If you didn’t get the chance to come and see us in our new place it is time! We are now located in Suite 350 (instead of 305… not hard to remember?!). We made it all cozy to motivate ourselves to hit more records for 2012!

Even though this is just temporary (Intela is trying to find a new big office for everyone) we couldn’t help hosting a little celebration last Friday so everyone could see this new little nest… and yes we managed to all fit in there, take a peek at the pictures!

Posted by: Nina Albert, Email Marketing Analyst

NFC stands for Near Field Communication, a short-range wireless technology that you most likely unwittingly use today.  The key fobs you swipe to get into your office uses NFC.  So does that contactless credit card you use each morning to get your balanced nutrition at McDonalds or Starbucks.

NFC devices can be used with contactless payment systems in combination with things like Google Wallet – a virtual wallet that stores credit card information.  Germany has already trialed a NFC ticketing system for public transport using NFC.

Now imagine that your credit card, your key fob, your business cards, your bus pass and even your car keys are simply one device: your mobile phone.  No more rooting around your wallet for the right credit card or clawing through your purse for your office keycard.  With Blackberry pledging to have every device launched in 2012 configured for NFC as standard (and Apple following suit) you can guarantee that 20-somethings at watering holes everywhere will be more wary of the classic in-to-the-toilet-phone-fumble.

The UK has more than 50,000 swipe-and-pay terminals right now.  Transactions are mostly limited to small-ticket items, for things under £15.  However, Blackberry believes that larger scale commerce will become commonplace using linked credit lines on your mobile device.  Industry experts, Forrester Research predicts that commerce on NFC-mobile devices will reach $31 billion globally by 2016.

Major players like Visa, MasterCard and Lloyds TSB are partnering with phone powerhouses like Samsung, RIM and Apple to develop many NFC-enabled devices.  Mobile service providers like O2, Vodafone, T-Mobile and Verizon are all exploring standardized payment platforms as well.  Hodkinson says, “You will see cobranded activity with us and the mobile operators communicating how NFC can be used for things like payments and advertising.”

In addition to acting as your credit card, Blackberry is testing the ability to swap contact info, videos and photos by simply tapping two phones together.   This will make pulling a girl’s digits on a night out with the guys almost 100% foolproof.  No more texting Claire to say how great it was to meet her only to have her reply that her name is ‘Holly.’

Mass adopting of mobile wallets offers brands a chance to be at core of consumer purchase decisions.  Brands are already developing NFC loyalty schemes, price comparison services and of course, display ads tailored to a users’ shopping habits.  But is the average Joe really ready to have EVERYTHING tied to his phone?  Perhaps we’ll find out in 2012.

Posted By: Jay Andrews, Senior Account Manager

Social media is expanding exponentially and I am curious to see what trends prove most successful in our industry.  I know more brands/advertisers are realizing the importance of reaching a broader more targeted audience through social media but the key for us is sustaining this business.  With Intela’s new platform we have realized several tools to sustain a campaign’s longevity through monitoring quality and keeping solid communication.  Get with your account rep today and let them know what you are increasing your focus on in 2012.

Posted by: Josh Krogh, Senior Affiliate Manager

At Intela we are always pushing the limits of what the technology can do for our systems and applications and we have been working on ways to improve how we deliver a better service to our customers.

So a few months ago we started a project to look for a good recommendation engine that would allow us to create better and more targeted campaigns by using recommendations based on past behaviour from our users. We looked at several technolgies and concentrated our efforts on 2: The Google Prediction API and Apache Mahout.

We started working on a proof-of-concept application using the Google Prediction API which was in Beta at the time and built a very simple application that would give us a good idea of what the capabilities of the API were. We worked on several variations of it but in the end we found it was too restrictive for our needs and decided to move on to the next one.

Apache Mahout is an open source project that contains an impressive library of machine learning algorithms including recommendation engines, classification, clustering data mining and many other algorithms. We concentrated on creating once again a proof-of-concept for a recommendation engine. This time it took a little longer to familiarize ourselves with the libraries and API and how to provide the data for the recommender, but we soon had a very good application that was delivering the results we were expecting.

After a few months working on this we have finally deployed a couple of implementations of our own recommendation engine based on Mahout and we are starting to see very good results.

Intela has a reputation for very inteligent marketing… ladies and gentlemen… Intela has just gotten smarter.

Posted by: Emilio Suarez, Senior Software Architect