Mining Wireless Business Intelligence

Tracing the tracks of users’ wireless activity can help businesses find out which m-commerce applications will work best in the marketplace. Analytics provider digiMine introduced its Wireless Business Intelligence (WBI) service in mid-June, providing wireless Internet content providers, carriers, and service providers with tools for analyzing mobile Internet usage.

digiMine WBI graphs the activity of wireless Web services.

“You can get hourly activity and daily activity,” says Nick Besbeas, vice president and co-founder of digiMine. “We give the user the ability to get views of all users and repeat users. Each tool represents an opportunity for them to get a report on what’s going on so they can build out their successful services further.”The digiMine WBI service provides a hosted data warehouse that can be mined to examine how subscribers are actually using wireless services, identifying customer segments, content consumption patterns, and transaction trends. The data warehouse stores gateway log files and content server log files that record how subscribers are using their wireless devices and accessing content. WBI provides Web-based reports on which content and services are the most popular, which businesses can view through a Web browser.

Besbeas claims that digiMine has already signed up with a major carrier, although he declined to identify which one. The company is also involved with a couple of other carriers in pilot tests.

Its reports track gateway activity, and identify which microbrowsers, such as Nokia’s or Openwave’s, are being used. They also keep tabs on what kinds of transactions and content appeal most to subscribers. For companies that have both wired and wireless Internet sites, the reports contrast how the sites are being used. DigiMine’s business intelligence technology is being used by J Crew and GetImages for their wired Web sites.

“Most companies really struggle in the effort to put data together in a meaningful way,” says Besbeas. “We have a hosted service and we manage the data warehouse and apply sophisticated data mining and analytics to get insight about what’s going on in the business.”

DigiMine is also partnering with Telephia to provide business intelligence for the Telephia Consumer Measurement Service, which can be used by carriers to manage their wireless Internet data files.

The company also plans to begin implementing location-based technology to track users’ whereabouts and deliver advertising to them. But that could provide a little too much information to the carriers and m-commerce service providers about their customers’ tastes.

By: Michael Cohn

Source: Internet World / PDF

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