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Introduction

The goal of mobile operators is to increasingly make their service offerings more personalized towards their customers. This movement is led by the need to differentiate products against fierce competition while driving improved revenue per unit customer.

Research

Wholesale Mobile Report

Secrets of MVNO Success

Enabling Technologies

Most of the emphasis on personalized services today is placed on mobile data services enabled by technologies such as GPRS. However, there are other enabling technologies that are fundamental to enabling personalization itself. The following technologies are not applications themselves, but rather enable applications to be personalized.

Personal Profiling

This is simply the use of databases and directories to store personal preference information with technologies such as LDAP being key for access to the information.

Intelligent Agents

Intelligent agent technology provides a mechanism for information systems to act on behalf of their users. Specifically, intelligent agents can be programmed to search, acquire, and store information on behalf of the wants and needs of users. They may be used for everything from finding the best sale on a consumer item to watching who is querying the subscriber's profile information, thereby acting as a security agent.

Personal Area Networks

The ability to create a PAN is crucial to establishing personalization in mobile data applications for use in various applications including wireless mobile commerce. PANs also establish the ability to enable certain presence and location services for voice and data applications.

Presence and Location

Closely related, presence and location technologies are enablers of personalized services based on the spatial orientation of the user.

Presence and availability technologies enable the system to determine when the user is in a certain locale and whether the user is available to engage in certain activities.

Location technologies provide even more precise location information, enabling the system to better interact with applications and personal profiles to deliver very targeted services.

Presence systems can enable location systems to work even better than they would by themselves by first approximating the location of a user and feeding this information to profiles to determine if better location information is necessary.

Applications

Personalization enables advanced, customized services such as alerts, targeted advertising and games, dramatically improved mobile messaging and others. One of the fundamental improvements brought by personalization technology (in conjunction with mobile data technologies) is the ability to provide various push-based applications in which the network autonomously (e.g. no manual, on-demand user interaction) determines whether to push services toward the user. Services may include content, information, and notification of events.