Mobile Inc » SMS

Turntable.fm Use SMS To Open Their Office Doors Instead Of Keys

Murat — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 02:38:50 +0000

In 2006 a young man called William Donelson went into a piercing shop in Ontario to get a RFID chip inserted into his hand. His goal was to be able to log on to his computer and unlock specially modified doors just by waving his hand at them. No more losing or fumbling with keys or passwords.

The same motivation has spurred Billy Chasen of Turntable.fm to create a door lock for this office that can opened by sending it a text message. No skin slicing involved.

There’s a couple of cool things this lock does:

When you text ‘close’ it will text you back ‘closed’ once it’s been locked.
If you text ‘status’ it will tell you whether the door is locked or not
Ability to create a whitelist of people that are also allowed to unlock the door.

Check out the video.

[Via TNW]

TFL Reveals Some More Details About SMS Bus Tracking

Murat — Sun, 07 Nov 2010 13:14:58 +0000

My post about Transport For London enabling SMS and mobile web bus tracking in October remains popular on this site (not sure why), so I’ve been keeping tabs on what TFL are up to.

Some more information has been posted on the their website along with a likely screenshot of the service itself.

Sadly the service will cost your standard rate to send a message, plus a 12p charge to receive the response.

However the mobile web bus tracking will be free of course.

More info here

FINALLY! | YO! Sushi Uses SMS For Offer Instead Of Wasteful Email-Then-Print Vouchers

Murat — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 19:34:19 +0000

If you’ve been reading this blog over the past year you’ll remember me ranting on about how there is a genuine business case for restaurants, brands and retailers to take their PDF/email voucher campaigns and make them SMS.

The situation still remains the same, Pizza Express, GBK, La Tasca, Gap and all the other places you know and love STILL make you print vouchers that have NO UNIQUE codes on them. If paper isn’t tracked, why should mobile to start off with? When consumers gradually change their behaviour and begin to use these things THEN look towards EPOS upgrades and improvements, I’m not saying tracking isn’t important, but right now all you need is a single SMS without anything dynamic.

This doesn’t call for some expensive, 3rd party solution, it just needs to be something you can show at point of sale. Unfortunately the industry is littered with people who want to over complicate this by trying to license their technology, stalling any sort of progress with custom solutions that require some impact of the business, whether it’s EPOS configurations or coupon management systems.

Anyway, so it looks like YO! Sushi have taken the first step towards saving some trees and me having to buy ink for my printer – by introducing SMS vouchers instead of paper. JOY!

I’d been waiting for the day when I got my weekly Money Saving Expert email from Martin containing an offer using SMS and today it happened. Good offer too, check it out:

If you text in you’ll get back a unique code which you give to the cashier. YO! Sushi have fancy EPOS terminals so I’m guessing they can accept codes without too much effort? Would be nice to get some clarification on this anyone?

I think the iTagg are the guys behind this, good work!

Tags On Sharks Trigger SMS Alerts For Life Guards In Australia

Murat — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 07:54:00 +0000

If you live and holiday in Europe you tend to not worry about sharks when splashing about in the sea, but now that I’ve moved to Sydney the chances of me getting eaten have increased considerably making me wary of every bit of seaweed and shadow in the water.

My current method of shark attack prevention is making sure that there are at least 10 or more people in front of me so I don’t land the first bite.

Luckily scientists have come up with a slightly more advanced way to stop people from getting hurt. They’ve tagged over 70 great white sharks with transmitters which trigger any of 18 acoustic seabed receivers. Whenever a shark is close to a beach or shoreline, the receivers fire off an SMS message to life guards within 2 minutes of first detection.

The first trial will take place in Perth, scientists are hoping the data collected by tracking the sharks will reveal why they come to shore and seasonal habits.

How long before one of those sharks gets its own Twitter account with auto-updates?

[Via PSFK & The Telegraph]

No related posts.

Producer Uses Oscars To Show Cheeky SMS Call-To-Action

Murat — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 13:40:33 +0000

Just been flicking through the news I missed last week and saw this little gem.

When The Cove won the Oscar for Best Documentary, one of its producers, Ric O’Barry held up a sign saying “Text DOLPHIN to 44144″ which directs people to sign a petition to shut down dolphin slaughter in the Cove. The petition will be sent to President Obama and the Japanese Ambassador to the U.S., Ichiro Fujisaki.

