Had a reader email me and ask me what I knew about SMSC crime.

Not a lot, other than a passing awareness, was my answer.

I said I’d make like a Who Wants to be a Millionaire and ask the audience.

Is it an issue?

It’s Fine Day today — the UK regulator, PhonepayPlus published details of the companies that it has fined for breach of its regulations last month. Most of the fines are 5,000 or 10,000… small beer, really, especially compared to last month’s 175,000 pound whopper fine for SMS.ac.

2Ergo is banished to the naughty step as a result of one of it’s clients operating a rather suspect free text online service that charges users £1.50/fortnight and whose server appeared to misunderstand the ‘STOP’ opt-out command, a huge no-no when it comes to the PhonepayPlus regulator panel. Effectively, once you signed up, you couldn’t unsubscribe…

2Ergo were reportedly quick at reacting when the regulator came-a-knocking and this stood them in good stead when it came to working out the value of the fine. However:

In coming to its decision on the level of fine to impose, the Panel was particularly concerned by the service provider’s breach history, noting that this was the fourth time within the past year that breaches had been upheld against this service provider.

Deary me. Not good!

CellphoneNews2.com (and, unfortunately, CellphoneNews2.mobi) has officially launched as a digg-style source of mobile-phone related news topics. Users can create a free account and digg up or bury news stories, thereby affecting what shows up on the main page.

It’s a rather neat idea, and easy enough to submit an article. There isn’t any commenting built-in, as there is on Digg, which personally I think adds a bit of value to those submitting articles. Rather than carry on conversation on a 3rd party site, readers can converse on the actual story.

The mobile site is quite neat, as well, though I’m not sure why they chose .mobi rather than easily (and for free) setting up an m.website. Perhaps in the near future the m.site could forward to the .mobi and we’d all be happy?

Have a read of this one…

Link: Calls for Tax Exemption for Charity Sms Donations

Vir2, a provider of SMS marketing and fundraising solutions for charities, has welcomed the decision by UK politican, Mark Oaten MP to file an Early Day Motion calling upon the Government to stop charging VAT (sales tax) on UK charity donations made by SMS. All other methods of giving to charity are VAT exempt. Premium SMS texts are a particularly useful way of collecting money quickly, but the Government are not treating it the same as other methods.

On the face of it, this sounds like a brilliant idea. I support it.

Vir2 favours a solution of creating “VAT free” short codes that can only be used by registered charities for the purpose of fundraising. The awarding of short codes is already regulated by Ofcom and Phone Pay Plus.

The problem? Well, you’ve got four (or five, depending on your viewpoint) huge, huge multinational companies who are earning massive percentages of their revenue from text messaging. Premium text messaging, in particular, contributes a tidy sum.

The last thing your common-or-garden mobile operator needs is the bright light of a consumer movement demanding tax exemption on donations made by text. Whilst one would have thought the key issue resides with Inland Revenue, I reckon that’s just a sideshow. At 17.5%, it’s a bit part in the huge game of premium text.

The tax is nothing, NOTHING when it comes to looking at the revenue share from premium rate text messaging. Operators are routinely taking 40-50% of premium text revenues citing all sorts of bollocks about ‘keeping the lights on’ and having to manage the billing relationship with the end-user.

The net effect is that when you donate to a charity, let’s say, via a £1.50 text message, a good whack — 30-60 pence of that (depending on exact relationships) goes direct to the operator. This is something that winds up the charity no-end, the aggregator and the service provider. I’ve no doubt that it’s also intensely annoying for the person donating the money when they read the small print (”At least 80p of your 1.50 goes to the charity… the rest goes to the thieving bastards…”)

There’s lots of conversations to be had on the topic. Pluses and minuses all round. I strongly favour operators taking a significantly reduced percentage of all premium rate text message traffic, not just charity donations.

But, as the chaps at Vir2 put forward above, I’d settle for charity shortcodes that are both VAT free — although I’d also like to see much higher payouts nearer the 90% mark, at least for charities.

Read more about Vir2 at www.vir2.co.uk.

If I want a UK number to receive text messages, who should I be using? The last time I bought MSISDN numbers, I used…

gosh let me try and remember.

