understanding of the query.

The results: No results for 8 percent of queries. That’s “very high” in Eric’s view. “Absolutely and unequivocally, that should be as close to zero as possible.” In fact, if there is no match, then that’s the optimal time to introduce a content recommendation – such as a song from a similar artist. “If recommendation works, then a service should never have to deliver ‘no results.’”

Formal recommendations offered for percent of queries. It’s a case of close-but-no-cigar, as far as Eric is concerned. This is because the recommendations lacked sophistication and a deeper understanding of what the terms meant. “They are based on matching text strings or word strings, not on semantics.”

The results: The lack of coordination/integration of search is notably high at 23 percent. “There is poor coordination between the Get It Now portal and the content management system.” As a whole, mobile search fails to function in an optimum way and the recommendation feature has clearly not been implemented. More importantly, Verizon literally delivers too much of a good thing, overwhelming users with a long list of results (a whopping 624 in response to the query “Frank Sinatra”.

The takeaway: “We’re still scratching the surface when it comes to recommendation. The companies – the ISVs (independent software vendors) – are still trying to do a lot of indexing and working on getting the search functionality right for the end-users.”

Ironically, the solution to this problem can be found in a comprehensive and strategic approach to recommendation.

Put another way, it can plug the gaps in mobile search because it will always deliver a result – even in cases where the index fails to provide an exact match. “Looking at semantics is a way to help the user and improve the quality of what you offer the user [in response to their query].” It also exposes the user to content they might not have otherwise known existed and could clinch the sale of additional content – all reasons for the industry to sharpen its focus on the technology and get down to serious business.

In-Brief: A detailed look at Mobicious, a nimble newcomer that has quietly signed a slew of deals with content retailers and fine-tuned its own proprietary crawling technology to create a place where users can find everything for their mobile phone. David Chang, Mobicious co-founder and VP of Marketing, talks about the company’s focus on discovery, plans for expansion outside the U.S. and hints at the pivotal role of social media. Shortly after the audio interview Mobicious took the wraps off of SnapMyLife, a mobile photo sharing and social media site. In March 2008, over 500,000 unique visitors from over 180 countries visited the site, which served over 4 million page views. Since then Mobicious reports over 1,000 people are joining the made-for-mobile community site (which has also appeared in the top ten social networking apps for the Apple iPhone). Could mobile advertising be far off? Read on!

When it comes to mobile content, offering more is good. But offering it all is best. This is the thinking at Mobicious, a Boston-based start-up that has made it its mission to become a kind of mobile content/services/apps emporium. The company, which built a “discovery engine”, has partnerships with around 10 major retailers including Jamster and Thumbplay – alliances that have laid the groundwork for an impressive and comprehensive catalog of 400,000+ premium and free content items.

More importantly, Mobicious has developed the IP to spider mobile content sites (as well as user-generated content destinations) and pull in a steady feed of fresh content from the legendary Long Tail…This has allowed the company to launch 100+ content “channels” where users can browse content according to topic and explore related content. (Mobicious aims to improve its Amazon-like approach to content recommendation – but that’s coming a little later in the roadmap.)

One part iTunes, one part Google (as the company has been described) Mobicious is more than a single destination for users to discover all things digital for their mobile phone. The company also reports high conversion rates for its content partners – generally over 20 percent conversion – and has plans in the pipeline to bring the same positive benefits to mobile carriers who tie-up with the company to boost their off-portal traffic and mobile commerce.

As David put it: Mobicious is in discussions with U.S. carriers about “augmenting their current on-deck content with all of the off-deck content.” How would it work in practice? “If you’re a subscriber, you’ll see not only your own service provider’s content; you’ll see all the off-deck content ‘merged’ into one place.” The result is a “one-stop discovery engine for everything that’s out there.” Unlike a Google or other portal/search provider that would no doubt prefer to take center stage as a content super-store in their own right, Mobicious would “forward the consumer off to complete the purchase at the specific site – whether it’s the carrier’s site itself or a third-party provider….We let the consumer complete [the purchase] using the existing distribution mechanism.

