MSearchGroove

Motorola’s first-ever Innovation Day in Europe was a show-and-tell event of exciting service prototypes that harness personalization to deliver what Andrew Aftelak, Director of Operations and Business Partnerships within Motorola Labs, calls ‘zero-effort’ search.

Listen to the podcast here.

The idea is to understand and, more importantly, predict user preferences from the clues they leave on devices - including mobile phones, set-top boxes, car radios and PCs - and leverage that to deliver seamless access to content.

It’s a tall order but Moto’s MediaNET doesn’t disappoint. The prototype enables a ubiquitous and intuitive approach that will effectively deliver content users like (without asking) across a variety of platforms. The starting point for this convergent content experience is SCREEN3, a technology developed by Moto that provides intuitive access to content from the user’s mobile device. In a nutshell, the technology notes the content the user interacts with and uses this information to push more of the same to the mobile device idle screen. The information is delivered in the form of a ticker of headline information on the home screen. The idea is to learn from the user to increase the relevance of the content and information delivered.

Granted that’s not an entirely new idea, but the way SCREEN3 figures in MediaNET is a perfect fit. A personal device gathers personal information and then feeds this into a system that delivers a personalized bundle of content that can pre-packed or put together by the intelligence in the system. In the demo I saw, users explore this brave new Web 2.0 world by responding first to a news alert on a handset (but it could really be any piece of content). This mobile snippet is fine, but the user decides she wants to see it on TV. The system checks for the associations between the content and then delivers the most relevant to the TV - in the case of this demo it was a news clip from CNN. Ok, now the user wants to move around the home. MediaNET consistently matches the device and the associated content, delivering an audio report to the radio and a website to the PC.

Like I said, the content can be pre-packaged (dare I say even sponsored?). This scenario swings the door wide open for mobile operators, service providers and media brands to get involved (and Aftelak tells me they are lining up to do exactly that but no announcements just yet). All the better if they actually have the digital assets to deliver content across devices purposed for those devices. In the other scenario, the system makes the associations and decides what content is most relevant to the original content the user accessed, and fetches more of the same. Lots of compelling business models could evolve here.

And the best news of all: there is really a business model. Unlike services that just grab content and aggregate it (angering a lot of content and rights owners check out the reaction to Google News-like services), this technology points users to where the content lives. This effectively nips any DRM/copyright concerns in the bud since users still need subscriptions to access the content.

Does personalization in this scheme replace search? Aftelak prefers to think of it as enhancing search to the point that search is no longer necessary. He calls it zero-effort search because it takes place behind-the-scenes based on what the system gathers about our preferences. This approach to search - which isn’t search at all - will be the sustainable business model. It recognizes that the paradigm is shifting from user-pull to content-push and doesn’t try our patience by delivering just any content. It’s the right content to the right users in the right context.

Mobile matters: SCREEN3 is really seen as a seed, because SCREEN3 is a very natural way to get stories out to people in bite-size chunks [so] they can say ‘I’m interested in it.’ That seed then goes back to somewhere and, this is the great thing, it can be anywhere. It can be to a set-top box which has the intelligence to be able to create the bundle. It could go back to a centralised server to a service that does that bundle creation for you. It could go back to a carrier who could identify your demographic.The personalization aspects happen all the way down the line.

More is better: “There’s a concept we have of distributed personalization, distributed profiles because we don’t only ever interact with one device. To be able to leverage that, if you’ve got them all connected with each other, it’s something that is incredibly powerful.”

Who’s next? : Moto operates according to an open innovation model, which means it partners with companies for capabilities. Aftelak can’t name names, but Moto is moving full-speed ahead to make sure it’s aligned with the search engine and recommendation engine providers to ultimately enable social recommendations and facilitate social networks. “My vision for social networking is something that’s a lot more distributed, where it’s the ecosystem of personal devices, your home-based devices and to a certain extent the network devices, that allow you to share information within a fairly small sort of group of people. My real vision for this is what happens when that information becomes distributed and it’s more about how you manage the group and the group’s content, and the group’s information and information which is just there because the group exists.”

• Posted in
• Recommendation, Personalization, Mobile Content, Podcasts

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