The cameras cut away a few seconds after the sign was held up (you can watch it here) but even still 32,000 responses came flooding in. Once the news started to spread over Twitter and blogs, it went even higher.

This got me thinking, what if this happened on the biggest stage in the entire world…the World Cup Finals?

Imagine if a player scored a goal and lifted his top up to reveal a SMS call-to-action? Or how about the captain after lifting the World Cup? The response rates would be insane, any worthy cause could get a massive boost.

[Via Awards Daily]

Concept | The Future Of Mobile Advertising | On-Handset Semantic SMS Advertising

Murat — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 15:45:52 +0000

For a long time it’s been clear in my mind where mobile advertising is heading – firmly in the hands of handset manufacturers. Google and Apple now have their own ad networks meaning the two user experience juggernauts will own where the ads come from as well as where they appear.

I keep banging on about the opportunity they have to ‘redefine’ mobile advertising and ‘start from scratch’. What I mean by this is that the limitations of many current methods such as SMS, MMS, Bluetooth and banner ads can be erased because the manufacturers can make up completely new ad channels that utilise features of the phone. And because this will be achieved by using data rather than messaging, it allows for better value for advertisers using CPC, CPA and CPM. All this has influenced the following concept..

The Concept

On device semantic SMS advertising would turn every SMS the user ever sends or receives into an advertising opportunity for the manufacturer. At first that might sound massively intrusive but it’s all about the execution.

The thought that spawned this concept was making advertising so useful that it could change its perception in the eyes of the user so they wouldn’t even question its placement on the phone. I wanted to blur the lines so the user would see it as a tool rather than a direct ad channel.

It works by recognising keywords or the meaning of the sentence/conversation within an SMS and adding dynamic functionality to those words. For example, your friend asks you if you want to go to the cinema, the word ‘cinema’ would be highlighted and clicking it would reveal cinemas in the area.

Within a few clicks you can find out film times and buy a ticket, all within the device interface. This purchase can be tracked and the manufacturer gets a cut of the profits.

Other monetization methods include ‘sponsored’ placements.

If you look at this from a user perspective, it feels more like a service than advertising. The key element here is that this is ‘pull’ advertising, the user doesn’t get interrupted or slowed down with what they are doing. They see the highlighted word and make the decision to find out more.

There can be hundreds, even thousands of words/sentences that can trigger dynamic content. Although not every word can be monetised, there should still be an effort to act like a service and provide useful information for certain words/conversations when possible to increase usage.

For example:

Provides weather based on a conversation between two people:

Context Vs Semantic

Although this idea could work using either technology, I wanted to explain the reasons why each has it’s advantages and disadvantages for the end user.

Contextual advertising has been core of online advertising for many years with companies such as Google and Yahoo integrating it within their search engines and other products. It is readily available and generally easy to implement.

The technology looks for a number of keywords within the SMS such as ‘cinema’, ‘food’ or ‘restaurant’ and returns ads or menu options accordingly. For example the message “Let’s go get some food” would show a list of restaurants or food outlets if the word ‘food’ is clicked. However if the message said “That food didn’t make me feel very good at all”, it would still show the same results as the previous message as it has no way to understand what the user meant.

These differences could potentially waste advertisers money (if they have sponsored results, CPM etc) but also affect the usefulness of the feature for the end user.

This is where semantics comes in. Semantic advertising looks at the meaning of the entire message, not just certain words. In the example above it would recognise the user wasn’t actually interested in eating food at all and felt ill, therefore it could suggest nearby pharmacies instead. The ability to understand the persons needs more accurately will benefit the both them and the advertiser immensely. Another example is distinguishing the difference ‘Jaguar’ the animal or the car manufacturer when scanning the entire sentence.

Semantic advertising is still in it’s infancy right now and has arguably yet to be perfected. As we move toward a more ad-funded digital future, it will play a key part in analysing status updates, tweets and any other ‘lifestreaming’ data from users (with their consent of course) to create an advertising utopia.

The Future

Thinking further into the future, this sort of technology would be able to analyse your needs in real time which could influence the advertising you get when you browse the mobile web or watch a video on YouTube.

The only company I can see pulling off this sort of thing is Google, they’re already working on semantic search and currently provide some of the most useful free services on the web. But I expect Apple to be on the case too.

I’ve no doubt they are heading towards more integrated advertising models within the handset user interface.

