UK shortcode whois service – sort of

By on July 21, 2006 in News

Picture_1_30While I was hunting for details of the owner of the shortcode being used for the Miami Vice movie’s mobile services (about which I’ve just blogged), I remembered this Three service I found the other day. 

There must be a UK shortcode whois registry somewhere that tells you who owns what.  There must be?  If there is, I couldn’t find it. 

This Three service is almost as good though.  Ostensibly it’s provided to help Three customers check if services are available and contact service operators in the event of a query.   However, provided the shortcode is working on Three, it’s pretty neat for looking up who own’s ‘em too.

I looked up the QVC shortcode (80782) and the image on the left is a screenshot of the results. Smart, eh?

You can find the service here:
http://3mail.com/customer/shortCodes.omp

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  • http://james-mobile.blogspot.com/ James

    Evan,

    There is an unofficial shortcodewhois in the US – usshortcodeswhois.blogspot.com, though I’m not sure about the UK.

    Also, thank you for your great stories & updates. I follow & reference your stories quite frequently as I’m trying to aggregate updates on the latest mobile marketing tactics & social networking trends globally on my blog (james-mobile.blogspot.com).

    Cheers,
    James

  • Jonathan

    Here is a link that provides some info on premium rate UK shortcodes and numbers. Not very detailed though, and in fact can be misleading. As an example, the code 61111 used by the National Lottery. A query returns it as belonging to O2, though I guess they’re just the service provider.

    http://www.icstis.org.uk/consumers/ncd/default.asp

  • njar

    essentially in the UK an SMS aggregator activates a shortcode, and when they do they submit the details to both ICSTIS and the respective network operators. Where a shortcode is used as a shared code for example, the aggregators name will come up. O2 Broker (SMS aggregator now effectively defunct) holds this code, they’ve either purposely or inadvertently not notified ICSTIS of the camelot contact details. The lists are kept ‘relatively’ up to date, but shortcodes do tend to be recycled or killed/livened on short notice and as such keeping the list to the minute accurate is tricky.

    Nice code you picked originally Ewan :)

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