ondeviceportal

We recognize several factors are emerging as critical to success in delivering ODP solution/service.

Companies that want to be competitive in ODP must have a superior mobile user experience, an effective way to monetize their content and services, support for mass market handsets, and broad management capabilities.

The user experience is the heart and soul of any ODP. Users must find it easy and enjoyable to use a mobile service or they will ignore it altogether. To create a superior mobile user experience, an ODP platform should include an underlying client and server architecture.

The client resides on the mobile device and lets consumers work offline, creating search requests that will be executed when the network connection is live. An intuitive user interface walks consumers through the offline search request process.

The ODP should also offer a learning cache engine which discovers user preferences and remembers recent search requests, tailoring the experience after each use. Most importantly, the client terminal must be easily downloaded onto the device to enable consumers to easily access and adopt the ODP services.

To reduce the number of round trips the client makes to the network, the server accepts search requests from the client and interacts with content providers to gather the requested information. Once the content is delivered back to the client, consumers should be offered a number of ways to interact with that data by integrating it with functions already available on the handset, such as contacts, calendar, or messaging.

The server should also track all usage patterns and statistics for reporting purposes.

This combined client/server interaction delivers consumers with a user experience that drives repeat usage and, in turn, increases the brand equity for the company that deploys the ODP.

Building a mobile advertising engine into the ODP platform is critical to maximize the ODP’s monetization capabilities. The engine should let content providers and mobile operators insert advertisements throughout an application in the form of headers, footers, banners, spotting view placements, and even video commercials.

Banner advertisements can be embedded offline within the user interface of the client, so consumers never have to wait for advertisements to be downloaded to their phones. Moreover, the ODP makes advertising available to users whether they are online or off. Advertisements can be regularly updated via over-the-air (OTA) downloads and rotated on a scheduled basis, seamless to the end user.

This scheduled upload of advertisements presents users with a regularly changing display but cleverly avoids the frustration a consumer typically feels while waiting for advertisements to upload in a WAP environment. As a result, offline ODP advertisements typically drive over 40% more impressions than mobile Internet based advertisements.

In addition, since ODP technology can track user behavior, advertisements can be placed – in real time – based on the actions performed on the consumer’s phone. This context-sensitive advertising placement is just another way that an ODP solution adds value to the wireless customer and improves the mobile usability experience.

While success in the ODP hinges on these five factors, broad handset support may be the cornerstone.
The mobile medium presents a huge opportunity for advertisers looking to place their brand on millions phones that consumers carry with them every day. For these companies, however, mobile advertising on the ODP can only be successful if the ODP vendor supports a wide variety of today’s most popular cellular handsets.

One of the biggest concerns for any company that is pursuing an ODP solution, should be the cost and complexity associated with managing the solution over the long term. As a result, a comprehensive ODP vendor should offer their clients an administrative console for management and reporting on their services and a Customization Development Kit for easy updates. These features are necessary to simplify the building, deploying, maintaining, and reporting of the ODP experience.

The customization tool lets companies make changes to an ODP, adding a new service or changing the look and feel without being tied to the ODP vendor. The customization tool lets lets content providers, systems integrators, and wireless operators develop and modify their own fast and easy-to-use mobile applications for the ODP.

These customization tools should also incorporate over-the-air technology to allow companies to push their updates out to consumers. Since an ODP resides on the device, consumers must download the portal to their phone or purchase a phone with the ODP preinstalled on it to use the service. It is crucial, therefore, that an ODP vendor offer OTA installation and OTA updates to ensure a friendly path for future growth by pushing out to client devices, so users don’t have to actively download new client software. They just turn on their mobile devices and the ODP update is there.

To optimize their ODP services and advertising, mobile companies need to also have insight into what services are the most popular with their consumers. As a result, ODP vendors must supply their clients with an interface that that gives administrators real-time visibility on customer usage trends, service uptake, advertising effectiveness, and the quality of service, enabling adjustments to improve the user experience. Having a console where administrators can easily pull reports to view advertising click-through and response rates as well as what ODP features consumers are using is a mandate for today’s ODP vendors. Such reporting lets companies know where they are succeeding by identifying what consumers like, what services they are using and what advertisements they are responding to.