Listen to the podcast here. [14.00]

Business model & making money: Mobicious lets users preview content/services/apps as well as read reviews and rank their own experiences. “There’s quite a large selection of free content that users [in the U.S.] can download to their phones. For premium content we refer consumers to both on- and off-deck suppliers.” The business model is primarily based on referral fees from partner content providers that are our partners (on a pay-per-performance basis). In addition, Mobicious takes advantage of Google’s AdSense and display advertising.

Crawling technology: Mobicious acquires content uses a variety of tools and technologies. “Part of it is spidering content that’s already out there….We’ve identified the top websites that have mobile content. Some of these larger players – because they’ve embraced this sort of distribution model – have XML feeds and structured feeds that we can take directly into our system.” For the rest, the procedure is manual. “The model is very similar to the early days of the Internet [with] Yahoo hiring college kids just to find all of the websites that were popping up. And so it’s a combination [of these methods].” But Mobicious also has its eye on the prize: a comprehensive content index. “If you layer all the metadata, ratings, reviews and tagging on top of the content, it becomes a very valuable information asset – [and one] we would then work with other players in the industry to distribute.”

Google & Co: They are also trying to create a similar index, but David is confident Mobicious has the edge. “We have a significant head start in building up that index….These Internet giants face a pretty steep learning curve, and they been tripping over some of the oddities of the mobile world.”

Cool stuff: Amazon-like recommendations are on the roadmap as a means to “bubble up interesting content” and encourage users to explore more, similar content. But the plan that has the most promise is David’s ambition to mash up a user’s iTunes playlist with the Mobicious mobile content stockpile. “Users could upload their iTunes XML play list and do an auto-match with any of the artists that appear in the play list for other content for their mobile devices.”

Roadmap: “We’re a bit like a search engine that enables people to discover mobile content from other sites. Sometime down the line, as the mobile value chain gets more mature, there is certainly a possibility that we will get much more deeply tied into the payment and delivery side [of the equation] for premium content. But today we’re all about discovery.” Moving forward, look for Mobicious to expand beyond the U.S. and sharpen its focus on mobile advertising.

Social media: David didn’t discuss this much and now we know why. Just last week Mobicious took the wraps off of SnapMyLife, a mobile social media site that lets people (and not just tech savvy teenagers) upload and share photos taken with their mobile phones. The mobile-centric experience also lets users check out their friends’ most recent photos, comments, and activities from their handsets; create real-time alerts to track and know when friends post new photos; and “broadcast” photos to friends and groups in a “follow-me”-type scheme that resembles Twitter. Just add images…

But the real news is buried in the press release and in the presentation David was kind enough to provide as background. The service is fun and interactive, but it also uses scalable filtering technology to eliminate risqué content. This feature does more than lay the groundwork for a widely accepted (and acceptable) community centered on user-generated photos and media; it creates a space where users can “follow and interact with other users and brands while on-the-go.” (To borrow a phrase from the press release…)

Read between the lines and SnapMyLife – which isn’t about chatting, dating or flirting – covers the bases to provide brands a space where they can engage and interact with an audience without worrying about whether the content is appropriate for children and younger users. Those controls are baked into this Mobicious property from the start. And, because the space already attracts a wide range of users from over 180 countries, it’s easy to imagine brands getting involved – big-time. They could take advantage of the demographic/geographic reach to sponsor the community, post images of cool consumer merchandise, or simply introduce follow-me type services around popular celebrities, media companies and brands that spark emotion…

It will be interesting to see where Mobicious takes its new mobile venture. Kudos to the company for developing a community where brands can become involved in – but never dominate – the conversation/exchange between users. Perhaps one better would be for Mobicious to make use of its core discovery engine here as well. That way Mobicious could unite its mobile Web properties and ultimately introduce users to user-generated content and content “broadcasts” they might not have otherwise known existed, as well as useful/relevant brand messages they are likely to appreciate…

When I reported in March that Qualcomm had snapped up Xiam Technologies — an Irish provider of targeted advertising, content discovery, and recommendations solutions for clients including Vodafone, Orange UK and O2 – I knew there was more to it. In my mind, the move clearly cemented the foundation of a new kind of Qualcomm, a company firmly focused on services and personalization – and not limited to the BREW value prop.

