Clickatell (SMS Text News sponsors) were in San Francisco today at the RSA Data Security Conference showcasing their on-demand authenticator SMS service.

For a while now I’ve firmly believed that this is the way to go. I used to have to carry around a SecurID card with me everywhere I went just in case I needed to be able to login to the servers. Although it did feel a little sexy carrying it when it was credit card sized, when they upgraded them to rather boring looking keychains, I switched off.

I kept forgetting mine. Worse, so did each of our IT team. It got to the point where I’d be calling them and hoping that they had their SecurID card on them — because without that there was little point in phoning them. It would be my problem to have to drive to the office.

Not with this new service from Clickatell and RSA. You can now be sent a ‘tokencode’, on-demand, via text message. You’re actually sent back an RSA-generated one-time password to use to login to the corporate network (or whatever server). The password, naturally, only has a shelf life of a few minutes before it becomes unusable. This is the sort of thing that’s going to get CIOs and CTOs relaxing and implementing it quickly, I reckon. RSA. Clickatell. They know what they’re doing.

Here’s the overview from the Clickatell service page:

RSA and Clickatell have partnered to enable delivery of SecurID ® tokencodes to mobile devices via SMS/text. You can now extend the benefits of the market leading two-factor authentication solution to users mobile handsets. Clickatell’s global messaging service enables users to request and receive tokencodes with assured delivery on the most extensive, carrier-grade infrastructure available. Clickatell reaches over 200 countries and 600+ networks.

Using RSA Authentication Manager 7.1 and Clickatell, IT staff can support a simple self-service model for provisioning without the involvement of helpdesk resources. The joint solution allows Enterprises to on-board users when business needs demand:

- VPN access for occasional users or temporary access for employees regardless of their location
- Two-factor authentication for contractors and vendor partners
- Access for large numbers of users in a business disruption scenario

I’ve had a few people ask now and again so I thought I’d post this final para: Just in case you were wondering about our sponsor, Clickatell, they’re a global messaging leader. One of the biggies, focusing on mobile messaging services for small, medium and huge enterprises across a range of verticals. They’re connected to 700 networks in over 200 countries, serving more than 8,000 customers including the likes of Barclays, BBC, CNN, Continental Airlines, First National Bank, Metropolitan Life, Oracle, Shell. A veritable who’s who. And they’re Sequoia-backed too.

A quick note to thank our main advertiser, Clickatell. As well as providing messaging services to over 8,000 companies across the planet, their support helps to keep the lights on here at SMS Text News.

If you’re looking to buy messaging services — in particular bulk SMS, do take a bit of time and peruse their services. By all means talk to them directly but if you like, talk to me and I’ll connect you to the right person there.

SMS Text News sponsor, MAXroam are offering a special Valentine’s Day top up deal –

Link: Happy Valentine’s Day from MAXroam

Since most of our customers are away from their loved ones today, we would like to offer them a special MAXroam promotion to call home.
Top up your account by €50 and we will give you 10% extra talk time free.

If you’re like me and in Barcelona you will have almost 30 minutes free to chat and tell your loved how special she/he is to you.

All you have to do is log on to MAXroam and we’ll automatically add a FREE €5 TopUp when you buy a €50 TopUp using the promotional code: ‘LOVEU2’. Offer available up to midnight PST February 14th 2008. Only one FREE €5 TopUp per customer on purchase of €50 TopUp.

MAXroam, sponsors here at SMStextnews, have recently announced some pretty cool updates to their global SIM card product. The most impressive addition is live billing, which allows users to instantly see real-time updated account details. They’ve also added the ability to include local fixed-line numbers to your MAXroam account from 52 different countries. This way, contacts in other countries are not paying extra for the ability to call you. Free call forwarding and outgoing SMS for $.05 are also now available to users.

If you’re a heavy traveler, you should definitely check out MAXroam. I know I’ve had a few headaches attempting to get a local SIM on some recent trips, and knowing how much that SIM will cost me for different features. You should note, however, that MAXroam does not currently offer data roaming, though I’m sure that’s in the works.

