As any content provider would attest, one of the biggest challenges is making sure your users know when your service adds new content that is relevant to their interests — while simultaneously not overflowing their inboxes with announcements for things they have no interest in. This module adds the ability to generate personalized recommendations for the purpose of sending targeted and opt-in email or SMS alerts. The Personalization Platform handles the intelligent targeting of the alerts and the Customer system controls the actual transmission of the alerts.

The system has two modes:

• Direct Opt-in Alerts: In this mode, the customer directly chooses the conditional parameters which result in an alert. Parameters include Genre or sub-genre, artist/celebrity, content type (i.e. ringtone, news item, concert ticket offer, etc.), newly released, newly licensed by store. For example, if the customer signs up to receive all items relating to her favorite artist, U2, then she would receive a SMS both when a new ringtone is available for download, or when a U2 concert tour is announced and she can buy tickets from her mobile phone. However, the customer could also choose to only receive ringtone alerts related to U2, and not new/concert announcements.
• Targeted Alerts: In this mode, the customer opts-in to receive alerts and specifies a desired frequency (i.e. x/day, x/week, x/month). The Personalization Platform uses collected profile information and a dynamic database of active alerts to deliver the most compelling SMS/emails to the customer. The targeted system can be configured to boost/promote specific alerts (i.e. exclusive content, higher margin items, etc.) while ensuring they are still highly relevant to the end customer.