ZIM something. Somebody ZIM.

I’ll get it in a moment……. trying to think.

ZIM EPL! That’s it. They had a pretty good amount of gold, silver and bronze numbers and online activation, last time I looked.

I also used FastSMS as well.

Do you have any recommendations for other suppliers of UK MSISDN numbers?

I called mobile service provider plusCONNECT this afternoon in relation to a story I’m doing on mobile music.

Any readers worked with plusCONNECT at all?

See Grant’s comment below. The 3UK shortcode whois was incorrect and plusCONNECT don’t work with TuneTribe at all ergo the above post is irrelevant.

Children In Need (wikipedia reference), the annual British charity event aimed at helping out Children, is the focus of one of the UK’s biggest messaging aggregators, MX Telecom, and the UK’s most progressive MN(V)O, 3UK.

They’ve both collaborated to launch a mobile donation service for 3UK users, enabling one-click donation. There’s no financial gain either, no 40% cut — the entire cash donation is sent directly to the charity. Nice.

Here’s some more details (other Charities take note, might be worth a chat with 3UK and MX):

3, the mobile media company is collaborating with MX Telecom to provide a mobile donation service for its users to donate directly to the BBC’s Children In Need 2007 Appeal.

A section of 3’s Planet3 Portal will be dedicated to BBC Children In Need, allowing 3’s customers to donate with the touch of a button.

“By giving customers a simple way to donate, 3 is using its 3G internet service to help raise as much money as possible,” said Mark Williamson, Head of Internet Products at 3 UK. “We’re hopeful a sizeable portion of our customer base will play a part in making this year’s BBC Children In Need Appeal the biggest yet”.

Working in partnership, MX Telecom and 3 have made the donation process simple and effective, delivering the entire donation amount to BBC Children In Need with no financial gain to either company.

The MX Telecom developed donation system also allows for Gift Aid, adding an extra 28% of the donated amount to the total received by BBC Children In Need.

Mark Fitzgerald, Managing Director of MX Telecom commented: “We’re delighted MX Telecom’s technology is providing the most cost effective way of donating to the BBC Children In Need Appeal. It’s also positive that the platform will enable BBC Children In Need to appeal to a broader audience.”

Fake texting, the dark art very well known to anyone who’s spent five minutes with a chap from a mobile aggregator, has been continuing to hit the headlines in India. Indeed, so much so, that Yahoo News reports that two high profile lawsuits depend on mystery texts.

Allowing almost anyone to set the originator address when they send text messages is a huge, huge potential problem. It always has been — however it’s oft been controlled by smart aggregators who won’t allow you to set dynamic originators (i.e. so I can send a text message to your girlfriend’s mobile and set the originator field as your mobile number.) but in the past years, more and more companies have been competing to offer this facility by default.

Link: SMS alert: Beware of fake messages - Yahoo! India News

The practice of fraudulent SMS texts has intensified so much that two unresolved high-profile lawsuits are more or less hinging on the mystery of SMS texts.

An hour before his death, Rizwanur Rehman had texted his father-in-law, telling him that he would leave a letter. This and few of the preceding texts have formed the crux of the case that is still shrouded in mystery.

Even Pravin Mahajan’s death threat SMS message to his brother Pramod was considered concrete proof of a motive for murder. But an expert, Rajesh Kumar’s testimony proved that just about anyone could have sent that text to Pramod Mahajan.

But sending fraudulent SMS messages is so simple that it is downright scary.

Googling “Bulk SMS” will bring forth a slew of results, several of them pointing to websites that will permit any user to send text messages to anyone’s cellphone. What is a cause for serious concern is that these websites do not verify their users - users are free to pose as just about anyone.

Got this in from Hugh at Mediaburst. They’re definitely are knocking back the client wins — this time they’re helping Co-operative Travel deliver a mobile marketing campaign across point-of-sale media at Co-operative Food retail stores.

The point-of-sale is actually at the check-out. So if you’re standing waiting in a queue and you’ve got everything out of your trolley and you’re waiting for the really SLOW person in front of you to pack their special carry-to-car bags, why not whip out your phone and text ’summer’ to the shortcode on display? I like it.