Without a doubt, Qualcomm has the corporate DNA for a full-force push into the delivery of targeted (dynamically personalized) content, apps and advertising. Consider the assets it accumulated when it acquired Trigenix back in late 2004. That IP became the basis for uiOne and has since evolved into a product portfolio combining a store-front, a home-screen replacement, and a skinning application that has been deeply integrated within Qualcomm’s BREW platform. Add Xiam, and Qualcomm has the bases covered to make its mark in mobile personalization, recommendation and targeting solutions. Xiam’s MPOS (My Personal Offers System) is software that enables operators to deliver targeted advertising/content to users.

But does Qualcomm see it that way?

After an hour briefing with Herbert I can now answer this question in the affirmative. Qualcomm Internet Services (QIS) “gets” it. What’s more, the company is gearing up to roll out more enabling services built from the ground up to deliver recommended content, apps and ads. (Special thanks to Richard George, Qualcomm’s professional and patient Account Manager at Hill & Knowlton, for rescheduling around my last string of business trips. He’s also put the wheels in motion for a deep-dive Q&A in early May with Andrew Gilbert, Executive VP & President of QIS, MediaFLO Technologies (MFT), and Qualcomm Europe – so please check back.)

During the briefing, Herbert told me the recommendation and targeting will be integrated into Qualcomm’s BREW solution and will likewise be a core component of BrandXtend, a Qualcomm offer focused on branded media, entertainment, music and game companies. A key aspect of BrandXtend is that it provides end users with a “platform for the discovery and delivery of compelling mobile content.” BrandXtend also sees Qualcomm collaborating with major brands. One deal that stands out is the 2007 tie-up with MLB Advanced Media, LP (MLBAM), the interactive media and Internet company of Major League Baseball.

Qualcomm will also market the recommendation and targeting solution as a stand alone offer and separate from BREW. As Herbert put it: “It will be business as usual at Xiam – particularly in Europe.” Beyond carriers there is also a greater focus on content providers and brands (off-portal). No doubt Xiam’s recommendation and targeting technology will play center stage in this marketing push.

What is the immediate focus? “From an immediate go-to-market perspective – particularly in the BREW space – the focus is on content upsell right now. It’s about getting to know the profile and interests of users to make recommendations for more BREW content. Brands and operators can apply [Xiam's] profiling and recommendation engine to sell more content and grow the addressable market.”

Herbert told me advertising is also an “important application area”, but the number one priority is upsell. “As carriers start to explore delivering ads to their users, then clearly we will be set up well to leverage the [MPOS] engine to recommending relevant ads as well.” Europe is where we’ll likely see an emphasis on advertising and a repeat of the pattern we saw earlier this year when Xiam launched its targeted advertising solution with Vodafone Ireland. (Vodafone Ireland is using MPOS technology to serve interactive third-party advertisements on their mobile Internet portal.)

It was helpful to have a briefing to draw the connections I knew existed in the QIS roadmap. But my conversation with Herbert also challenged me to think outside the box as we discussed the range of services he imagines could be improved by adding a more personal touch.

“Demographics, real-time content choices and preferences, how this changes dynamically throughout the course of an average day. The richness of a profile is a core asset that the MPOS engine can leverage to deliver targeted content and advertising.” But it doesn’t have to stop there. Herbert could envision a service based on this technology that recommends the right device to the right user. I suggested relevant, personalized health advice and services.

We had some fun and let our imaginations go – but one thing for sure: We shouldn’t restrict our thinking about recommendation and targeting to the usual mix of mobile content and apps. There are no limits.

The news yesterday reminded me how much I love my work and why. It is exciting to be that little bit ahead of the curve, consistently and correctly identifying the companies and trends that will have a significant impact on the mobile space. No wonder VC companies lead the new user registrations on MSG and also pack my in-box with requests to discuss cool new companies and technologies. I enjoy the exchange and encourage VCs – as well as the rest of the MSG community – to reach out to me directly to continue the dialogue. Of course, MSG will continue to showcase companies worth watching – so please check back regularly.

