SMS Text News Hub

Posted by Fox on September 8, 2008 at 2:32 PM

Connectivity and service are the two key business drivers in the expanding premium rate telemedia market, according to content, messaging and billing from txtNation, which has recently expanded its connections in to India and China and has upped its already high level commitment to support with the launch of txtNation SD, a dedicated, centralised support service.

The company – which will be appearing at CTIA in San Francisco next week and at Ad:tech in London later this month – has already gone live in China and India and has two clients using its connectivity in these regions. One, a large consumer electronics brand, is using it to offer add ons to pre-loaded memory cards in phones in the UK and China.

Alongside connectivity, txtNation – which has connections in 45 countries globally – sees the key to success in the premium messaging, billing and content market as being support services. Michael Whelan, director of txtNation says: “Retention is starting to improve in the industry, as are pay outs and connectivity, so now support to clients is the key to staying ahead”.

For this reason, txtNation has rolled out txtNation SD, its support and distribution arm, which will give a total range of support options using a centralised support system. Whelan admits that his company puts a lot of resources in to support – offering, in his words, “true 24x7 support globally, on a solid platform and two account managers – in fact we spend more now on support than sales as its so key to getting and keeping clients”.

In Whelan’s view “one in five” prospective clients come to us complaining about lack of support [from other companies]. We don’t want to be one of those companies so we have support all over the world to follow the sun.”

As well as offering unprecedented levels of support, txtNation has also rolled out version 5 of its Control Panel web interface, which allows clients to set up and run any of the mobile services that txtNation has on offer. “It’s a one-stop-shop of everything we do,” says Whelan.

According to Whelan, Control Panel 5.1 (CP5) is an exceptionally powerful tool for the billing and delivery of rich content and services. Via a streamlined, accessible Web-based interface, CP5 serves the enterprise in powering a range of award-winning content, messaging and billing solutions. CP5 also provides a plethora of options that allow clients to customise every aspect of how they use the services provided by txtNation, he says.

“Whatever services you use, you get 24x7 access to a control panel that enables you to fine tune those services, request an upgrade, buy new services and to keep a close eye on data related to your account,” adds Whelan.

CP5 is the next step in the evolution of txtNation’s successful content management and applications platform, built on years of experience, and industry expertise in delivering both common and bespoke mobile services. Among other things, CP5 provides centralised and intelligent content store, intuitive access to SMS, MMS, WAP and email solutions, as well as wizard-driven templates for common services. It also brings easier integration with industry gateways, premium billing and alternative billing, and lets clients create content portals easily, as well as administer subs and one-off purchases.

It also offers full real-time statistics, campaign management and flexible support for white label and resold services and DRM.

The service has already been put to use by wine seller Blossom Hill, which is using CP5 to manage an SMS and MMS competition on its wine labels, where consumers could enter by text or by sending a picture to shortcodes on the bottle label.

For more information, please visit: http://txtnation.com/contact_call.php

Posted by Fox on August 26, 2008 at 2:36 PM

The market's leading mobile solutions provider txtNation are extremely proud to announce that their new affiliate program is now up and running.

txtNation openly invites their clients to encourage not only friends but business colleagues or acquaintances to join txtNation’s ever expanding mobile solutions enabling the client to further increase their profits. One of the best things about this new scheme is that anyone needing a mobile billing solution, amongst many other unique solutions, can become a client of txtNation who then in turn can refer others and make the most of this exciting new scheme themselves, making this above all a win-win situation for everyone.

This new affiliate scheme has been provided to give existing clients an amazing incentive to persuade people they know who could also benefit from txtNation’s solutions which could drastically increase revenue, to engage txtNation's unique services and as a reward for their referral and loyalty and belief in txtNation’s services they will receive a bonus of 5% of whatever revenue their referred accounts generate. To show their commitment to their client's this 5% comes from txtNation themselves not from the newly referred clients. The new clients will keep 100% of their usual revenue in addition to their own revenue generated through the use of txtNation’s services.

txtNation have provided many ways for their existing client's to invite friends, business colleagues or acquaintances to join and begin reaping the extensive benefits that txtNation has to offer and to do this existing client's will need to be logged into the control panel. Once logged in, the affiliate menu with a list of ways to invite people will be clearly marked, making this an easy painless way of potentially generating extra revenue, for example; simply enter the e-mail addresses of those who are being referred and txtNation will generate an email that will then be sent out to their referral providing them with instructions on how easy it is to sign-up with txtNation and how txtNation can launch their business awareness tenfold and how they can soon also be enjoying the benefits of this scheme also. Banners can be placed on web pages with links back to the affiliate sign-up form, text based links and non-electronic means, such as sending out letters and business cards along with the clients’ unique referral code are all examples of available methods of referral, so the only question left to ask is 'what are you waiting for?'

