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Press release of Schwäbischer Verlag, Leutkirch, August 19, 2010
BADEN-WUERTTEMBERG - Users of SZON.de now receive even more competent and individualized service. Now the website of Schwäbische Zeitung offers a recommendation system based on which the comprehensive information, entertainment and service offerings can be used even better.
The new offering provides users with information where they can find additional articles, images and videos on the topic they clicked on. This system was developed as part of the T-City project in Friedrichshafen in collaboration with Deutsche Telekom and Yoochoose GmbH, which specializes in recommendation systems. Since the project start at the end of July, all users now get recommendations displayed when they navigate through the pages of SZON.de. Under the articles they accessed in a targeted manner, they will find links to articles on "related" topics. "A great success that shows how new technologies can become established in the market if they are associated with added value," said Frank-Peter Käßler, project manager at T-City.
The website of Schwäbische Zeitung was selected for this project by the T-City team due to its great reach. Thomas Löbel, managing director of SZON.de, is happy for his users that user friendliness can be even further increased with this recommendation system: "If we can improve the service of our website in a sustained manner, then we will be very interested in introducing new technologies." No sooner said than done: The system has been operational since July 22, 2010.
Similar to shopping portal Amazon, the system by Yoochoose is set up in such a manner that during the recommendation decision the article just accessed or the image or video gallery are taken into account, as is the past usage behavior of the user. For reasons of data privacy, such information is only recorded anonymously via a cookie at SZON.de. Thus, the user's behavior creates an "adjusted portal" over time, while any link to a real person or personal information such as name, age and gender is excluded. "It is extremely important to us that privacy is respected," said Thomas Löbel.
With 320,000 users and 1.15 million visits, SZON.de is one of the large portals among the websites of regional media companies. Especially in the past few years, the systematic regionalization has resulted in continuously increasing user numbers.
A young technology company, Yoochoose offers software for personalized recommendations. The novel processes are based on research results by Deutsche Telekom Laboratories.
Link to the German press release: