It’s not official - yet, but Fast Search & Transfer has pre-briefed me on the details of an announcement set to hit the wires mid-week. The company, which snapped up AgentArts, a recommendation engine provider, earlier this year, is set to launch an enhanced FAST Active Mobile product suite. (The enhancement, of course, is personalized recommendation.)My thanks to Ryan Jones, FAST’s Director of Telecom & Media Product Marketing, who just stepped into the role of Mr. Mobile at FAST, succeeding Mike Brady. In an exclusive podcast interview, Ryan gave me the inside track on the new product and a valuable update on the joint venture with Rakuten. (The two companies tied up to develop and provide mobile search and advertising services – news we reported here.)

I’ll circle back on Monday – for sure – with the edited podcast. Right now I have to tie up loose ends before an early flight to Boston. (A pleasant surprise indeed: Looks like I’ll have the chance sooner than I thought to meet Ryan in person during Mobile Internet World. I’m on the same roundtable as FAST – along with Eran Wyler, Founder and CEO, InfoGin, and Brendan Benzing, VP Mobile Search and Marketing, InfoSpace.)

In the meantime, allow me to share a few of the podcast highlights.

PERSONALIZED RECOMMENDATIONS: There are three ways that our recommendations engines work. First, we can connect products to products. So if a user has looked at a product, we can recommend them up to that. Second, we can connect behaviors to products or other behaviors…We can even add in other behavioral characteristics, like your geography or the time of day, and we can make recommendations using those components. And the third, we can make recommendations based on a community that you’re a part of. …Not only can we use the community that you’re a part of to recommend products, but we can use products you’ve looked at to pair you up with other users in a community. And we think that’s revolutionary; we call that “social circles.”

USER CONTROL: We’re just at the beginning of all the different bells and whistles we can turn on with FAST recommendations. So the first step, when you’re thinking about integrating community input into a recommendations engine, is simply comparing a group that a user has associated themselves with, with the product selections or user behaviors of other members of that group. But, as we get more and more sophisticated, we can allow the carrier or the content owner to provide an interface to the consumer so the consumer has the choice of what specific attributes they want to align themselves with….There’s lots of different ways that a carrier can tune the recommendations engine, or enable the user to tune that recommendations engine, to get different results.

ROLLOUT PLANS: The vast majority will either buy both as a package or add the recommendations on top of it for search offering. They really are designed to work together….You can use our search technology to federate out the different content sources that a stand-alone recommendations engine wouldn’t be able to access. And so, by combining the search with the recommendations, you can make the recommendations much more powerful and access content that it couldn’t access on its own.

FEDERATED RESULTS: It allows the carrier to provide that choice to users, just as you said, and then build recommendations across that choice of content if the carrier so chooses. But perhaps even more importantly than that, it gives the carrier the control to position different search results in different ways so that they can manage the experience for the user, increasing user satisfaction and stickiness to their services. … We’re excited that Motricity and InfoSpace have gotten together. We think it gives us a platform to deliver search to the marketplace that’s much stronger than it’s ever been before.

RAKUTEN: We’ve made a lot of progress and we have an announcement coming within the next two weeks about a launch taking place with Rakuten. …Japan is one of the most sophisticated areas for mobile use and it gives us a ‘test bed’ in which to try out some very sophisticated offerings. So the arrangement with Rakuten allows us to get access to thousands of merchants and use things like recommendations; use things like Ad Momentum (FAST’S keyword advertising solution with more than 30 online and mobile advertising clients) to start to build the worlds biggest storefront or, in this case, Japan’s biggest mobile storefront, and that’s something we think we can replicate worldwide.

Off-line, Ryan confirmed some key points regarding the Rakuten joint venture:

• The BETA launch is slated for December

• The joint venture will approach Japanese mobile operators – but, more importantly, it will provide the basis for a mobile search and advertising portal that has its own brand and own differentiation.

• Federated advertising is high on the agenda (in Japan and elsewhere), so watch this space…

This entry was posted on Monday, November 12th, 2007 at 6:55 pm and is filed under Mobile Advertising, Mobile Search, Mobile Social Networking, Recommendation. 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.