By now we have all read that CBS Mobile and Aggregate Knowledge are teaming up to enable content discovery and recommendation and deliver targeted and relevant advertising. But it’s not just about technology; it’s about a seismic shift in mobile advertising strategy. As Jeff Sellinger, Executive Vice President, CBS Mobile, pointed out in a press statement: “Behavioral targeting on mobile phones is the next frontier …because the smaller the screen, the more relevant the content needs to be.”

Trading in key words for technology to tap the collective wisdom of crowds… Is this the way forward? It will be great to hear the CBS side of the story, particularly since this move is the latest in a strategy marked by industry firsts - including the first location-based advertising scheme (together with social-mapping and communications company Loopt) and the first alliance with a line-up of leading mobile advertising companies (AdMob, Millennial Media, Rhythm New Media and Third Screen Media) – to get more bang for the ad dollar. (I’ve contacted CBS for a podcast/Q&A and will circle back when I have it.)

In the meantime, let’s look at what Aggregate Knowledge brings to the table, and the interplay of discovery, recommendation and advertising.

Here is an excerpt of the Q&A:

Q: Please walk me through the deal and the user experience.
A: What we’re doing with CBS Mobile is providing another navigational metaphor; something that allows somebody to see relevant content based on what other people are reading, discussing and finding interesting. There’s also a personalization element to this. If users have specifically spent some time on the CBS Mobile WAP site or engaging with CBS Mobile news, then they would see a set of content that is more relevant to what they’ve been looking at in combination with what others are looking at.

Q: Aggregate Knowledge has around 100 other sites in its network, including BusinessWeek and The Los Angeles Times, as well as a number of retail sites. Is the content and ads you deliver going to be around CBS only? Or will these other destinations figure somehow in the equation?

A: We are absolutely bringing the full leverage and power of our network data to bear. We treat the activity that’s happening anonymously in aggregate on CBSNews.com on the WAP site and we’re then looking at that in making our recommendations and suggestions based off all the connections between that content and what people are looking at across our network. We’ll bring all those connections to bear to drive interesting recommendations and content suggestions.

Q: And these destinations cover different kinds of media – such as print/online with BusinessWeek and video/TV with CBS. You can also crate content recommendations that unite platforms.

A: Yes, and you’re right on to the key point. We’re starting with CBS Mobile news. And therefore, you could expect to see some cross-over on the behavior of those anonymous users on our other news sites and BusinessWeek is a great example. And then as we start to roll this out across the other mobile content areas for CBS, you would expect to see cross-over in other areas of interest.

Q: That tells us about the user experience. Now you also have destinations such as Sony and Shoplocal.com in your network. How do the play into the advertising side of this. I mean with all those sites you have inventory to plug any gaps CBS might have. For that matter you could be a kind of ad network in your own right.

A: We take a look at what’s interesting and we either deliver an article or a direct product or a direct brand offer based on current interests. It’s the same targeting mechanism for content that we would use for advertising.

CBS can bring to bear their offers, their content and their inventory, in the context of our discovery window on their site and on mobile phones. But it’s also clear that we could do some matching [of ads across the Aggregate Knowledge network] with CBS content. Maybe people reading a story about high-definition TVs also looked at this particular Sony product and we would also make this match.

I don’t have a concrete example, nor will I have anything in the very short term. I can only say it makes sense that we will be able to help CBS Mobile bring a lot of our advertising inventory into the context of their service and the discovery window operating on their site.

Q: I imagine a benefit would be making a match that makes sense. A big issue in mobile search, for example, is a lack of relevant content to go with the search terms.

A: Yes. This is why we get so excited about this platform; because we think discovery’s perfect for mobile and delivering relevant advertising. If you have one shot at impressing or engaging somebody, you have to really catch their attention. That’s where discovery and serendipity can come in to capture the user’s attention with the offer they didn’t expect to see. But it is effective because our technology tells us it’s the association other users make. It’s based on real buzz and interest, not just algorithms. It’s about the element that gets users to engage or an offer that sticks in their mind to get them to engage later.

On mobile, you’ve got one second to get somebody’s attention and we think discovery is a better metaphor and a better way to get somebody’s attention over search.

Q: What’s next?

