Real-Time Contextual and Social Relevance in Mobile

Personalized mobile user experience is a hot topic today because a smarter app will delight users, keep them coming back, and make your business stand out from the crowd. The extreme version of personalization is real-time contextual and social relevance. According to Jason Arbon, the contextual brain for your app is only a few API calls away. Based on lessons learned working on search relevance and personalization at Google, Bing, and a stealth mobile app startup, Jason describes the value, limitations, performance, and data-privacy of local and web services available today. He demonstrates practical examples of leveraging APIs such as Foursquare, Yelp, Google Places, Facebook, Location APIs (latlong + velocity), and Twitter. Then, Jason describes available natural language processing APIs such as NSLinguisticTagger and illustrates ways to use in-app usage data to improve an application’s contextual experience. Take away ideas for making your users happier—and you and your app look smarter.