For example txtNation’s mPUSH brand delivers content straight to the paying customers mobiles, whereas the mFUSION brand runs mobile campaigns such as competitions, voting, alerts, reverse auctions, bulk messaging, VCards to name but a few, the mBILL platform aggregates connections through one API to allow clients to build their own mobile services and then there is the mENABLE platform providing a very powerful billing solution for online websites. All of these solutions run on premium short codes which available in over 45 countries worldwide, the latest of which to go live was China which has produced astronomical results.

Contact TxtNation

Posted by Fox on August 14, 2008 at 3:47 AM

twitter have just announced that they'll no longer being sending outbound SMS text alerts to users of their service. Here's the email I received...

Hi,

I'm sending you this note because you registered a mobile device to work with Twitter over our UK number. I wanted to let you know that we are making some changes to the way SMS works on Twitter. There is some good news and some bad news.

I'll start with the bad news. Beginning today, Twitter is no longer delivering outbound SMS over our UK number. If you enjoy receiving updates from Twitter via +44 762 480 1423, we are recommending that you explore some suggested alternatives.

Note: You will still be able to UPDATE over our UK number.

Before I go into more detail, here's a bit of good news: Twitter will be introducing several new, local SMS numbers in countries throughout Europe in the coming weeks and months. These new numbers will make Twittering more accessible for you if you've been using SMS to send long-distance updates from outside the UK.

Why are we making these changes?

Mobile operators in most of the world charge users to send updates. When you send one message to Twitter and we send it to ten followers, you aren't charged ten times--that's because we've been footing the bill. When we launched our free SMS service to the world, we set the clock ticking. As the service grew in popularity, so too would the price.

Our challenge during this window of time was to establish relationships with mobile operators around the world such that our SMS services could become sustainable from a cost perspective.
We achieved this goal in Canada, India, and the United States.
We can provide full incoming and outgoing SMS service without passing along operator fees in these countries.

We took a risk hoping to bring more nations onboard and more mobile operators around to our way of thinking but we've arrived at a point where the responsible thing to do is slow our costs and take a different approach. Since you probably don't live in Canada, India, or the US, we recommend receiving your Twitter updates via one of the following methods.

m.twitter.com works on browser-enabled phones m.slandr.net works on browser-enabled phones TwitterMail.com works on email-enabled phones Cellity http://bit.ly/12bw4R works on java-enabled phones TwitterBerry http://bit.ly/MFAfJ works on BlackBerry phones Twitterific http://bit.ly/1WxjwQ works on iPhones

Twitter SMS by The Numbers

It pains us to take this measure. However, we need to avoid placing undue burden on our company and our service. Even with a limit of 250 messages received per week, it could cost Twitter about $1,000 per user, per year to send SMS outside of Canada, India, or the US. It makes more sense for us to establish fair billing arrangements with mobile operators than it does to pass these high fees on to our users.

Twitter will continue to negotiate with mobile operators in Europe, Asia, China, and The Americas to forge relationships that benefit all our users. Our goal is to provide full, two-way service with Twitter via SMS to every nation in a way that is sustainable from a cost perspective. Talks with mobile companies around the world continue. In the meantime, more local numbers for updating via SMS are on the way. We'll keep you posted.

Thank you for your attention,
Biz Stone, Co-founder
Twitter, Inc.
http://twitter.com/biz

Posted by Fox on July 25, 2008 at 12:19 AM

AdMob, the mobile advertising network, have launch some incredible looking tools for iPhone developers and advertisers looking to target iPhone users.

Advertisers can place optimized image ads and text ads with 'click to call', 'click to text' and 'click to watch' functionality.

Advertisers can also target iPhone users by location and the type of connection being used (wi-fi, 3G and Edge).

AdMob have had iPhone ad code for sometime, but it's results were questionable. The new code addresses the issues faced by advertisers and iPhone developers.

