The most significant thing about Nokia's Ovi Store announcement on Monday was the focus on its personalised recommendations for users – serving up apps and games that they may like based on their buying habits and current location.

Apple's App Store doesn't currently offer this, although the Genius technology it uses to provide recommendations for music on the iTunes Store shows it has the capability to introduce something along these lines for apps too.

And operators? One of the companies looking to help operators offer better recommendation and discovery tools is Xiam, an Irish startup acquired by Qualcomm last year. We sat down with Colm Healy, VP and general manager of Xiam to find out more.

“With the huge amount of content now available through mobile phones, the issue is how you help people discover it, but also how you ensure they don't get paralysed by the amount of choice,” he says.

“As people are designing services for the mobile phone, they're increasingly looking to build personalisation and recommendations into that experience. It goes across games, browsing, and even now in location-based services.”

Xiam's technology finds its way onto operator portals in two ways – through the BREW and MediaFlo offerings of its parent company, and directly through deals with operators like Orange and O2.

He says operators are reacting to the work done by the likes of Apple, Nokia and Google to deliver a better, more personalised experience to their customers. So does Xiam's kind of recommendation technology work?

“We see customers not just buying more, but coming back more often,” says Healy. “They're also going much deeper into the catalogue. People who get targeted recommendations buy from twice as deep in the catalogue as people getting editorialised recommendations. The conversion rate is two or three times larger, and they come back 30 per cent more times.”

Specifically for games, Healy says that on many operators, 20 per cent of their games catalogues will be sold during an average month, but claims that those using Xiam's tech have boosted that to 40 per cent. It's the long tail!

Or not: “We talk about the fat middle, because at the bottom there's always going to be some games that never sell,” he says. “So it's less about the long tail, and more about this fat middle that can be exploited.”

The idea of operator portals which offer different content and services to different users has been kicking around for a while now (and even launched in some cases), but now that need for better content discovery can be seen in the new breed of app stores too.

“People want to be engaged and amused, and to see what's new and happening,” says Healy. “If you have an app store which is changing, dynamic and surfacing new and interesting applications for a customer, they'll come back more often. If it's just the same top three or top five every time they visit, they'll stop visiting.”

Xiam is keen to get operators using its technology across all their content areas rather than just one in isolation – he cites the idea of a user who buys a Formula 1 game being later recommended an off-portal F1 mobile internet site.

“Tying it all together is the message we're selling to operators, and they're very receptive,” he says. “If they don't do that, they can't provide a better experience than a webco.”

Xiam uses various algorithms to generate recommendations for users, including tracking what everyone's buying, drilling down to what people in a similar demographic are buying, and what trendsetters are purchasing.

Social aspects are also coming into it – the idea of monitoring the chatter going on in someone's social network and turning that into games or music recommendations, for example.

Healy says quality will come more into it in the future too – not just recommending content based on what people are buying, but on how they're rating it.

“It's really immersive and exciting, and an area we would like to evolve into,” he says.