A: We are executing on our ‘discovery everywhere’ strategy. And that means delivering discovery beyond the Web. We want to get it into all the different places consumers touch a business and this includes set-top boxes. We’re looking at ways to show consumers interesting content or other things that might be related to their viewing interests.

You’ll also see more from us in the mobile environment. And you’ll continue to see a lot of effort and push around what we call discovery advertising. When we see users are interested in buying something, we want to deliver one of our discovery ads to help convert for one of our advertisers. So those are the three big areas that you would expect to see us focus on in the next quarter or two. It’s about using all our capabilities and connections to deliver the right offer to the user at the moment of intent.

I first met with Aggregate Knowledge during RecSys 2007, a super-cool conference focused on recommendation engines and technologies. I felt it was a great opportunity to meet with companies sure to make a mark on mobile – and I was right. Aggregate Knowledge has since entered into its first mobile trials, and Paul tells me that other companies in the space are lining up. Why? Because mobile search is great if users know what they want, but most times they don’t. And even if they do, inputting their request on a mobile device can be a pain. That’s where discovery and recommendation come in. (Why I’ve consistently come out for tie-ups between companies in the two spaces – and why we’ve seen a string of M&A aimed to accomplish just that…)

I did the interview a few weeks back, but had to hold off on final production because industry conferences and speaking engagements kept me on the road and away from my studio. But sometimes being a little late is a good thing. Case in point: yesterday’s news that BusinessWeek has chosen Aggregate Knowledge to deliver “user-driven content recommendations” on BusinessWeek.com. How will it work? When a reader clicks on a breaking news story on the BusinessWeek site, Aggregate Knowledge will automatically provide user-driven content suggestions in the form of “More from BusinessWeek.” These suggestions are based on what visitors are actually reading across BusinessWeek.com.

Clearly, recommendation – not search – will transform how users find and buy content. The tie-up with BusinessWeek confirms that this is going to be a big thing in the online. I look for it to be huge in mobile – soon.

After all, the personal nature of device and the emergence of social networking are key factors that play in favor of any scheme that harnesses community buzz to bubble up cool content. (In a nutshell, this is what Aggregate Knowledge does and I encourage you to read my recent column for background on the company’s Pique Discovery Network, an offering that – true to the name – is designed from the ground up to pique the consumer’s interest in targeted content they will most likely find useful and most definitely would not have known otherwise existed.) As Paul puts it: “We think that discovery is going to be a line item on the marketer’s budget the way search is. And it’s not that discovery will cannibalize search or search will cannibalize discovery. It’s much more that there are two ways in which people find content.”

Listen to the podcast here. [10:13]

Content syndication and discovery: Paul is convinced that marketers are “going to have to have a discovery budget as well as a search budget.” How would this work and what would a CMO need to consider? Start with syndication and placement. “We take content and we syndicate it across our network. So for example, if you’re a major ticket vendor and you would like your tickets to appear next to news articles about the artists who are mentioned, we will take your ticket inventory and provide it at the right spot with the right marketing message next to the news article about your favorite band; or maybe it’s about the Super Bowl. So that’s an example of a tangible way in which discovery can become that line item to the marketer.”

Social networking: It’s a great fit with mobile and an ace in Aggregate Knowledge’s hand because it tracks buzz. But beware of the hype. As one of the first people to found a social networking company, Paul is in demand for his outspoken and realistic take on the explosion of social networks. “I get the vertically-oriented social network pitch at least once a week. I’m going to be a social network for Evangelical Christians; I’m going to be a social network for people who are over 65…Some of these are going to be very successful and some won’t. But the analogy I use really goes back to the entertainment business. Social networking is a hit-driven business and you’ve either got Britney Spears or Christina Aguilera, Jessica Simpson, or you’ve got nothing. It’s really a winner-takes-all kind of thing.”

Trends that matter: Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo was Paul’s top trend pick long before it was announced. What else does he expect to see in 2008? Ad networks will snap up analytics companies. Core Metrics and Co. have “high multiples related to the fact that they own the data sets to make targeting better….I think that those companies are doing very well but [will] get premium valuations if and when acquired by advertising networks because the value in that targeting data I think will out-strip their current services business.”

