Apriori a Mobile Product Recommendation System Interacting

APriori A Mobile Product Recommendation System Interacting with Tagged Products Reischach, F., Guinard, D., Michahelles, F., & Fleish, E. (2009). A Mobile Product Recommendation System Interacting with Tagged Products. Pevasive Computing and Communications, 1-6. The article pertains to a design for a communication system that lets peers share opinions and recommendations about products or services using their mobile phone. Users of the system, APriori, will leverage some of the potential inherent in technologies usch as auto-ID-enabled mobile phones that are either barcoded or potentially outfitted with RFID chips.

Using peer reviews for purchasing decisions is not a new phenomenon by any means. Online companies like the retailer Amazon has allowed consumers to provide their reviews and opinions about products for years and most of the larger online retailers have also done the same. APriori's niche seems to be the fact that these reviews can be entered and accessed via a mobile phone and therefore can be used for purchasing decisions in a brick and motor store, as opposed to online shopping.

The mobile phone is a platform that has yet to reach its full potential. Although there are several smart phones in today's market, many of the apps that power these devices are still in a developmental phase. However, social accelerators have already been in place for years that allow for widespread content participation and organization which have allowed communities to share information in new ways; which is especially true in younger generations.

The ability of handsets to access the Internet, read 1-D barcode recognition, and utilize NFC liking capabilities has greatly expanded the potential functionality of these handsets. This has been leading to a bunch of speculation on the new world of mobile computing. While mobile commerce might occur sometime down the road, APriori tried to concentrate on providing solutions that were more short-term.

The rating system that the company was developing the infrastructure for was more tangible than some of the other applications that were trying to use the emerging technology advancements. The platform offered a product rating module that would let the consumer rate a product with a quick one to five star rating. From these ratings, a peer can get a quick at-a-glance assessment of a product. These ratings can even be broken down into subcategories to rate various factors about a product.

However, if a user would like to more detailed analysis on the system, then they can fill out a product review; which generally consists of a short description (under 100 words) that they can describe their experience with the product. There are many different options the article outlines for interacting with the servers and accessing the rating screens. The company even made some prototypes to work with different.