I reckon that’ll be successful.

A few more details:

All that shoppers need do is text the word “Summer” to a short code that appears on the in-store screen (link to  promotional image) and they’ll receive the auto response “Save an Extra £50 per booking off last minute summer holidays. For more information call 0870 574 9272, or text “Call Me” to 87103 for a Co-operative Travel booking agent to call them.”

Mobile marketing is another touchpoint for The Co-operative Travel to engage with its customers. Going forward, the company believes mobile marketing will become one of the preferred marketing channels for travel companies in the near term.

The Co-operative Travel is the UK’s largest independent travel provider, with over 400 branches on the high street, state-of-the-art customer call centres and an award-winning website. The Co-operative Travel is not owned by a parent Tour Operator and is therefore able to offer its customers a much wider range of holidays.

I always really like to hear about new client wins and new mobile agency projects such as this. Everyone is far too quiet. I’m delighted to get updates from Mediaburst and Incentivated — however too few agencies are talking about what they’re doing. I think it’s essential for everyone in the industry to be aware of what’s going on, even if it is news about your competitor’s success — because you might find yourself sat in front of a deeply mobile-unfriendly marketing director of a travel company who, if you highlight Mediaburst’s Co-operative Travel story, could all of a sudden become very friendly.

Got this one from Esendex chap, Julian Hucker. Esendex are a mobile services company. Incentivated is a mobile marketing services company. They’re not immediate competitors. Which is why Julian was rather susprised to find that Incentivated have been reportedly using his company name as a keyword in Google.

Link: Julian Hucker

A quick search revealed that the offending party was Incentivated - in fact they were outbidding us so must really have felt that Esendex was a hot search term!

As per my earlier post, I put in my normal telephone call but was suprised by the result. Unfortunately Jonathon, I believe he is the MD, didn’t want to take my call.

However he left it to one of his colleagues to tell me that he didn’t think “it was much of a problem”.

Unusual behaviour — however I’m in two minds. Part of my uber-capitalist perspective thinks this is all-fair-in-love-and-war — is it actually ‘passing off’? Strictly speaking, I’m not so sure — if you type ‘Esendex’ and you see an advertisement for ‘Incentivated’, so be it. Chances are that users searching for Esendex wouldn’t click on an Incentivated link. Different if you’re searching for ‘text services’ or ’shortcodes’.

Anyway, unusual.

Extremely sad news. Paul Griffiths, Dialogue Managing Director, died on Sunday. (Dialogue are a tier-1 UK and Australian based mobile aggregator.)

I’ve never actually connected with Paul, although I have done work with Dialogue in the past. Thanks to Chris Hunter of mytxt who emailed me the news. I phoned Dialogue and spoke to Gemma who confirmed the news.

I’m sure many of those reading, especially from within the UK, knew Paul well. If you did and you feel minded, perhaps you could post a quick memory of your interactions with him on the comments below.

We extend our deepest sympathies to Paul’s family and everyone at Dialogue.

Update: The Dialogue Statement:

It is with the deepest regret that Dialogue Communications informs you of the sudden death of Paul Griffiths, on Sunday 8th July 2007.

Paul was a wonderful, family man, who was a role model in the mobile industry and a respected company leader.
Our immediate thoughts are with Paul’s family, at this sad and difficult time.

Dialogue Communications will continue to develop and expand the business Paul and his business partner Hugh Spear started back in 1994.

For those who knew Paul, and would like to pay their respects, a funeral service will be held in Sheffield at 12 noon on Tuesday 17th July 2007, at the Mother of God RC Church S7 1DX, on the corner of St Ronan’s Road and Abbeydale Road. This will be followed by an interment at Abbey Lane Cemetery, S8 0BQ, and a funeral reception at Sheffield Park Hotel, Chesterfield Road South, S8 8BW.

The family would like to request that no flowers are sent and instead donations made to local Sheffield charity, “PACT”. This charity - Parents Association for Children with Tumours and Leukaemia – assists children with cancer and their families and can be contacted at Sheffield Children’s Hospital, Western Bank, Sheffield, S10 2TH.

