Philips Launches Mobile Recommendation Service

Philips Electronics has announced the Philips Simplicity Concierge as part of its Sense and Simplicity campaign. The service lets people send text messages to receive information about popular destinations in major cities, such as restaurents in Boston or Spas in London, and receive 5 recommendations culled from Conde Nast web sites, reports the New York Times. Philips paid the publisher $5 million for the deal. Philips is also using the service to experiment with m-commerce: “In addition to text recommendations, users with Web-enabled phones get a screen message with a link to a Philips area of Amazon.com, where they are encouraged to buy products…”Our intent is to show people that this technology can work for you and help you,” Mr. Plaskonos said. “Eventually, our hope is that this will transfer to mobile purchasing, through sites like Amazon, of products that they need for gifting purposes.”…Mr. Plaskonos said that the e-commerce feature was still “a little bit out there in terms of consumer behavior” and that Amazon has not seen a lot of sales from it yet. “But we’re interested in seeing if this is something that people will begin to pick up on”.

Conde Nast gets an added bonus with free market research. “Richard Beckman, president of the Condé Nast Media Group, said he was eager to see how many consumers would use the concierge service. The companies will keep track of which information categories prove the most popular and will fine-tune the service accordingly.”

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