Comments? Suggestions?

Incentivated Powers A Really Complicated Mobile Call-To-Action For BA Flight Info Service

Murat — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 22:41:43 +0000

Mobile solutions company Incentivated power the new SMS flight info service for British Airways. Fantastic, SMS is easy peasy, so let’s hear more about it:

According to Mobile Marketing Watch:

The service, available for UK- and US-registered mobile phones, enables users to get up-to-the-minute flight information for yesterday, today and the next five days. Users text D for Departures or A for Arrivals followed by a space, the departure date of the flight (in the form DDMMYY or MMDDYY for the US) and the British Airways flight number (eg BAXXXX) to 60747 in the UK, 70615 in the US.

OOohh laawwd – how the hell is anyone meant to use this service again if they have to remember all that?

So I decided to give it a try and deliberately entered false details to see if I would get a error message back saying explaining how to do it correctly. I.e “Sorry that was wrong, please try again by entering D or A….”

Nope! If you get it wrong, well you better just remember the format and get it right.

How could this be improved:

A good error text-back notifying the user that there has been a problem with their intial SMS due to typing incorrectly and tell them how to do it properly.

Something this complicated would benefit from changing the user journey from one single message to three. Here’s how:

User texts in either D or A (or departures/arrivals) to shortcode
BA sends back message asking for departure date
User sends back departure date
BA sends back message asking for flight number
User sends back flight number
BA sends flight info. JOB DONE.

That way the user doesn’t need to remember how to correctly format the message because they get reminded at every stage. Yes it would cost BA more in SMS costs but repeat usage would increase.

Wow | Text “Haiti” To 90999 Has Just Reached $1,020,000 In Less Than 24Hours

Murat — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 08:26:27 +0000

UPDATE 11.30pm GMT : It has now topped $4 million in 36 hours

Twitter and Facebook proving they can actually be used to save the world.

The American Red Cross have been raising money for the earthquake disaster in Haiti and the tweet above has just been put out by the State Department member Jared Cohen.

The New York Times have just said that Facebook is reporting 1500 status updates PER minute containing the word Haiti.

I much prefer Social Media being used for this rather than trying to complain or communicate with a brand (who don’t care).

Why Location Based Coupons/Advertising Won't Work In Its Current Form

Murat — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 21:48:29 +0000

No sooner than my post about location about to become interesting for consumers, Techcrunch posted an article about a concept by AT&T for ‘on-the-go’ mobile coupons.

Ever since the dawn of time mobile marketers have been using the ‘Starbucks coupon’ example to sell the idea of location based coupons into brands and businesses. I’ve used it a few times because it’s the easiest way to explain to someone who’s ‘non-mobile’ about location and the possibilities.

The scenario goes like this, you sign up for a mobile coupon service, fill out your profile, ticking coffee and various other things as your interests. You walk past Starbucks one day and BAM, your mobile beeps and it’s a 20% discount SMS coupon for a cup of coffee. Then you stroll in, extremely happy and redeem your coupon. Win for you and a win for Starbucks.

This basically applies to the concept by operator AT&T, the idea is simple, as consumers walk around a city, they get mobile alerts whenever their favourite nearby stores and restaurants have a deal. It works by the mobile operator constantly monitoring the customers location (opt-in of course), then matching that info to available retailers to push coupons/info.

Sounds great, apart from one problem….it uses SMS.

Firstly you will never escape the fact that SMS advertising messages are intrusive. They arrive into your inbox just like personal messages, they don’t have a separate folder, they don’t arrive silently, they don’t generate a different on-screen alert or icon. Oh and if it’s a coupon, you can’t sort by expiry date.

Just like any consumer, I’m interested in around 100+ different brands, everything from clothing, electronics, all the way to peanut butter. Do I want discounts on these brands? Hell yes (I love those printed vouchers), gimme as much as possible. Do I want my phone beeping several times a day and my inbox filling up? Hell no.

No matter how targeted the coupon is, there is no way a location based SMS service can remain useful and scale to cover the amount of brands an average consumer likes without severely pissing them off, regardless of opting-in.

Often you’ll hear the answer “Well you can just set how many offers you want per day so you’re not inundated”, however it’s not the amount of offers that’s the problem ‘cos I want them all, it’s the way it’s delivered to the phone. SMS just isn’t the right technology to handle it. Anyway, no matter how über targeted that advert, it needs to find a way through a number of real life obstacles first.

