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Issues of the Ariadne Capital Journal - Through the Maze

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The mobile content world is becoming more competitive every day. It seems that mobile content is quickly taking over ring tones as the next hot mobile application.

I've recently had the honor of meeting some of the Leiki (“participate in playful interaction”) team at the Mobile Content World show in Olympia , London . Leiki is a Finnish company based in Helsinki that delivers personalized content by learning the end-user's preferences. Amongst all of the options out there, my first venture into the mobile content world was decidedly via this company. I was convinced of the product's uniqueness when their business development director showed me a demo on his own Smartphone and the quality of the Financial Times (FT) delivery was quite clear and very easy to navigate.

Now my latest toy in the wonderful world of technology is Leiki FT, a mobile content application that can be quickly downloaded onto your smart phone to deliver the FT online daily (updated every 15 minutes).

FT Leiki can be downloaded via your phone on the Leiki website ( http://www.leiki. com /login.html ) or via the FT.com website (http://leiki.magenta.net/ft/PAGE1.HTM). It only takes a couple of minutes and the application can then be found on your phone under, unsurprisingly, “applications.”

Once logged on, the user uses the tabs at the top of the page to navigate the programme , with Latest , the latest stories to break on FT.com, or My , which learns the user's preferences and will be explained later in this article, “Index” and “$”, or currency options. There is also a help tab to explain all of these functions.

Index seemed as good a place to start as any. This is broken down into via Top Stories ( UK and US), World News (by region), Market News , Currencies and Market Reports . I decided to have a look at the top US stories, seeing as I rarely get the chance to thoroughly follow anything going on in my home country. I opened an article about President Bush and the Hurricane Katrina aftermath, and, after reading the article, I wanted to find more articles about President Bush so I moved the tab buttons along to a little + symbol at the top of the page to indicate that this is a topic I was interested in learning more about. By pushing this plus sign, Leiki learns my preferences.

If I press the minus (-) sign, then Leiki has learnt that I do not want to read more about President Bush or Hurricane Katrina. The tabs on the main Leiki page include the My section, which lists all articles that correspond to the plus signs that I pushed while going through the newspaper, so I now find many articles on President Bush, weather and specifically, Hurricane Katrina. Leiki has learnt what I like – and gets smarter every day.