Cards can be sent to Louise Griffiths, and her children Rachel, Michael and Isobel at c/o Dialogue Communications, The Workstation, 15 Paternoster Row, Sheffield, S1 2BX.

Please contact info@dialogue.net or call 08700 790 100 ext 501 if you would like to attend the funeral.

Following an investigation by premium rate regulator ICSTIS into claims that Channel 4 chat show Richard & Judy had been conning viewers, their service provider Eckoh were today fined a record £150,000.

ICSTIS rules that the competition ‘You Say We Pay’ had “seriously misled viewers by actively encouraging them to enter the competition after the potential winners had already been selected”. They’ve also passed the case to broadcast regulator Ofcom, for further investigation and possible action under the Ofcom Broadcasting Code.

Announcing the record fine, ICSTIS Chairman Sir Alistair Graham said: “The size of the fine reflects the very serious nature of the breach of our Code of Practice. The Hearing Panel found clear evidence of fundamental failings in the winner selection process. Winners were being chosen before the competition closing deadline, whilst millions of additional viewers were still encouraged to phone in and pay to enter competition but were denied the opportunity of fair consideration. Such reckless disregard for viewers is unacceptable.”

“There is no doubt that the public thoroughly enjoys taking part in premium rate competitions and votes on television. However, as well as being entertaining and fun, services should be reliable and trustworthy. Consumer protection should be at the heart of television rather than a broadcasting philosophy of “the show must go on”. The public should be able to use these services with absolute confidence. Consumers must get a fair deal.”

At the same time, ICSTIS announced they’ll be changing their name to the more friendly “PhonePayPlus” in October 2007.

Link: MX Telecom Inks Deal With Textopoly to Deliver High-Value SMS Campaigns and M-Commerce Solutions

MX Telecom, a leading provider of global SMS text messaging and wireless multimedia solutions, today announced that Textopoly, a mobile marketing agency that integrates technology, creativity and feasibility to drive mobile campaigns, has selected MX Telecom’s Messaging Gateway to deliver SMS messaging campaigns and M-Commerce solutions to its customers. MX Telecom is operating short codes for Textopoly and delivering high value mobile campaigns through its sophisticated messaging platform.

You know a ’scandal’ is big news when BBC Radio One, the yoooof station, covers it during it’s morning news broadcast complete with audio quotes from the GMTV MD.

Link: Phone-in firm sorry over GMTV scandal | Uk News | News | Telegraph

He [The GMTV MD] said GMTV had trusted Opera, but went on: “The fact is it appears two or three people at this telecoms company were taking it upon themselves to do this even without the knowledge of the management.

“If we had known it would have stopped immediately.”

Half of me thinks that GMTV should have checked up to ensure everything was working smoothly — especially after the recent spate of issues with other suppliers and television shows. The other half of me thinks that this is what they were paying Opera for, to sort it all out and make sure the rules and regulations are correctly implemented.

Have a read of this bit, also from the Telegraph article:

It claimed Mark Nuttall, the sales director of Opera, learned what was going on in 2003, but wrote an email which read: “Make sure they never find out you are picking the winners early!”

Opera admitted some staff had been removed from their “normal duties”, but would not give further details.

Ooooh dear.

Bad, very bad for the industry’s public reputation. I wonder, though, if this sort of coverage will actually influence people? Will the frequent users of such services continue as normal?

This is excellent — here’s an overview and some case studies about iTAGG, penned by Co-Founder, Steve Procter.

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Steve writes:

“Delightfully vocal” hey!! ;-)  I like that one…I think!!  As always though Ewan, a fantastic blog, frankly the only mobile industry one I read.

iTAGG is now one of the longer established 2-way sms gateway providers in the UK.  We started back in 2002 and our first service was to provide live goal alerts for the Japan worldcup. With no access to premium rated sms at the time and with people signing up by credit card, and with delivery times being, lets say ‘not guaranteed’, it was certainly an interesting time!  iTAGG was started on the back of my first internet business Easily.co.uk which became one of the leading domain name and hosting companies before we sold it to Netbenefit a few years ago.  It was the concept of searching for available domain names and letting people register them that led us to the idea of letting people register keywords on a shared shortcode.  I am not 100% sure we invented the concept but with nearly 20,000 keywords having been registered on various shortcodes and virtual numbers we’ve had over the years, I feel iTAGG has led the way in bringing low cost 2-way text services to small and medium businesses in the UK.

In 2003 we also became the first company to provide a location based service across all network operators across the whole of the UK (as opposed to a couple of trials in London and a few that still didn’t include Orange).  I have to add that we don’t count Three because until this day they don’t offer their location gateway out.  The service was for The Good Pub Guide and we are now running it for them for the fourth year running.

When the networks finally provided inbound MMS to shortcodes last spring in time for the world cup, iTAGG was again the first to upgrade it’s 60300 shortcode and offer sms and mms keywords on a shortcode to all it’s clients.  We already had a lot of experience with this having provided inbound MMS on long numbers for the likes of Live 8, so it made sense that we expanded our core services to be 2-way sms and also mms.  We’ve played around with our pricing over the years but with the huge takeup of MMS capabilities over the past 6 months we decided to stick to the £25 per year model which is seeing keywords fly off the shelves.  The bulk and premium sms sends then usually come off the back of that, but we do have a number of clients who do pure outbound delivery.

The core iTAGG system provides a web based control panel for people to setup sms sending and receiving services (voting, subscriptions, autoresponders, etc) in 10 minutes.  But the other side is our programming interfaces for developers and this is now growing faster than ever with a lot of small and large businesses realising how easy it is to integrate their own systems with ours.  One example of this is a Global 100 company that has been integrating with us to be able to send out MMS to UK users for a new web and mobile based social networking service they will be launching very soon.  Their developers had sent the first MMS through us within 24 hours of us sending them the technical documentation - they had allowed 4 weeks in their plan to get this part of the system working!

We also did some fun stuff with Ellen MacArthur a few years back when she sailed round the world, in taking image and video feeds directly from her boat webcams and showing them on a wapsite and within java apps that we built and hosted.  We also sent sms alerts every day on her current status and are proud to say that apart from the BBC 10 o’clock news (who funnily enough happened to be broadcasting as she crossed the line!!), we were the first medium to announce she had finished.  So with careful planning sms really can provide a timely and accurate method of communication.

One last case study to show how diverse and wacky small business use of sms and mms can be; we provide a service where workmen who go round digging up holes in the road all day long can send in MMS photos of the start and end of each of their jobs which get automatically fed through to the company’s own systems where they are logged.  This allows the company to provide full records to the local councils, etc to show that each job has been completed.  The workman also gets a text back detailing his next job, etc.  In terms of volumes, we are talking thousands of them every day - which makes “reviewing” our inbound traffic a lot different from when 90% of images were of an adult nature

One thing we’ve always excelled in is knowing the rules.  And wow are there a lot of rules in this game!!  But 5 years experience with a few complaints and ICSTIS raising their eyebrows at you really teaches you that you can’t knock up a gateway overnight and run it from the bedroom.  Sorry but anyone who says they’ve never had a problem has one hell of a surprise coming and some serious procedure altering moments and sleepless nights in store!!!  And just like the domain name game, it may soon be time for some culling of the dodgier players who have jumped on the band wagon thinking this is an easy ride.  Well for anyone thinking delivering millions of sms is easy then please take a read of the several hundred pages of different industry guidelines and then think again.

It is always very interesting to see new players come along in an industry, and as more and more professional companies take part (and there is no doubt, there are some amazing looking companies now!!) it helps establish mobile as a real industry.  For a few years it certainly felt like it wasn’t taken too seriously, and people wondered what the hell it was I did.  It’s also fun to look at who is who in the food chain - we are by no means at the top but even iTAGG have something like a couple of dozen other mobile/sms players using our gateway, and I daresay they have others feeding in to them.  So far from being a nasty back stabbing industry (hey I worked in domain names for 5 years!), and with great blogs like SMSTextNews pulling people together it is amazing how tightly knit and friendly it all is.  Long may it continue…

Steve Procter
iTagg

Tel: +44 207 043 3607
email: steveprocter at itagg.com
MSN: steve at itagg.com

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Steve, super. Really, really good! Thank you for taking the time to write that. It’s thoroughly interesting — I knew just a little bit of that. It’s brilliant to actually read — from the horse’s mouth — what you’ve been up to.

