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Rich applications, location awareness to transform mobile Internet

T-Mobile's new myTouch 3G became available to the public. The smartphone is generating excitement because it represents the potential of the Android platform and the mobile Web.

One of the featured myTouch applications is "Sherpa," developed by Santa Monica-based mobile technology company Geodelic in partnership with T-Mobile. Sherpa is a local discovery application that learns a user's favorite types of locations and preferences over time.

The more it's used, the more it customizes itself to the user's taste, learning their likes and dislikes so it can prioritize recommended and relevant local retailers, restaurants and attractions. Mobile Marketer's Jordan Crook interviewed Geodelic's Founder and CEO, Rahul Sonnad.

Here is what he had to say:

What makes Sherpa different?
By combining a user's location and interests, with other contextual information such as time of day, Sherpa aggregates and presents contextually relevant, location-based information about the real world that surrounds a user at any moment.

Sherpa uses a learning engine called GENIE (Geodelic Engine for Interest Evaluation) that automatically learns a user's favorite locations and lifestyle behavior. If a user eats out more than they shop, it modifies itself and tailors the experience to begin showing more restaurants and less retail stores.

Geodelic's Sherpa represents the next step in the mobile Web -- a Web that goes beyond basic search by combining the power of mobile devices, GPS and the Internet.

What's the strategy behind this application launch?
Geodelic has optimized Sherpa around the myTouch device and experience.

Sherpa will automatically learn a user's preferences and personalize information around the user. The launch provides Geodelic with great visibility which is important in launching an application in an emerging category - local discovery.

Why T-Mobile's myTouch 3G?
Android has gained tremendous momentum over the last several months, and the T-Mobile myTouch is the flagship device for Android in the United States. Plus, it's just a really great user experience.

What challenges will this application address and for whom?
Geodelic's Sherpa application allows users to discover information about their location effortlessly without searching. As such we feel that it benefits a very broad range of consumers.

While there is currently a lot of content related to metropolitan areas and retail experiences, we are rapidly enhancing the application with a broad range of niche content.

How is the application being monetized and promoted?
We feel that local discovery will create tremendous efficiencies for consumers to find goods and services, as well as for businesses to communicate with their customers at their locations. While the initial focus is around the user experience, we feel that as the industry matures over the next two years, ad models analogous to keyword bidding will emerge with a focus on contextual targeting.

We have also become very convinced that next year the idea will be transformative in how companies think about mobile publishing.

Just like the late 90's saw mainstream adoption of Web sites, we will rapidly see mainstream adoption of location-based experiences.

At the end of next year, if you walk into a hotel and your phone doesn't give you contextual info (i.e. what room your meeting is in, what the restaurant specials are and when the gym classes are), you're going to think either your hotel or the phone is broken.

This implementation is really fascinating because the application learns about the user continuously. What do you think this means for mobile marketers and advertisers? Will we see products like this more and more?
A lot of personalization has been tried on the Web with mixed success.

The phone, however, is a very personal device. At Geodelic, we are working to use both aggregate information to improve the experience and anonymous personal information.

For mobile marketers, this means increasing efficiency for getting their message out at the right place, at the right time to the right users. Being able to reach people with a rich marketing experience on mobile devices is a watershed scenario for marketers, and personalization will make this much more appealing to the consumer.

Where do you see mobile taking us in the future?
We are at the beginning of the biggest Internet transformation since the World Wide Web.

Leading this are two complementary trends: 1) Rich mobile applications and 2) Location awareness.

The combination of these is going to create a new kind of Web that is optimized for mobile devices and will in the not-so-distant future surpass keyword search with regards to user traffic.

We call this the "global mobile Web," and this network of information will become dominant on mobile devices.

You might want to look up information a few times a day and that will be a lot of traffic.

On the other hand, having your device offer you information about your local environment and activities and information related to it, will be something that phones continually and automatically do in the future.

And this transformation is going to be the fastest in the history of technology, due to the unbelievable growth curve on these Internet-connected mobile devices.