DigiMine Inc. is tackling an underserved area of data mining: wireless. The company, founded by three Microsoft defectors, has a new service called Wireless Business Intelligence that analyzes log-file data for wireless content providers, service providers, and carriers.

DigiMine says the hosted service will provide daily reports to help clients fine-tune their efforts in wireless content, commerce, and products. For example, clients could have the data analyzed to determine what type of content is best suited for certain wireless-user demographics, or why wireless shoppers abandon their shopping carts at particular points.

The wireless industry, which suffers from severe customer churn, could certainly use some assistance identifying relevant content for users, says Yankee Group analyst Robert Mirani. "You want to have information about users in as timely a fashion as possible, but carriers, service providers, and content providers haven't done that." It's not that large wireless providers are lacking sophisticated data warehouses, he says. The problem is that many of the data warehouses weren't designed to let those providers act quickly on information, with reports generated in batches or only periodically.

With wireless products and services, it's critical to determine what works and what doesn't--and to tweak products and services even faster than most Web companies. "People on the Web have more time than someone on a wireless device, when the user is probably a mobile professional who's acting fairly quickly," he says. With wireless, "there's a somewhat shorter fuse with the content."