In an age of smartphones, app stores and mobile search, the old operator content portal seems like a tired creaky creation, but T-Mobile apparently is experiencing a revival of interest in its mobile content and storefront. Since it started using Medio’s Web2Go portal as it mobile homepage last summer, the operator has experienced a big bump in customer engagement in mobile Web services—a bump to the tune of a 200% increase in average browser sessions per user across its feature phone and smartphone line ups.
The Web2Go is browser-based user interface, which hosts hundreds of content sites, applications and storefronts, hosted from its cloud-based content platform and rendered on the device as mobile Web pages.
For the most part the content is the same as what you’d find out there in the Web, taking the user to the mobile optimized versions of ESPN, Yahoo News and E! Online’s website.
But Medio claims the key technology resides below the content pages themselves to the underlying analytics and recommendation engine. As customers go to various sites from the Web2Go portal, Medio starts recommending other sites, giving the customer the option of embedding icons for those sites in the home portal. According to Medio, it has served up 5 billion recommendations across all of its operator customers’ handsets, and has directed 5 billion page views from the various versions of its portal.
Because Medio hosts much of the content through partnerships with the content providers and it optimizes each page view for the device viewing it, it’s able to reduce the bandwidth the browser consumers per session while increasing the amount of sessions overall.
In short, Medio creates a cheap and easy way for T-Mobile to drive its customers to the mobile Web while minimizing the traffic that increased activity creates on the network.