Mobile: We know that the company has a mobile trial and we know mobile is high on its radar. No other details, but Paul has promised he will let MSG know his next move first (!) In the meantime, he leaves us with an intriguing trend: Mobile and RSS feeds will become “ideal channels for marketers to get their content discovered in that magical and serendipitous way.”

Regular readers will recall that I reported on the tie-up between white-label mobile search & advertising provider Medio and leading on-device portal (ODP) provider SurfKitchen last week when it made the rounds at Mobile World Congress. I wrote my analysis based on the press release (coverage here), and requested briefings with both companies. Michael “Luni” Libes, Medio Chief Architect and co-founder, responded immediately and Dave Evans, SurfKitchen CTO and widget guru, followed soon after. Thanks to my able assistants, Andrea Henninge and Bev Nicholson, I now have transcripts of both interviews that I can feature here as well as incorporate into other reports/projects in the pipeline.

To be clear, the partnership between Medio and SurfKitchen is neither exclusive nor unique in the industry (in fact, other ODPs tell me they are planning similar partnerships as we speak). However, it is a development that validates the pivotal position of the idle screen in delivering search and, more importantly, advertising. And we all have our eye on that prize…

Search & advertising + ODP is a winning combination that we’ll see more of this year. This is because mobile operators recognize they must move past using ODPs to deliver what Dave calls the list of “hit” services (such as mobile TV, music, content catalogues, and navigation) which offer limited customization but drive significant revenues. The real value is in harnessing ODPs to support a broader range of services and business models around search, advertising and personalization. (For more check out this thought-provoking opinion piece – and Dave has promised to circle back with a guest column for MSG soon.)

Vendor spin aside, Dave makes an important point. ODPs are morphing into a new kind of service creation tool, enabling services – such as search and advertising – to be created by third parties and delivered to the handset.

More on SurfKitchen further down in this post; but first, what’s in this for Medio?

Just as I thought, Luni sees the ODP as another channel to the customer. More specifically, the ODP is “another method to get people to the content and ultimately generate significant advertising revenues.”

This excerpt from our impromptu Q&A says it all:

Q: Is the ODP core to how Medio will present and/or monetize mobile search services?

A: We have been focused on this [kind of] technology for ages. On Verizon [Wireless], our search deployment is an app that does search. It’s been downloaded on the order of 10 million times – not an insignificant application on Verizon.

A trial that is still going on is with Sprint. It’s live and it’s on more handsets now….It’s really like a storefront ODP. It’s the entire vending machine in Sprint; in client form. [In the case of] T-Mobile we took it that one step further. …If you see it in those few steps, you see that [the focus on ODPs] is actually a logical progression.

Q: So where does that leave SurfKitchen? You do your own app and the other approach is to partner with other ODP players?

A: Right. We have a new partner in SurfKitchen. They specialize in getting code on handsets [porting]. We specialize in search. So wherever they’re deploying their ODP; we’re happy to be the search partner for them.

Q: There are other ODP players out there. Are you speaking with them as well?

A: We have talked to others already. We do these partnerships when there’s at least an RFI on the table; so in this case there was something that triggered [the partnership] but I can’t speak of what that is.

I expect you’ll see other [partnership announcements] from us in the next year or so.

Q: Do you have ambitions to be on the active idle screen – to have search be part of the device UI?

A: In most cases it’s actually harder to get something [an app] on an idle screen than to get an app pre-loaded because it requires you to have the code embedded on the phone. It can take years to get to that stage.

We are pursuing that. I can’t comment on which ones we’re talking to. We are talking to idle screen vendors and OEMs, and operators in North America.

Q: Active idle screen is gaining serious traction in Asia.

A: We’re not actively pursuing Asia at this time.

Q: Speaking of Asia; how’s it working out with mInfo? You announced a partnership and things went quiet.

A: It’s going fine and, typically in this industry, things take longer than expected.

Q: Let’s talk about T-Mobile and Yahoo. Just to be clear, is that an impact on Medio.

A: One of our biggest customers swapped out their Web search partner [Google for Yahoo], so that made a couple of waves, but we’re still the on-deck search company.

