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Personalisation of telecom services - introduction
Personalisation has become fashionable in telecoms. One of the major enablers for this recent trend in communication services is the mobile phone. Its success largely stems from the fact that a mobile phone is a very personal device, much different from a normal fixed-line phone. When your mobile phone rings, you know the call is almost certainly for you, and not for your spouse, children, or colleagues. Most people carry it with them the whole day and store personal contact information on it. The need for personalisation has grown due to the fact that life is getting more and more complex, and people have more and more different roles within one day. People do not want to mix all spheres but like to be recognised in their current role: employee, husband, father, football player, or member of a political party. These roles belong to the same person, but you usually contact the person through a different interface according to the subject. Personalisation is also part of the solution to information overload: it will help you to get the information you are interested in at the right time. Telecom users would like more personalised services and at the same time are more and more mobile. If the telecom service providers offer conditions where the customers feels at home wherever they are, the service boundaries will disappear and the usage of telecom services will drastically rise. All considered, there is no doubt that next-generation services will be characterised by the provision of the user’s personal preferences as well as the combination of different types of media on multimodal user interfaces. The successful i-mode service in Japan already demonstrated the appeal of services suited to the taste of the user. Enabling technologies The virtues and business potential of personalised telecom and information services are known. However, European telcos are still facing some technological challenges to implement the vision of trusted personal services. Among the factors to be integrated are: user profile; location information and user context; content management and adaptation, service presentation; data mining and knowledge management. Profiles and authentication At the core of personalised services is the user profile or personal profile, which gathers the user preferences and data. It is important to remember that a large part of information stored in a user profile is dynamic, meaning it could change quickly with context including the location. There is an identified need for integrating the distributed aspects of personal profiles. The newly kicked-off FP6 IST project ePerSpace, ‘Towards the era of personal services at home and everywhere’, will develop solutions in this area. Some mechanisms enabling seamless login and authentication are also missing. The new Eurescom study P1441 “Identity Management enabling AAA services” will explore some important aspects of this issue. Mobile Presence Location-aware services will probably be the first step towards more personalised services. However the technology in this area is not yet mature. Among others, there is a need for integrating user context data from terminals, networks, and gateways. One of the latest Eurescom studies, P1348 SPEED about ‘Strengthening Telco's Position in the Mobile Presence and Location aware services European Interoperability for new market opportunities’, shows roadmaps for the provision of services based on location awareness and Mobile Presence. Adaptable content and multimodality Personalisation means, among other things, addressing the user in his or her preferred language. Experts are working on the integration of multilingual information technologies. Personalisation also means adapting the content to the user device, using the best user interface as well as making the best use of multimodality. Many Internet services have been designed with desktop computers in mind. Therefore, a lot of work is necessary to achieve the user-friendly adaptation of those services and the creation of new services on different terminals with multimodal interfaces. In order to offer advanced services supporting a user and context centric presentation, new mechanisms allowing for a flexible handling of content in different environments need to be introduced. In particular and in order to satisfy the user looking for rich media content, advanced services have to exploit the semantics of the media content. This could be solved by content-related indexing, which supplies and uses metadata telling “what is to be found where” in large content assemblies. In order to create personalised services, metadata have to be introduced into the workflow of telecommunication services, actually not only on the content, but also on the service context and the user’s preferences. Therefore new mechanisms for creating, using and linking media-related metadata need to be integrated. Eurescom project FRAPESA, ’Framework for personalisation of services and applications in next generation mobile services’ (P1308), recently concluded that the main components for the generation of new services combining several media and giving interactivity to the user are already available as separate components or will be available within the next two years. However, it will be a challenging task for service and network providers to combine, adapt and re-configure these components in such a way that they can be used as building blocks for next generation personalised services. You can find more information on Eurescom project FRAPESA P1308 at: www.eurescom.de/public/projects/P1300-series/P1308. Conclusion Providing personalised services will eventually place the individual user at the centre of the service conception and development. We should bear in mind, though, that the provision of personalised services could be conflicting in some ways with the protection of user privacy. There should be privacy settings for the individual user. Besides the privacy issue, telcos should be aware when defining their personalised services that the line between personalisation / ambient intelligence and annoying and nagging features is sometimes very thin. This issue of Eurescom mess@ge presents a selection of exclusive articles covering different aspects of personalisation for telecom and information services. You will find a vision of personalisation from Telenor, get some concrete elements of personalised communication from software provider Destination Moon, and get the opinion of a personalisation expert from Telecom Italia Lab. Please send us your comments on this article. |
