MSearchGroove

by Peggy Ann Salz

In brief: Back with Part 2 in this three-part podcast series looking at the business value of recommendation and personalization. Colm Healy — Vice President of EMEA Services for Qualcomm Internet Services and General Manager of Xiam Technologies – discuses the issues related to fragmentation and where personalization fits in to drive mobile commerce (for paid apps) and user acceptance (for ad-supported apps).

Fragmentation, distribution, monetization. These are the headaches that plague developers everywhere. It’s all about reaching an audience of people who are mostly likely to appreciate and buy their apps. Or, if the model is ad-funded, it’s about an approach linked to advertising that people will accept. In both scenarios, the ability to bubble up apps we appreciate – or encourage us to discover the wealth of apps at our finger tips – is at the foundation of a sound and scalable business model.

This is the view of an increasing number of companies focused on connecting the dots in our browsing and purchasing patterns to enhance customer profiles and – ultimately – suggest apps and stuff we will likelydownload, buy and recommend to our friends.

In this podcast Colm Healy — Vice President of EMEA Services for Qualcomm Internet Services, General Manager of Xiam Technologies, and a frequent columnist/contributor on MSG – talks about the link between personalization and app stores. We also discuss a range of related topics including the outlook for HTML5, the challenges to the emerging app ecosystem and the potential role of the Wholesale Applications Community (WAC) in the scheme of things. By way of background, WAC brings together 24 mobile operators in a community to create an eco system for the development and distribution of mobile and internet applications irrespective of hardware device or software technology.

Among the highlights:

FRAGMENTATION & FRUSTRATION: Colm doesn’t have all the apps he wants on his device. They’re just not available for his Android phone – and that’s a shortcoming that tries his patience. His view: it’s annoying to him and to all users everywhere. “End-users want to be able to get the content they love, to engage the brands that they really find useful. If the industry fails to be able to allow them to get to that, then that’s a real missed opportunity by the industry.” The root problem is fragmentation – but HTML5 is shaping up to solve this. The new standard “brings the experience of a Web page closer to the experience of running a native application.” Overall the technology will “make the browser, which is effectively ubiquitous platform that everybody supports, more powerfuland more like the kind of experience that people want on their phones.”

LIGHTWEIGHT APPS: Where HTML5 and other developments come together to pay off the most is what Colm calls lightweight apps. “If you’re trying to run a high-end game, you’re absolutely going to want to run it natively on the phone and frankly it’s very difficult for you to get away from the fragmentation there. Just as in the console game world, there’s a range of platforms you have to address, in the mobile game world the same is going to apply.” The solution – and the excitement – is around lightweight apps. “HTML5 offers the promise of being able to run all of these across multiple different devices with a single code base.”

WAC: There is a great deal of potential. But there are also challenges. “The key people, the people who ultimately decide what technologies end up on the handset, are the handset manufacturers and the WAC is clearly an operator-driven initiative. So, success will be down (1) to their ability to work together for a standard, which I think is something very achievable and (2), to quickly have that adopted by handset – supported widely by handset manufacturers, which I think is more of a challenge.

RETAIL & ADVERTISING: Personalization sits at the heart of a good mobile retail experience. “In my view is there’s a bit of a nuclear arms race going on in terms of the number of applications that a particular platform has. Frankly, for most end users, there are a finite number of applications. There’s a fixed or finite size as to what an application developer eco system needs to be for it to be found useful and enriching….So, once you get to a couple of thousand apps, you absolutely need personalization.” It matches people with apps they want and oils the whole retail experience. “This whole nuclear arms race will come to a bit of an end and it will become much more about how engaged are users with the particular retail experience.” Advertising is also a fit. “Instead of you having to advertise to 2 million people to get the 10,000 that you are likely to respond to you, you can get to those 10,000 people. It directly lowers the barriers to entry, the barriers to profit. The real issue here is [about] the barriers to a sustainable business model for the content developer.”

Editor’s note: Colm and I will be back on June 30th. The topic of the third and final part of this podcast series: Is discovery the new search?