The trouble with mobile phones is, no-one knows how to work them

ACCORDING TO mobile content monitoring specialist, Olista, one man downloaded the same piece of software to his mobile phone 76 times because he failed to understand the difference between streamed content and downloaded content.

Olista CEO, Oren Glanz, told the INQ he didn't believe the figure when he first saw it.

So his company phoned the offender up. He confessed to having downloading the content purposefully. He didn't realise it had actually been saved on his phone.

Olista didn't reveal how many times the man had to pay for the software.

This example illustrates how ordinary mobile phone subscribers are struggling to understand how to obtain premium content with their handsets.

Olista has estimated that 55 per cent of all 3G handset owners abandon content downloads because of problems with usability, content discovery and billing.

The solution, according to the firm , is SAM (Service Adoption Management) software. Basically, this aggregates data from multiple sources – such as the operator's WAP gateway and its billing system. With this data, Olista claims it can discover why subscribers aren't downloading software even though they don't actually bother to complain about download failures.

One of Olista's declared customers is Cellcom Israel. The company's software discovered that the most popular content downloads on that operator's network were adult entertainment and gambling.

However, the operator got cold feet over promoting such items to end users and so Olista was able to monitor how downloads dropped off again.

The advantage to Olista's approach is that it doesn't require any software to be loaded onto a smartphone to collect data. The disadvantage, says Glanz, is that Olista can't actually see what appears on the user's handset. µ

L'INQ
Olista