Take a look for yourself: http://www.admob.com/s/solutions/iphone_dev

See Also: AdMob giving away $1,000,000 of Advertising to iPhone Developers

Posted by Fox on July 22, 2008 at 1:05 PM

MobileVerbs Inc. (www.mobileverbs.com), a provider of on-demand Mobile Marketing Platform, has reached an agreement with Zee TV USA Inc. (www.zeetvusa.com), a "flagship" ethnic entertainment channel, to enable premium SMS voting for upcoming programs.

The MobileVerbs service will allow the audience to cast their vote for their favorite artist by simply sending in a SMS message.

"We are excited about the opportunity to leverage the most innovative mobile marketing solution from MobileVerbs," says Jaideep Balial, Vice President and Head of Programming at Zee TV USA.

Posted by Fox on July 22, 2008 at 12:50 PM

CardBoardFish (www.cardboardfish.com), the low-cost SMS specialist, today launched FishText, a mobile application that substantially reduces the cost of national and international ad-free texts from a mobile phone.

FishText is Java-based and runs on most handsets. There is also a web-based version at www.FishText.com. Both bypass a mobile operator’s network and thus enable users to save money for every text message they send.

FishText is free when texting other FishText users and costs from just 1p for all other texts to over 200 countries. After registering, every user gets GBP0.20/EUR0.30 worth of free credit, which is up to 20 free text messages. As an introductory offer until 1 August 2008, FishText users topping up with GBP20 or EUR20 will get their credit doubled, with no expiry date. This will effectively halve the price of all messages, so that texts to South Africa or the US for example will cost just 0.7p.

The only other cost for customers using the mobile application are data charges for the small amount of data used by FishText, which are charged by the mobile operator. Credit, which does not expire, can be purchased on a mobile or via the website by using a range of convenient and common payment methods such as credit/debit card, PayPal or Google Checkout. UK users can also top up via a premium message, and this feature will be available in more countries in the near future.

FishText is ad-free and the recipient will see the sender’s normal mobile phone number without any FishText branding. FishText also enables text messages of up to 459 characters and supports the synchronization of the mobile and the web-based application. FishText uses strong encryption to keep customer data safe and secure, both on the mobile application and on the web.

The mobile application can be downloaded at wap.FishText.com and, once installed, can be used for sending and receiving text messages straight away. FishText also provides an optional virtual mobile number for a small fee, allowing users to have a completely separate messaging account and separate mobile phone number without the need for a contract. The virtual number is a UK number, regardless of which country the user is in.

“As SMS specialists we at CardBoardFish have created an SMS solution that bypasses the operator, passing the savings back to the consumer”, says Ben Fitter, Director of New Media at CardBoardFish. “There are many expensive contracts offering various bundles of text messages; FishText removes the need for this and reduces costs.”

Posted by Fox on July 1, 2008 at 2:15 PM

Low-rates SMS provider signs deal with high-quality messaging specialist for global delivery

Mobile messaging operator TynTec (www.tyntec.com) today announces a deal with international SMS provider InVueTXT (www.invuetxt.com) to provide high-quality and global SMS delivery.  Following the agreement inVueTXT will use TynTec's enterprise quality message delivery services to transmit cut-price SMS to Eastern Europe, Africa and India

inVueTXT will be using this guaranteed delivery to ensure their customer-base has absolute confidence that SMS will be delivered to the intended recipient, regardless of geographic location. The inVueTXT service allows users to download an application straight to their handset which allows them to send text messages to Africa, Eastern Europe and India. Users also have the option to top up their mobile phones with SMS scratch cards for different destinations. This allows users, especially expatriates, to keep in touch with their family and friends by using a cost-effective, reliable service. 

TynTec can ensure each and every SMS sent will arrive at its intended destination thanks to its range of deep-level connections (SS7) into the global mobile telecoms network.  This means TynTec is one of the few companies that can ensure delivery of SMS and full visibility of the message trail from creation to delivery, allowing performance to be measured against rigorous SLAs. 

Michael Kowalzik, CEO of TynTec, said: "inVueTXT needed to be able to offer users global delivery of SMS with absolute confidence.  Working with TynTec means they can ensure that the transmission of each and every SMS is fully tracked and guaranteed to arrive to the target destination within 15 seconds. 

Dr. Pierre H. Wilter, MD, inVueTXT, said: "Working with TynTec means we were able to give our end users the best possible quality of SMS delivery at an unbeatable price. As these are the two things that are at the very core of our proposition, TynTec has allowed us make our service a viable reality.

"TynTec will continue to provide us with the backbone of our service as we expand further into new territories."