Artilium

Friday, July 03, 2009

Life Blogging

Okay so what do we mean by life blogging?  We see this as keeping a record of your life in the form of a blog, a bit like a diary but which can be published and shared through the Internet. Extending this to an automatic Life Blog we now consider something that automatically records what you do each day and publishes it for you.  Nokia has already used the name Lifeblog to describe an application on their smartphones which keeps an automatic record of your messages and media content in chronological order.

So an Auto Life Blog writes…

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Friday, June 26, 2009

Measuring Relevance in Mobile Advertising

The latest mobile advertising figures show revenue of £6 billion by 2014 (i). This has taken the current economic conditions into consideration and so these are quite conservative compared with some previous figures. However, this is still predicted to be a massive market and is experiencing 38% growth in comparison with a decline in other advertising sectors. The big question is no longer, will we accept mobile ads. Many people already regularly receive mobile adverts and the mobile advertising industry is definitely real and growing. The new questions are more about how they should be delivered and how can they…

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Monday, June 15, 2009

Mobile Social Networking

Social networking on the Internet has become massive, Facebook alone has over 200 million active users and the average user has 120 connections to friends (i)! It appears everyone and their granny is using it and the commercial value is being widely recognised. However, it has been difficult to monetize in its current form and this is a problem when so much investment has been made in the enabling technologies and on hosting the systems.

If we now consider mobile social networking and what the difference is between this and “fixed” social networking. Obviously the difference is mobility,…

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Monday, June 08, 2009

The Need for Continuous Location Technology

There are numerous location technologies available for mobile phone location. It is convenient to consider the following 3 categories.

1. GPS
2. Cell-ID
3. Handset measurements

The GPS receivers built into handsets tend to give accurate location data assuming that the GPS is switched on, that it has clear visibility of the sky, and that the receiver has managed to synchronise. Of course the problem with GPS is that you must have good visibility of the sky which rules out indoor operation in many cases, then you must allow time for the…

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Tuesday, June 02, 2009

Behavioural Processing and the Semantic Web

The dream of the Semantic Web is to have machines which can answer arbitrary questions. This is based on Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of the Web as a universal medium for knowledge exchange. One of the applications usually proposed for the Semantic Web is an intelligent search engine – which provides a UI where you can ask questions, such as “When did Elvis Presley get married?” and it would answer “1st May 1967”.

One of the key advantages of the Semantic Web concept is that data is organised in a way that can be read and more importantly,…

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Monday, May 25, 2009

Do I know who you are?

Previous blogs have discussed the need for explicit subscriber opt-ins when personal data obtained within the mobile network is being used. However, it can be useful to use grouped subscriber data for gathering intelligence about subscriber behavior in general. Essentially this helps in understanding the subscriber’s needs and enables services to be optimized for customers in general. This data can be grouped (or bulked) in a number of ways often with the groupings based on subscribers demographic, subscriber location and time.

To use this type of bulked data you would assume that the subscriber does not need to…

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Friday, May 15, 2009

Would you like ads with that?

The probable answer to that question is “no”, but let’s consider mobile advertising from another perspective. We all consume media content and we are all exposed to advertising as a result, be it radio, TV, cinema, newspapers, magazines or the Internet. We accept this position because the advertising subsidises the cost of the content or even makes it free. The adverts themselves can also be relevant, entertaining and even useful.

In mobile advertising the way the advert is delivered is important. In most types of media the advertising is adjacent to the content and if you are not…

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Thursday, May 07, 2009

I’m on the train!

How often have you observed someone answering their phone on the train and announce “I‘m on the train” ? Clearly this is in response to the caller’s question “Where are you?”. It is often followed by an elaboration such as “I am on my way to Edinburgh”. What is interesting about this dialogue is that the response to a question about where someone is, is answered by providing information about the person’s context and not their physical location.

Imagine this dialogue: “Where are you?”, “I am located at 56.89˚ North 3.38˚ West”.

Not very useful is…

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Monday, May 04, 2009

Let the subscriber decide

There has been a recent storm over Phorm! (i) Apparently BT had been testing Phorm, a behavioural advertising service, on their broadband network without the consent of users. Phorm claimed that its technology was “fully compliant with UK legislation and relevant EU directives”. However, opinions differ. The EC started legal action over this service. The problem centres on whether the customers have given consent to have their personal data used by an advertising system.

The clear solution for this type of problem is ensuring that the customer consent is given and that they are aware of how their…

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