Michael on the mount
Hi, my name is Michael Bramlage and I head up Product Management for Ovi Store. I recently joined Nokia, having made a cross-country trek from Seattle to New York City.
As a newcomer to the city, I ‘ve been impressed with the fact that the city has something for everyone. This is most evident when you go shopping. Whether you’re strolling the high-end luxury retailers on Fifth Avenue in Midtown, grabbing groceries at the Fairway market on the Upper West Side, or hunting for bargains at Century 21 down in the Financial District, if you want something, the city’s got it.
However, on a recent walk through the city I became overwhlmed by “choice overload.” If you multiply all the products across all the stores in New York City, you wind up with tens of millions of choices. How do I find what’s right for me?
This is an interesting challenge that we’re tackling here on the Store team. We call it “relevance” and it’s focused on ensuring that visitors to the Store get connected with the content that matters most to them.
For Store, the first step involves filtering the right content for the right user based on two important factors: the visibility rules of the content and the unique characteristics of the customers, namely their country, language, and device.
In terms of device, not all content works on the range of approximately 100 devices that Store supports. For example, the new Compass Touch app from Nimbuzz, that allows you to access the device magnetometer and use your N97 as a compass, isn’t designed to work on the Nokia N95 8G (a non-touch device). In this case, Store filters out this application for people using the N95 8G. The goal is to show only what works for you and your device. Imagine for instance, walking into a shoe store and all shoes that weren’t your size were already removed from the store shelves, or going into a department store and all they carried were clothes that fit you right. How cool would that be?
In terms of geography, not all content is available globally. While we’d love for all users to get to all the content we have in our catalog, Store must honor the legal rights of publishers and ensure that content is served only to consumers in those countries that publishers have designated for delivery. Global rights are a rarity in the publishing world and the same rules apply in the mobile content space as well.
Now, we’ve been tinkering in our R&D labs on a few improvements to how we handle these scenarios on our web site: http://store.ovi.com. Just this week we made a change to how the site handles visitors that link directly to content available in the Store, like the incredibly fun Tower Bloxx game http://tinyurl.com/lkryy5. The change is designed to provide clear messaging to notify users when the visibility rules of particular content don’t match the particular users’ detected country, language, and device. And if we don’t know your device, please tell us on store.ovi.com – it’s like telling Levi’s your jean size when you walk into the store!
There are many more improvements like this coming very soon. Please stay tuned.
-Michael
I’m Richard Ferguson and I manage the games catalog at Ovi by Nokia. I’m an avid gamer and like to test my skills against friends. One of the awesome things about Tower Bloxx and Tower Bloxx Deluxe is the “snackable” quality. I can play it in arcade mode during my daily commute. It’s easy to pick it up and put it down whenever I have a few spare minutes. And when I’m looking for a serious jolt, I can use it in puzzle mode, building an entire city and populating it with people. I like to compare my performance against friends and truth be told, sometimes find myself wanting. But hey, the thrill of victory…..the agony defeat….that’s what gaming is all about.
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