Companies looking to improve their wireless Internet offerings are missing out on some valuable information-information that’s right under their noses, said Nick Besbeas, executive vice president of sales and marketing for DigiMine Inc.
That information involves what mobile Internet users are actually doing-where they’re going, what they’re looking at and how they’re interacting with their device. Wireless carriers, content providers and mobile Internet service providers “are not taking advantage of that data to its full potential,” Besbeas said.
And that’s where DigiMine comes in.
DigiMine (which is not a cartoon) offers data-mining services, which DigiMine said can help companies better understand their customer base. The information is gleaned through recording what users look at and how they look at it. DigiMine takes that information, rolls it up and creates analysis the company said can define customer segments, content usage patterns and transaction trends.
Besbeas said the strategy comes from the direct-marketing business, which exhaustively studies customer trends and consumer segments in order to send targeted products and services to the people who would most likely buy them.
“If it’s worth investing, it’s worth measuring,” Besbeas said.
DigiMine was formed a year-and-a-half ago by three Microsoft Corp. employees in distinctly different fields: data mining, data warehouse operations and direct marketing. The three got together to offer the company’s customer tracking services to dot-com companies. Now DigiMine employees number more than 100, and today the company is announcing its move into the wireless space.
“Wireless Business Intelligence is a product that we’re launching now aimed at carriers and content and service providers in the wireless world,” Besbeas said.
DigiMine’s WBI product allows wireless companies to manage, analyze and act on mobile Internet usage data generated by subscriber activity, the company said. WBI provides a secure, hosted data warehouse to collect gateway log files and content server log files. DigiMine analyzes the information to create reports detailing subscriber groups with common demographics and behavior for targeted content and marketing.
“What we can tell them (wireless companies) is what content people are seeking out,” Besbeas said. “That just enables them more and more to focus on what people are interested in.”
Understanding what is and what is not popular might seem easy to determine, but Besbeas said it’s more complicated than it sounds. Wireless Web users generate reams and reams of information, which can be hard to decipher with an untrained eye. DigiMine, Besbeas said, takes that information and translates it into graphs and charts that any businessperson could understand.
“We put it in a very understandable form,” he said.
“DigiMine takes on all the heavy lifting,” said Joel Sider, the company’s corporate communications manager. DigiMine hosts the data warehouse and can come up with a wireless Web usage analysis in just a few hours, he said.
Besbeas said one major U.S. wireless carrier has already signed on to use DigiMine’s service, but he declined to name the carrier. Other carriers are in the trial stage. In addition, DigiMine formed an alliance with Telephia Inc. to integrate its WBI product with Telephia’s consumer measurement service.
Data mining “is an incredibly powerful data proposition,” Besbeas said.
