Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
One thing you may not know about the TiVo personal video recorded - due to hit our shores early next year - is that it knows what you like to watch. This is not always a good thing.
The TiVo uses details of the programmes you record to build up a profile of your tastes and uses this to suggest to you programmes it thinks you might like. Seven Network has exclusive rights to the TiVo in Australia and it will be marketed by VoIP service provider, Engin, in which Seven has a 34 percent share. The TiVo has been on the market in the US for some years and according to Phil Dobbie, Engin's chief marketing officer, one male US TiVo customer was not impressed with the conclusions his TiVo was coming to on the basis of his viewing habits: "It thought he was Gay, because he was watching a lot of programmes about men."
Not too happy with being thus pigeon-holed by his TiVo, this customer decided to induce a shift in its perception by recording lots of good macho stuff - war, crime, violence and the like. That worked, after his fashion: his TiVo decided he was definitely not gay, but it didn't pick him as being anywhere close to a sensitive new age guy either.
We're probably all familiar with web sites that, to some extent, offer us content that they think we will want based on the content we have previously chosen. According to ninemsn CEO, Tony Fauré, this personalisation will becoming increasingly prevalent in the delivery of online services. But despite all the talk of Web 2.0, interactivity and end user involvement in the web, we won't be busy personalising all our online content services to our own liking.
Speaking at a Trans-Tasman Business Circle lunch in Sydney this week, Fauré said: "[A] big change is how much media is becoming personal: how are we going to enable people to consume media in a way that is very personal."
However given the option of customising their online experience to their personal tastes, few customers will take it. Fauré said ninemsn had a feature 'myninemsn' that gave users a range of personalisation options, but it was used by less than two percent of customers.
"I as a consumer want my online products to be personal but I don't want to have to do the work to make them personal. So the media has to do the work because the vast majority of consumers don't want to do it...As media companies we have to get our heads around how do we infer what a consumer wants: how do we put products in front of them and get them to choose and then use that information to offer them a better choice next time."
Getting that personalisation down to a fine art so that they don't put consumers offside with inappropriate content could be what sets future winners in the online world apart. How that information gets used without encroaching on individual privacy will be another matter.
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
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