Why Personalization Could Be THE 2010 Megatrend; Welcoming MSG Supporter Xiam Technologies
The explosion in app stores and off-portal browsing are changing all the rules, pushing content discovery (and the search for solutions to make finding stuff easier) to the top of the agenda. This came across in my own on-going research (dating back to 2005) and the industry-first report I wrote on the topic at the time, aptly titled Mobile Search & Content Discovery.
Back then content owners and mobile operators alike complained about content discovery shortcomings, ones that no mobile search services could solve for a myriad of reasons I outlined during my recent mobile search masterclass.
Fast forward to (almost) 2010, and it’s shaping up to be an exciting time indeed, with recommenders (finally) taking center stage. Industry interest is high and this has prompted mobile operators to issue RFIs/RFQs for recommender systems as they ramp up to tackle discoverability issues in their own app stores.
VISIONMOBILE ANALYSIS
A welcome confirmation of the pivotal role of recommenders comes from Andreas Constantinou, my esteemed associate at VisionMobile. His must-read post provides us a helpful overview of the recommendations market and a SWOT analysis of a selection of the players that matter most. As Andreas puts it: “The market of recommendations solutions is one of the most underhyped in the mobile industry. What started as ‘people who bought this also bought that’ has found its way into 10s of operator portals, not to mention 1,000s of mobile websites.”
What is the business value of recommenders?
It’s a question I address in my upcoming report. (My publisher just pushed the date closer to Mobile World Congress, by the way, so I repeat my open invitation to companies in this space to contact me for a briefing.)
MAKE IT EASY
It’s also a topic Colm Healy — CEO of Xiam Technologies, a Qualcomm subsidiary providing discovery and recommendations solutions to mobile operators — will examine in a series of thought leadership contributions on MSG beginning later this week.
The first in the series will outline the key takeaways of the company’s white paper, titled Make It Easy For Me: 3 Ways Operators Can Use Personalization To Give Customers What They Want On The Mobile Internet. You can also download this white paper by clicking on the box ad in the right-hand sidebar.
Xiam is the first in a string of MSG’s new line-up of sponsors and supporters, companies that recognize the importance of thought leadership and MSG’s position in the marketplace as a premiere thinking space. I’ll have more names to announce in the next weeks, as well as additions to MSG’s growing portfolio of marketing and media solutions. In the meantime — welcome Colm (and a special thanks to Martin Clancy, Xiam Marketing Manager).
Tags: Content Discovery, discoverability, Recommendation, recommenders, Xiam
December 16th, 2009 at 3:40 pm
We built the Newstogram platform to understand each user’s individual interests in news content and dynamically personalize content recommendations for them. We’re already deployed on websites and we’re talking to different mobile application developers about deploying it for mobile.