So — if you work in and around mobile — please do send me over a case study and/or an overview of your operations so I can publish it for all.

The first case study is in! Here’s a wicked overview of TxtLocal by founder Alastair Shortland.

- - - - - -

Alastair writes:

You are certainly correct… there is little time at the moment to write press releases!

I run http://www.Txtlocal.com - (Txtlocal Ltd). A website offering a very simple yet highly powerful SMS system- and we are currently doubling sales and SMS traffic each month - and have done for the past 9 months. It is an incredibly exciting time, and each day we witness massive use of our SMS services from hundreds of businesses & services across the UK.

Txlocal is a “bedroom business” which I created in October 2005 because I could see a clear gap in the market for a very simple, low cost and accessible SMS communications system that any member of the public could use. Sign up for free in seconds - import contacts into groups from Excel or grow a list of opt-in contacts using your keyword - type your message - send. Full delivery reporting, scheduling, mailmerge, long 640 character messages, fully changeable “from address”, very simple contact database. Please watch our 3 minute movie (http://www.txtlocal.com/group-text.php) showing how quickly you can set up and send your campaign!

We also launched a very simple programmers API a few months ago which has really set things alight! In minutes anyone can integrate SMS with existing online databases and SMS-enable any website or desktop application. Again, all free except for the low cost messages.

We found many of the other SMS companies were either:

1) Too technical - talking about SMPP and SOAP on the homepage is not great for chinese restaurants

2) Overly simplistic - did not feel like a serious business - could not trust that messages would actually be sent

3) Marketing agencies - no published prices, all gloss and no real info about just how simple SMS marketing is. We phoned one and were quoted £5000 +10p per message just to manage a simple SMS campaign! Daylight robbery - SMS is not complicated and there is no need to charge for anything other than the texts themselves at half that rate!!

Mass adoption is starting to happen - elements of the media (radio text-ins, TV adverts with shortcodes, reality voting shows, county council schemes etc) are raising awareness of SMS as a communications medium with simply awesome potential. How else can you so quickly, cheaply and personally reach out to a group of associates or customers?

In 1 year we have grown to over 4,000 customers - have a look at some of the feedback. http://www.txtlocal.com/text-advertising.php Very impressive I’m sure you will agree. Everyone from nightclubs to churches to darts teams to stag do’s. Anything you can imagine. We are in constant contact with hundreds of customers and have never had a single complaint, just very positive feedback

Every day we hear fantastic stories about how SMS marketing is changing businesses across the UK.

- Opticians, doctors, driving schools - texting personalised appointment reminders - much more effective and cheaper then calling customers directly or writing letters. Total outlay of less than £5 to insantly contact 100 people!
- Football teams announcing a change of fixture, match results, team updates - directly into the hands of people that have chosen to receive them. Read by 100% of receipients unlike email or letters.
- Charities co-ordinating team members and filling rotas.
- Last minute cut-price ticket availability at the theatre
- Poker tournement meet-up information
- The big match at the city centre pub - “Come down this afternoon and show this message on the door for free entry”
- Confirmation of salary payments
- the list is simply endless…

We have blue chip customers like Pizza Hut, Rileys Snooker Halls, Tetley, Lloyds TSB, AXA Insurance… and although this is fantastic, Txtlocal was created with small businesses in mind - and we are seeing scores of these come to us each day.

We are now in a position to really start shouting about Txtlocal - and introduce the concept of opt-in group SMS to the whole UK business community and local community groups.

If you have any ideas about how we can push Txtlocal further and raise awareness then please get in touch!

Cheers Ewan & thanks for your fantastic blog.

Alastair Shortland
Operations Director
Txtlocal Ltd (http://www.txtlocal.com)
07740 101098
MSN: al.shortland at btinternet.com

- - - - - -

Alastair, brilliant — that’s exactly what I was thinking when I wrote the post yesterday. Thank you very much for taking the time to write it.

So, if like Alastair, you work in the mobile industry — whatever business line — please send me a case study and overview of your business that I can publish here on SMS Text News. Simply email it — or check here for more guidance.

