@ Mobile Content World: Personalizing Sites By Knowing The User

It is amazing that this is a talk being given in 2007. Our software has been doing this since 2001 and maybe, just maybe people are ready for what we’ve been doing for years.

If you’re a mobile content provider and you’re looking for mobile personalization as described below, contact me.

@ Mobile Content World: Personalizing Sites By Knowing The User: “

Jennifer Wilson, managing director of HWW, gave a very good talk on personalizing mobile content sites (WAP, portals, whatever). She started by describing an internal checklist adopted by Ericsson to identify a ‘perfect user experience’, the 0-1-2-3 rule:

–0 or no required user behavioural changes

–1 log on, point of entry

–2 sec response time

–3 no more than three clicks away

Wilson said that in order to do this you really need to know the user, and that’s best achieved by carriers and content providers working together. The carriers know who the customer is, some of their spending habits, whether they’re post- or pre-paid, and so on. The content provider knows the customers behaviour on its site, their interests, what they look at and what drives them. ‘Together it’s a rich psycho-demographic profile of actual behaviour, mapped against type for recommendation of unused content types,’ said Wilson.

The best form of personalization is to restructure the site based on the history of the user. For example, if someone constantly goes to the entertainment section of a news site and ignores news and sports, the site should move entertainment to the top of the list. Two caveats—the site is restructured but all the information is still available, nothing is eliminated. Also, the site should take into account consistent behaviour over a period of time and not a single action. There also needs to be ways to let people know what their friends are doing, and things they have discovered that I may be interested in.

(Via MocoNews.net.)

My lame WWDC predictions…

Well WWDC surely didn’t pan out for my prediction. Oh well, guess I’ll retire from attempting to be an Apple prognosticator.

However, it is interesting to pickup on what happened with the lack of a reasonable SDK for iPhone. I don’t necessarily mind the lack of a native SDK but honestly, to pick a network centric application development model and then equip the iPhone with the lamest data communications capabilities is just downright moronic.

I have more on this subject and will post later this evening when I have a bit more time to expound.

June predictions at WWDC

Quite a number of people are speculating what the major announcements at the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference might be…. well here is my prediction.

I just finished watching the historic Bill Gates – Steve Jobs discussion from D: All Things Digital and it shed a little light on what might be coming. There has been a lot of exposure in the past couple months about multi-touch and it’s no secret that the iPhone is going to be the first Apple device to support it and Apple also owns a patent.

It’s also interesting that at the D: conference that Microsoft introduces Surface and that an event sponsor HP has a working example on display.

If you watch the VoD of the interview with Bill and Steve (vid number 5 has the relevant piece) where Walt asks about interface evolution and when are we actually going to see a move away from the traditional “windowed” interface. Bill starts to answer the question and Steve looks like the cat that ate the canary.

I predict that the “secret innovations” that Apple has been holding back on in the early Leopard releases is full support for multi-touch. Remember that the iPhone is an OSX device and it’s operational and fully integrated with multi-touch. The catch here is that the hardware has to support it…. and here is the other potential major announcement…. the hardware introductions made at WWDC will have multi-touch capable screens integrated. I will also wager a guess that Apple might finally create a new Finder based on these innovations. I doubt the new multi-touch interface will replace the old interface outright but that Apple might do something like allow for the alternate interface through the same mechanisms that it invokes Expose, Spaces and Dashboard.

We’ll see how this pans out in the coming weeks. Stay tuned…. and buy Apple stock. ;-)

Proud Dad moment, redux

Sitting quietly at my desk when the phone rings. I answer in the best professional voice I can when shrills and shreeks explode out of the earpiece. Kristina, my middle daughter was accepted at UCLA and Berkley next year. She will be choosing UCLA and joining her sister Amanda.

I am very proud of her achievements and she will be a tremendous asset to the Bruin family.

ucla.gif

Happy Birthday, Rebekka




Happy Birthday, Rebekka

Originally uploaded by theagent.

Happy 15th birthday sweetheart… you’re so beautiful.

Author

Jerry has been involved in the enterprise software industry as a principal and consultant for more than 25 years. His clients have included Hughes Aircraft, Time Warner, Sun Microsystems, NeXT Computer, and Apple Computer. In 1993 he founded Flashpoint Systems, a leader in Internet and Intranet application development. Following Flashpoint System’s 1995 merger with a leading systems integrator, he served as CTO, directing product research and development. He has been a visionary leader in the development of Internet-based enterprise business applications. In 1998, Jerry and Simon Arkell founded VERSIFI, Inc. The company’s initial product was considered the world’s leading technology in the area of enterprise content management by Gartner Group. They sold the company in 2000 for 48M to a European content management company funded by The Carlyle Group. In 2003, VERSIFI Technologies was reconstituted and acquired AdaptiveInfo.com, the leader in predictive content delivery to wireless devices using Bayesian Algorithms. In 2008, he co-founded Perssonas, Inc. Perssonas is a social network based hyper-aggregator with a focus in delivering branded, content rich experiences for the entertainment industry and major brands worldwide.

  • Dilapidus: Well.. mine is hooked up to a dell 24.. but beleive me .. it’s close enough for coding :-)
  • bcrisler: WICKED! Congrats to Rebekka!
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  • amabuddy: Hi Jerry, I know this is a very old post, but I wanted to let you know that we took your suggestion and...
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