Amethon launches viral content tracking on mobiles

Stan Beer
Monday, 10 October 2005 11:00

Your IT - Mobility

Australian mobile applications developer, Amethon Solutions has launched what it claims is a world’s first content fingerprinting technology that the company says will enable monitoring, analysing and monetising peer content on mobile phones.

The first use of the Amethon’s patent pending content fingerprinting technology is with FriendsWhoForward, which has just been announced as the Australian winner of the Ericsson Frontier competition. The FriendsWhoForward application embraces the concept of peer generated content where users make content such as pictures, music clips, mini movies or jokes to suit their own individual tastes.

Content fingerprinting is designed to be implemented by the mobile carriers, to drive peer driven content and to introduce a radical business model that benefits both the carrier and the person originating content. Amethon Solutions CEO, Martin Strommer said, “The content fingerprinting technology changes the value chain for mobile content, by introducing incentives and rewards for original content. It’s about encouraging peer to peer (P2P) content. P2P content is not well understood even though we estimate that it generates up to 90 percent of operator traffic, but currently there is no way of tracking it, or how much revenue it generates.”

Amethon Solutions content fingerprinting product manager, James Cleary said, “Put simply, the technology tracks content across the network. The FriendsWhoForward application allows a user who has created some interesting content – such as a funny video clip – to register it by sending it to an operator's short code where it is tagged and tracked. The user then sends the content off to their friends, who also forward it on just like a normal message. The operator can then count the number of times the content is forwarded between more and more subscribers.”

Amethon will shortly be launching a trial of the content fingerprinting technology with at least one network operator in Australia, and one in Asia. According to Amethon, the technology is deployed as a simple appliance into the operator’s network, so is simple to integrate.