Pushing adverts and coupons to people based on their location has so many variables involved to get a positive reaction. One of the 1000+ things to consider are – when did they last get paid? Are they in a hurry? Are they waiting for someone they met on Saturday night to text them back? All of these things will have a influence on the person receiving that coupon to a) not be pissed off and b) actually use it.

It’s clear that SMS ads can’t scale for the consumer but what about the advertiser? The costs for SMS and location lookups aren’t cheap. So how do you get small/medium sized businesses involved? Do you really want to keep getting offers from McDonald’s, Coca-Cola and Nike all the time?

The consumer research I’ve done has made it clear that it’s not only variety of businesses and brands that’s important but the type of communication too. People don’t just want to be told about discounts in an effort to constantly part them with their money, it’s about things like free gigs, days out, local events and all that other stuff.

Research I was involved in at Nokia showed that even in emerging markets where people are more receptive to ads, SMS push advertising can still annoy the hell out of people.

The solution?

Looking towards the future, mobile coupons need seamless integration into the phone operating system. Especially with technologies like NFC coming into the mix. No downloads and no crap, just comes as standard like your SMS inbox. Pushing adverts is still the right solution because location based ‘pull’ is unrealistic.

What if you had another inbox for coupons that used your data connection? Always running in the background, it’s own entity on your phone, and constantly updated with proper coupon management.

When a coupon comes in you get a notification on your homescreen which contains the companies logo and offer info, then fades after a few seconds and then goes into your coupon wallet. You can sort coupons by expiry date and distance as well as get alerts if one is about to expire. You’ll even be able to control the way alerts sound and act.

If you take Tweetdeck on the PC/Mac as a example. The way it deals with large amounts of constantly updated information could provide some great learning’s for how coupon wallets should work for the average person who walks past dozens of shops every day.

Large detailed notifications provide enough information at a glance for you to decide to find out more info, it’s unobtrusive and has enough options to customise alerts so it doesn’t annoy you.

Here is a Tweetdeck notification:

Using this, I’ve come up with a coupon notification on the mobile phones homescreen:

Now lets look at how the Coupon Wallet might look:

The benefits over SMS are clear, a real solution for mobile coupons rather than a hack of a existing messaging technology.

The only company I can see delivering something like this is Google. Not only do they have a great mobile operating system which more and more handsets are adding everyday, but also the ad serving technology to easily enable small, medium and large businesses into location advertising. They mastered it with search advertising and they’ll do it with location too.

It’s not just about premium brands, it’s about huge inventory made up of small and medium sized businesses, allowing thousands of locations to push ads to users. Big brands are great if you live in a major city but there many high streets and towns that aren’t oozing with well known names. Just take a look at Google Local Business Centre, it’s so damn easy for a independent store to get involved in location and coupons, that’s how it needs to be.

Google have already started integrating coupons with maps, it’s very early days but businesses can use printed or mobile coupons with their company map placement. The way it works at the moment is by you actively searching for businesses in maps and if they have a coupon your in luck. But what if your in a area you already know? How will you find out coupon offers in your area? That’s where the Coupon Wallet idea comes in.

I’m eagerly waiting to see how this pans out, third parties like Cellfire will always have their applications but once it becomes a out-of-the-box mobile feature they’ll be in trouble. Whether it’s integrated with Mapping applications or stand-alone, it’s definitely coming.

Nike Chalk Bot | Prints Your SMS Messages On The Tour De France Route

Murat — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 00:32:43 +0000

God damn you Nike, letting your agencies run wild and be massively innovative with the brand. How dare you.

I totally missed this campaign which ran in the summer, it’s brilliant all round. Nike teamed up with the guys at Tour De France to display messages of “hope, perseverance and love” with the road-printing Chalk Bot.

The robot was programmed to paint text and online messages in yellow chalk along the 2,200 mile route of Tour De France bike race. The messages were aimed at being inspirational to the cyclists and push them that little bit further as part of the Lance Armstrong Livestrong campaign (Lance beat cancer to come back and win the Tour De France several times and now spreads awareness).

After the Chalk Bot prints the message, it takes a picture of the road, logs the time and GPS location then sends it back to the user. Amazing.

Check out the Chalk Bot photogallery

[Via Switched & Trendhunter]