If you’re an SMS aggregator or similar in North America and you don’t have much in the way of TV related services — or want to draw upon the experience of a UK company who’ve been dealing with the text-mad UK public, read on. Siren are on the hunt for partners. And they’ve got a ton of case studies and services that will, I reckon, get clients in North America salivating.

Link: UK SMS TV Pioneer Seeks US Partnership

Chris Pressley, Siren’s CEO, comments: “The SMS TV games market is highly competitive, but one which we now lead in the UK. Our success can be put down to a combination of the quality of our on screen graphics, the level of game play and viewer experience and the investment in the technology platforms that underpin the service.” Chris added, “The announcement today reflects our desire to hear from interested US companies who might be willing to represent our platform in this exciting and fast growing market.”

Siren do a ton of work in the UK and, well, they’re on the hunt for partners in North America.

If you reckon that might be you, pick up the phone and call up Oli Madgett on +44 845 225 2800. Tell him I said to give him a call. He’ll introduce you to Chris or Andrew for further discussions.

The last time I talked to Oli, it was to phone him up and demand to know where he was for our 1pm meeting. Heh.

He was a little bit shocked to get such a call because I’d called the wrong Oli in my phone book. What a nutter I am. He’s a good chap so give him a call.

Fakemytext.com is a service similar to the likes of Textanonymous and the raft of anonymous texting services out there.

I don’t have a real issue with these types of services - that is, until someone sends a fake text from my number and causes no small amount of havoc.

I think there’s definitely a humour element to them — I’m sure it’s quite a fun tool to wind up your friends, particularly if they don’t quite know that text messages can be so easily faked. However, the moment that someone goes to the media with this sort of thing or a related story, there will be huge pressure piled on the regulator and the regulator will all-of-a-sudden announce an immediate investigation and, before you know it, aggregators will be told to tighten up their dynamic-originator services. I can absolutely see that happening.

Meantime….

I had a note in from a reader looking for a recommendation for a premium SMS supplier for EU and USA. My mind has gone blank. Can you recommend anyone — or can you help? If so, please post a reply here (he’ll be reading) or send me a mail and I’ll connect you.

Check out Julian’s post here…

Link: Julian Hucker: Business SMS: Is it time for a Code of Practice?

Our focus at Esendex is primarily on Business SMS services and one of the things that we’ve been considering is whether the industry is ready for a Code of Practice.

ICSTIS’s remit is obviously premium rate services and most other regulation is restricted to marketing activity.

Whilst it goes without saying that Spam is unacceptable, there are many areas that are not specifically covered by these guidelines, such as:

- Recommended / permitted times for sending a Business SMS message (my own bank’s daily SMS bank balance is sent out at about 6.15am each day)
- Recommendations on the frequency of messages
- Information on the sender

Is this an area that any other SMS providers / aggregators have a view on?

So I’m not an aggregator nor am I an SMS provider, but I have a view on this. I think a code of practice could be useful.

What idiot bank sends text messages at 0615 in the morning? That’s bordering on the offensive!

SMS Text News sponsor, Clickatell, are fairly chalking up the announcements this month.

Link: Clickatell Leads Charge for Global SMS Capability: Financial News - Yahoo!
Finance

Clickatell Inc., the world’s #1 global mobile messaging operator, today announced its customers can receive reply SMSs using its popular Communicator application. Visitors to CTIA Wireless in Orlando from 27 - 29 March will be able to see demonstrations of the service at Clickatell’s booth # 4668.

With strong coverage in the North American market, the two-way, or reply SMS, functionality is available on a record breaking 400+ networks worldwide.

This launch of two-way text functionality allows Clickatell customers to receive replies to the local and international SMSs they have sent, straight to their Communicator inbox. This powerful functionality allows businesses and consumers to engage in a dialogue or launch a response-centric alert program.

Don’t underestimate the value of two-way connectivity. It’s absolutely critical in my view. I can remember trying to get that functionality in America a few years back. Geez, it was that difficult, we had to host SIM cards in London on Nokias. I kid ye not. So excellent news from Clickatell.

