In his post, the always interesting Paul Golding asked the question “Is personalization that important?” especially in the mobile sector.

In my opinion, Personalization is a vital part of this equation.

Personalization of mobile devices allows the creation of a unique user experience and a user-statement. Padmashree Warrior (Motorola) stated this as:

… user expectations in the mobile world revolve around Personalization, Mobilization and Socialization. Personalization is about reducing digital clutter, and making a world of exploding digital content increasingly relevant to you. Tomorrow’s personalization engines need to learn your preference and work with location and presence to deliver an experience tailored to you.

I think Personalization goes beyond that. It transcends the device, to include user-interaction, content, context and services. Device makers, service providers and the customers need to realize that they are part of a learning, adapting and evolving ecosystem. In such a system, the user should not only be able to customize, choose, create, distribute and control content, but this entire process, should in itself create additional value. When done correctly, everybody in the food chain gets a slice of this additional revenue.

Ringtones are one of the simplest examples that come to mind. They are a rage in Asia and Europe and catching up here. Third-party moblogging, location and presence based services focus on the ‘context’ aspect. This is the ‘Who Effect’ that Tony Fish referred to in his illuminating post.

To do this correctly, an open standards based approach has to be agreed upon and followed by all the stakeholders. Organizations such as W3C, Open Mobile Alliance and 3GPP have still a long way to go before Personalization standards are in place.

Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, Nokia’s chief executive has said, “Devices alone are not enough anymore. Consumers want a complete experience.”

PostPath is the first company outside of Redmond to build protocol compatibility with Microsoft Exchange (famous for using undocumented protocols). Interestingly, the PostPath server runs on Linux but appears to the system as a valid Exchange Server. A nice feature is that the Linux tools for high availability can be leveraged as opposed to the Microsoft route.

Postpath is billed as drop in replacement of Exchange server for the companies looking for a rock solid email and collaboration server. Microsoft has a very strong grip in any Enterprise environment, with Microsoft products being used from desktop to the server room and everywhere in between. For any new entrant in the Enterprise space, it is always an uphill task to kick in the enterprise doors and convince the customers to switch to a non-Microsoft products or even to try it out. Their demo at DemoFall 2006 was certainly impressive.

In my opinion the key to Postpath success would lie in finding the way to penetrate the enterprise and giving them a very compelling reason to try it out or switch. Watch out for this company along with Zimbra.

Further Reading:
Postpath named Top 10 startups to watch
New methodologies for ‘bottomless’ e-mail storage
Network World’s Unified Communications Newsletter
Michael’s thought blog has an interesting post
Follow the discussion on Ed Brill’s blog on Collaboration & Technolology
PostPath goes after Microsoft Exchange at ReadWrite Web blog

Retrevo gives us a peak into the future of search. For day to day searches Google, Yahoo and Microsoft live are great. But what do you do when you are looking for something very specific like setting up that hi-tech printer or configuring the latest <drop in a name here> mobile gadget or any other cosumer device. We all know that setting up most of the hi-tech gadgets is a living hell.

Steps in Retrevo. Retrevo is the ultimate in consumer electronics virtical search. With Retrevo you get quick access to product documentation as well as search, and as per the demo I have seen, the results are very very relevant. The search provides a preview of the documents you are looking for. Results can be mailed to your family and friends with ease. Retrevo categorizes the results in different sections to help you get closer to solution faster, helping you narrow down to the product model and solution the problem you are facing faster.

The sucess of Retrevo would lie with adoption by the customer support sites of consumer electronic manufacturers and adoption by non-geeks. I can clearly see Retrevo reducing calls to tech support, reducing the support cost per customer and also helping improve the customer satisfaction. If Retrevo can help my Gradma and help her figure out that latest camera and dvd player, they can write their own check.

Retrevo was founded by Vipin Jain, Jiang Wu and Manish Rathi.

Knock knock Google…. Google Book Search is great, but Retrevo is serving a very different need.

Further Reading:
Retrevo’s Vipin Jain on Vertical Search
Interview with Retrevo Founder at Podtech
Retrevo at Wonderful Thoughts
Retrevo’s “Snapshot” Graphs Products By Price And Feature at TechCrunch