Q: What about advertising? Has anything changed in the way that you approach publishers or the other way around? You made your CBS announcement not long ago, but I’ve been hearing that you are no longer focused on getting more publishers.

A: No, that’s incorrect. We’re still adding more publishers. We added ABC – so we are live on ABC news – and we’ll be adding more publishers.

Q: What about smaller publishers?

A: I can’t give you any details until later this year. There’s lots of things early this year; there’s lots of things going on. We can say self-service is coming, and we’re happy to talk to any publisher who wants a search box on their site now.

Q: Finally, federated search. Companies have different definitions and approaches. What’s Medio’s view?

A: We’ve been doing this [federated search] since the start. We did federated search on TELUS and we do federated search on T-Mobile USA.

We will be doing something that’s closer to what you probably have in mind in terms of design in federated search. You’ll see that come in a few months.

Q: So how does this compare to JumpTap’s view of federated search?

A: Yes, I saw that interview on your site. ‘We can do it if they ask us to do it’ was the kind of answer you got [from JumpTap]. Whereas… we do it unless they [operators] tell us not to do it.

Our broadest search happens to be in Canada [with TELUS]. In T-Mobile USA, we don’t have the mobile Web turned on – our mobile Web index – because they asked us not to. And at Verizon; it’s currently only downloadable content because that’s all that they have required.

Q: So what do you do in the case of TELUS? What are you federating and how?

A: We federate all results except the Web results. So it’s Yellowpages in Canada and the U.S., as well as results from Amazon. We also bring in weather and flight status from third parties. And when I mean third parties, we actively go out and quote them in real-time and bring back their results.

That to me is the definition of federated. Federated search is actually like what search is, which is everything that’s searchable within that one company’s domain and within their index. Whereas with federated you actually go in and integrate search results from other parties. By that definition; we’ve been doing this forever.

++++++

Likewise, I used the catch-up call with Dave not only to be clear on SurfKitchen’s side of the tie-up with Medio, but also to get an update on SurfKitchen’s progress toward becoming a “next-gen” ODP (and integrating search and advertising every step of the way) since MSG published an exclusive podcast a few months back.

Back then, Dave spelled out SurfKit Phonetop – a suite of applications to deliver zero-click discovery, and a range of analysis tools and framework to enable services to be deployed across a broad range of devices as widgets. The product has since launched and will be shipping in 2Q08. Dave tells me SurfKitchen has a customer “who is the process of implementing that technology, and will be going live in the middle of the year.”

Here is an excerpt of our Q&A:

Q: You talk about being a next-generation ODP. What do you mean by that?
A: Over the last six months we’ve seen a lot of change in the industry; in particular there is a renewed focus on discovery and the user experience. We’re also seeing that the operators are starting to focus on offering a broader range of services to their subscribers and opening up the walled garden to third-party content providers and third-party services.

An ODP, rather than being a fairly closed service focusing on one or two services for the operator, is becoming a platform for the wide range of services that the operator, as well as third parties, can deploy into that ODP.

Q: What is SurfKitchen’s role in this? Luni [from Medio] remarked your value prop revolves very much around your ability to do all the heavy-lifting, the porting.

A: Absolutely. We are the enabler to enable those widgets to be built and run on a wider range of devices and platforms including Symbian, Microsoft, Java, Brew, and Android. We’ll be extending it [to Android].

Trying to create a consistency across devices makes a much more viable market for people who want to develop widgets and deploy them at much lower cost. We all know that the experience on the device is a much better experience than the experience [of] a WAP browser, but it’s expensive to put an application onto a device. So, at the moment, we really see just the high revenue earning services on the phone. With the widget framework you make that effort once, put the widget framework onto the device and then you can launch lots of services on the back of that at a much lower cost and a much shorter time to market.

Q: You have other announcements and I’d like you to connect the dots. SurfKit Home, for example, brings the on-device portal onto the idle screen.

A: Yes, SurfKit Home delivers zero-click access to other services that the subscriber wants to have on their home screen. So, again, this is all about how do we increase the discoverability of services and, along with the widget framework, how do we then make the relevant services easy to find on the phone for the end-user.