(If, by the way, you’re hunting for some sort of SMS connectivity, do talk to Clickatell or drop me a note and I can introduce you. I’ve introduced quite a few readers in the past months and they’ve all reported super service.)

Got a recommendation? Sam’s hunting for Ukraine and Russian connectivity.

Link: SMS Text News » Worldwide premium rate shortcode service required

I am in need of a premium rate sms and shortcode provider for Ukraine / Russia but cant find anyone who supplies and manages these networks

If you can help, please mail me some details (ewan@smstextnews.com) or post a comment below.

Update: Found a supplier!

SMS Text News sponsor, Clickatell, launched a mobile messaging portal for mobile operators today. The service enables operators to offer small and medium sized businesses, system integrators and application service providers carrier grade, IP-based SMS connectivity, and a sophisticated integration and message delivery environment.

As the Clickatell announcement puts it (and, well, it’s something I agree with too):

A fully managed and certified application showcase allows software vendors to commercially offer mobile applications, toolkits and plug-ins to enterprise portal customers, further driving messaging traffic.

For the last seven years Clickatell has been managing the interface between businesses and operators and currently has over 8,000 service providers and developers connected to its gateway.

The more the industry can do things like this, the better. I know there are pros and cons, but really, I’ve been on the coalface. I’ve been sat there in meetings or on teleconferences arsing around with technicians from mobile operators who never seem to understand the end-users of their technology.

Witness, for example, the Canadian wireless company who wondered “why the hell” (a direct quote!) anyone would want to send a text message to a screen in a nightclub. We pointed them to Impulse, we showed them the video of it working in England, we showed them case studies, stats, the whole shebang.

But still they couldn’t be arsed to unlock their network and give us a bit of a hand because they didn’t get our service.

No matter how many times I would yell, “But we’re talking about PUTTING MONEY IN YOUR POCKETS,” nothing seemed to work. Until we found an aggregator that sorted it for us.

So anyone that can stand in front of the mobile operators and just plug me straight in and let me get on with it, right on. More please!

Seen the Eckoh press release about the recent goings on?

Eckoh is aware that its integrity and professional reputation has been brought into question by a series of articles in the press in the past three weeks based on information provided by a “source”.

The information that has been provided has been largely misleading, inaccurate, and more recently completely fabricated. The Company’s primary concern has always been that the public are not deceived and it believes that it has a duty to defend its reputation and those of its customers.

As a result, the Company is taking legal advice against those supplying this information and is reporting the matter to the police today.

So does that mean that Eckoh know exactly who’s briefing against them? They must know (or suspect?) the identity of the ’source’ in order to whack’em with some sort of legal action. But then again, you’re not exactly whacking anyone with anything if you’re taking legal advice about them. You’re just threatening. And telling the public that you’re sort-of-doing-something-about-it.

I’d like to see some writs issued.

Some good old fashioned fighting-the-corner, fighting-for-the-industry sort of thing.

If Kate Winslet can win damages from newspapers discussing her weight, one imagines that Eckoh could do similar, given the ‘misleading, inaccurate and more recently completely fabricated’ stories being published. But it’s not that simple, not when it’s a ’source’ being quoted delivering the fabrications — as apposed to the media outlets.

I think it’s good that Eckoh are communicating anyway. I was pleased to read the press release. I await the next one with no small amount of interest. The sooner this whole thing can be addressed, dealt with, managed and closed (at least in the public mind), the better.

Alex spotted a big spread in today’s Sun newspaper claiming that David Guest was axed from ITV’s I’m a Celebrity show by mistake — because of a fumbling of text votes, allegedly, so the article reports, by mobile service provider, MIG.

More than 30,000 phone votes for Gest, 48 — favourite to win the ITV1 show — are alleged to have been lost.

Premium phone rate service regulator Icstis last night began an investigation into the new row over phoneline voting for top shows — and asked to see our files.

The probe came as the firm handling the votes claimed the emails were fakes.

ITV admitted there had been a computer system failure on the night of the vote, November 30 last year — but said all votes were eventually counted.

ITV questions the validity of the ‘leaked emails’, calling them a ‘malicious fabrication’.

No response on either of the MIG or Eckoh websites as yet.