Not many peo­ple will be famil­iar with its name, but mobile adver­tis­ing agen­cies want­i­ng to keep abreast of devel­op­ments in mobile tech­nol­o­gy would do well to make a note of Zedge, a high­ly pop­u­lar Android app which can now brag 50 mil­lion installs and more than 22 mil­lion active users.

An app for per­son­al­ized con­tent and game discovery

Zedge, which has offices in New York City and Nor­way, offers game rec­om­men­da­tions and per­son­al­ized con­tent along with free ring­tones and wall­pa­pers — and it’s reach­ing beyond Android with the launch of a new iPhone app.  The new iOS app, which launched on Decem­ber 17^th, fol­lows the startup’s addi­tion of a mobile games dis­cov­ery chan­nel ear­li­er this year.  Android users use it to sieve out the games that don’t inter­est them from the vast array of dross out there.  Based on their pre­vi­ous activ­i­ty, the app presents them only with the ones that are like­ly to hook their attention.

The app will expand to encom­pass the full range of Android fea­tures in stages, begin­ning with wall­pa­per but adding addi­tion­al per­son­al­iza­tion and rec­om­men­da­tion func­tions ver­ti­cal by ver­ti­cal.  Ring­tones will be avail­able for the iOS app ear­ly in 2013, with games com­ing on-stream short­ly afterwards.

Pro­fes­sion­als in the world of mobile phones adver­tis­ing will find the tech­nol­o­gy most enticing.
The app’s rec­om­men­da­tion engine relies on users’ inter­ac­tions with the con­tent from its chan­nels (like games, ring­tones and wall­pa­pers), ana­lyz­ing an abun­dance of anonymized data before serv­ing up a list of rec­om­men­da­tions match­ing their pre­vi­ous inter­ests.  More­over, it gets bet­ter and more accu­rate the more it’s used, thanks to Zedge’s cun­ning deploy­ment of machine learn­ing and clus­ter­ing theory.

The new gold stan­dard for game discovery?

Accord­ing to the company’s COO Jonathan Reich, in prepa­ra­tion for the iOS launch, Zedge com­plet­ed a big upgrade of its infra­struc­ture involv­ing migra­tion to new hard­ware and a revamp of its archi­tec­ture – devel­op­ments which he believes will sig­nif­i­cant­ly improve down­load speeds and response times.  As he puts it, it’s all part of the company’s aim to become the “de fac­to stan­dard for game dis­cov­ery” on both Google Play and iOS.

There may be a way to go yet; but with a respectable ninth place in Google Play’s pletho­ra of free apps, this firm has good form when it comes to mak­ing rapid progress.