The final new piece is our mediation server, which is aimed at providing click stream tracking on the ODP. It can track key presses, page views and how those push back to the server and are then delivered into the operator’s data warehouse. We can close the loop in terms of being able to easily launch a new service, measure how users are using [the service] and then refine that service.

Q: And across all those products, you’re integrating search and advertising?

A: Yes. We’re seeing that search and advertising really is coming together as a single message – single service – that needs to be provided into all the widgets [and] all of the services offered by the operator. Our announcement with JumpTap last year and our announcement with Medio this year are about working with the best of breed search engines and being able to surface that up into the ODP.

Working with those companies means that we can leverage discoverability by having entry search or advertising on the home screen as well as within the widgets.

For example, you might have a restaurant widget that the user can search within and, because the user knows they are in the restaurant widget, you can add additional context so the search terms get the response back from the search engine consumed within the same widget. This keeps the user all the time in this great experience, in this context, and allows for the pushing through of paid-for adverts from restaurants or from entertainment establishments that want to have those eyeballs.

Q: That means more opportunities to show advertising and more context that will likely make those ads more effective and, ultimately, generate more revenue. Is ad-serving or selection part of what you will be doing?

A: We will provide the targeting data, but we will be working with people like Medio, JumpTap and also some of the more dedicated advertising solutions. We’ll provide them with the targeting to receive the campaigns back then surface them into the ODP.

Q: What about AdMob? Last time we spoke you were integrating it into the client.

A: AdMob is very much focusing on the key word advertising, which we are still integrating into the client where the operator requests us.

We see a lot of potential also for the more promotional campaign based banner advertising. We are not yet announcing it, but we are working with one of the league players in that space to provide commercial ads into the client.

That should [produce] a good mix of promotional advertising as well as key word text advertising, and then mapping that into the recommendation engines from Medio provides a broad range of paid-for content, key word advertising and more promotional CPM-based advertising.

Monday: A podcast/briefing with Artilium and a closer look at the company’s MWC announcements and path-breaking approach to presence.

“Been there, done that” was my initial reaction to a service that rewards users when they recommend content to their peers. That’s basic Marketing 101. But in mobile it’s a lot harder to manage, and the virtuous cycle it creates (enabling users to share premium content in order to sell still more content) can pay off for the mobile operators and content companies that get on board. Indeed, next to social networking, viral marketing, which builds on the connections between members to potentially boost commerce, is poised to gain some serious traction in 2008.

Case in point is MoConDi’s opt-in content sharing application MeYou.

During the Mobile World Congress, MoConDi, a mobile entertainment creator and distributor whose customers include Disney, Warner Brothers, Sony Music, Gameloft and Electronic Arts, announced that One Italia, a mobile entertainment and value added service (VAS) provider, signed up to offer the content sharing app (branded Passa Parola) to H3G (or 3 Italy) mobile subscribers in Italy. (The mobile operator counts 7 million subscribers, btw.) Plans are to take the platform to the U.S. this year.

In a nutshell, MeYou offers users rewards (in the form of redeemable points) for content purchases and recommendations. How does the viral marketing part of this work? Typically, users send text messages to recommend cool content to their friends. This recommendation text consists of a message, a download link for the content and a link for MeYou application installation. The application has access to over 5,000 pieces of content via the MoConDi content management and delivery platform.

JT Klepp, MoConDi President, tells me the next step is to replace the free text window with templates users can choose from to spread the word. The idea is to make the one-click content recommendation process even more of a no-brainer for users; but the move is also necessary to also close an unfortunate loophole in the service that let users send text messages to their friends for free. Users were not abusing the service, but could, and that wouldn’t jive with expansion into the U.S. market. (To date three carriers are using the platform, including Vodafone and 3 Italy.)

JT counts just over 1 million users of the service to date, and “about one-fourth are active and buy or recommend content more than once a month.” JT also did the numbers and found that users who downloaded the MeYou app continued to explore and purchase content, generating a 33 percent increase in ARPU over users who didn’t have the client. These observations dovetail with some other stats JT recently announced in a press statement.

To recap:

• 60 percent of MeYou users have purchased mobile content in the past

• 64 percent of users send reco