PODCAST: Right Here, Right Now; Will Mobile Personalization & Mash-Ups Deliver Us ‘Digital Sixth Sense’? » mobilegroove

In brief: Will recommendations from our significant others help us navigate the content deluge? This post draws from provocative statements about our future and the pivotal role of personalization in our everyday lives made by Andrew Gilbert, EVP, President QIS and Qualcomm Europe, and a podcast interview with Colm Healy, Vice President of EMEA Services for Qualcomm Internet Services (QIS) and General Manager of Xiam Technologies.

Regular readers will recall that I have been tracking personalization and recommendation in mobile since the start. It began with my industry-first report on the topic and continues in my current projects for GigaOM PRO. In many ways recommendation is much greater opportunity than mobile search because it’s not about giving people what they are looking for in the first place. It’s about surfacing new options for customers, helping them get over the paralysis of endless choice and creating a compelling and dynamic experience they’ll want to come back to.

In other words, it’s about selling more digital stuff and getting closer to your customer.

CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE

Speaking at Open Mobile Summit last week in London, Andrew Gilbert, EVP, President QIS and Qualcomm Europe, revealed that his company’s internal research shows mobile users who normally download one application a month, download five apps a months if they receive recommendations that are relevant to them.

As Andrew put it: “This means we need to better understand what our customers want. We have been doing this in sales for years, but now we have access to more information that allows us to better analyze the needs and make decisions on what to recommend so that customers can decide what they want to do.”

Put another way, it’s not about communications. It’s about tapping communications and social networks to turbo-charge services and deliver context-relevant content. “We are now working on recommendation engines to predict what you are interested in. Social commerce where you tap into your social networks to provide help and advice for purchases, holiday destinations, places to eat or locations to visit.”

All this paves the way for what Andrew calls the “next phase of Information Access.” In this phase of Connected Intelligence– which we are about to enter, by the way – things are connected and the information these things collect or monitor is then made available to us in an variety of ways.

DIGITAL SIXTH SENSE

At the same time we are rapidly moving from search (looking for stuff we know we want) to discovery (wanting services to suggest and deliver stuff for our consideration).

Andrew calls the result of this mash-up the Digital Sixth Sense. A way to think of it: it’s your “invisible friend who helps you out.” It tells you things before you even thought you needed the information.

Another part of this mash-up is the increasing role of our social circle in the scheme of things. “People will define what information they want to share with close friends. We will also rely more on our friends and our friends’ friends for help in our decision making.” Beyond that, our smartphones will help us make even smarter decisions. “Apps will help you decide where to buy clothes that you are interested in, what restaurants your friends have recommended and what interesting places to visit.”

INTERVIEW WITH COLM HEALY

A big part of this vision – and the capabilities that power Qualcomm’s aptly titled “relevance engine” — come via its acquisition of Xiam Technologies. I caught up with Colm Healy, Vice President of EMEA Services for Qualcomm Internet Services (QIS) and General Manager of Xiam Technologies, for his views on what personalization is – and what it isn’t – and what it can deliver.

Among the highlights:

GETTING PERSONAL: “To me personalization is really about helping people to discover more easily stuff that’s going to enrich their lives, entertain them and make them more productive. A large part of that is actually filtering out the stuff that isn’t relevant to them.” In Colm’s view, personalization is also about us taking control to ensure we see what we want. “But it’s also about somebody, an assistant in the cloud, who’s actually working out — based on what you have told us about yourself or what you’ve shown interest in before — what’s going to really excite you.”

BUSINESS VALUE: There are two ways to see and measure this. One is the enhanced user experience that it delivers. “We see that people who engage with, say, an app store that is personalized, come back more often. They spend more time on it, and they find it just a better experience…. So, that enhanced user experience is the foundation and cornerstone of any other business objective you want to achieve.” In addition, it’s a way mobile operators can differentiate themselves (and their app stores) from the shopping experience offered by Apple or Android, for example. “By using the kind of technology we offer, our customers have increased the likelihood of people to actually respond to an offer by three to four times, and even higher in some cases, and that, in turn, leads to being more engaged with the service.”

SOCIAL MATTERS: The next wave is about people connecting with people to make decisions – what Colm calls social discovery. So we will find out what we want to do, buy or experience based on what our peers (or the groups of people most like us) like. “Frankly, in many ways, the app store experience is almost going to become the last leg, where you simply pay for whatever you’re looking to download.”

MY TAKE

The innovation is clearly going to be in personalization and recommendation – and companies like Qualcomm have collected the capabilities that will allow it to play a major role. Mobile search (speaking here about universal search – not cool stuff coming out of mobile search companies on the fringe) will be more about the nuts and bolts, getting the destinations we want to do what we want. But how will we know what we want in the first place? Colm’s vision of social discovery is perfectly aligned with our current behavior. The rise of social networks and their impact on all we do (from using Twitter to replace our RRS to consulting communities for the best X (music, restaurant, apps — you name it!) are proof-positive that we discover cool stuff by asking our significant others. Clay Shirky correctly reminds us that the future is all about the filter. Personalization technology is one way to cut down the clutter and potentially boost revenue for the companies that give us what we want – even before we ask for it.

LISTEN TO THE PODCAST HERE. [10:22]

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In part two of this series (June 16th) Colm and I explore the cloud, fragmentation and what all this means to developers, retailers and companies trying to make money on the mobile Web.

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

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010 at 3:38 pm and is filed under Content Discovery, Mobile Research, Mobile Search, Mobile Social Media, Personalization, Podcasts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.