I was chatting yesterday with Dan from Green news site, Greenbang.com about bill shock. He was recently over in San Francisco for a few days and we caught up. Once or twice I had to call him to arrange where meet and so on. I was calling him on my USA mobile. Since he was only in America for a few days, he didn’t bother to do the standard thing — that is, buy a local SIM card. Why not? Well, it’s a hassle, right?

That decision cost Dan a whopping 270 quid when he got home.

Talk about bill shock. He didn’t use his phone that much. When he did get a call, he was brief — as he knew he was on international silly rats.

If you’re like Dan and you travel a lot — definitely, definitely go and get yourself a MAXroam SIM. Not only are they an SMS Text News sponsor but you will never, ever be without service, provided you’re in a country that has GSM cellular capability — because you can use it in nearly every single country on the planet. The rates are generally far below normal operator roaming charges and you get that warm fuzzy feeling of comfort (that I rejoice in) knowing that just in case your home operator has screwed up, you’ll always be connected with your MAXroam SIM.

A MAXroam SIM is yours for €29.99 inclusive of €5 initial call credit. All managed online and backed by a wickedly friendly, enthusiastic and capable management team.

My favourite feature of the MAXroam service (apart from always-being-connected wherever I am) is this:

When you first sign up you can choose a phone number for your SIM in the USA, France, UK, Poland, Italy, Sweden or Ireland free of charge. You can add as many as 50 numbers (additional numbers start from EUR2 per month) to your SIM from any of the following countries.

I’m about to go and configure all my local numbers.

MAXroam (SMStextnews sponsor) has announced their ‘Roaming Mad’ story competition, which rewards consumers for sharing their horror stories of high roaming rates. The MAXroam SIM, recently launched by Cubic Telecom, is a borderless SIM card offering significantly lower roaming rates. The MAXroam SIM also eliminates the hassle of getting a local SIM and trying to figure out the rates for it.

The Roaming Mad story competition encourages consumers to submit their stories of crazy roaming bills and attempts to get a local SIM when travelling. All entries will automatically be rewarded with a EUR5 voucher off a MAXroam SIM. Ten EUR50 vouchers will be handed out to the travellers with the highest monthly roaming bills, and the best story submitted will receive an Apple iPod Touch.

I had my own issues recently when traveling to Amsterdam for a week, and in the future will likely look into a MAXroam SIM. You can submit your story online at www.maxroam.com. It only takes a minute, and you automatically make EUR5, so you’ve got nothing to lose.

MAXroam (SMS Text News sponsor) has hit the marketplace in the United Kingdom. You can (shortly) go into any Maplin shop (electronic goods retailer) and pick up your MAXroam SIM!

I really, really love the concept of a borderless SIM. If you travel often and you don’t want the hassle of arsing around with local sim cards in multiple countries or paying stupid amounts of money for your calls, you should get MAXroam.

Link: webitpr | World’s First Borderless SIM Launches to Eliminate Extortionate Roaming Charges

Cubic Telecom today announced the launch of MAXroam, a new mobile roaming product that allows anyone to reduce their mobile phone bill by as much as 80 per cent while traveling abroad. MAXroam is the world’s first universal SIM and is being launched to consumers in the UK and Ireland through Maplin’s network of high street stores, as well as via the Maplin product directory and online at www.maxroam.com/maplin.

MAXroam was launched to offer consumers the best country-to-country phone rates anywhere. The service dramatically reduces costs for both the callers and the recipients of roaming phone calls, by using local, in-country numbers, effectively making all global calls local calls.

The MAXroam SIM can be used in any standard GSM mobile phone, and there is nothing to download and no applications to install. Customers are given a local number in their home country and another local number in the country they are traveling to. You can either forward your calls or leave a message telling your callers you are traveling, informing them of your new number. MAXroam can currently be used in over 160 countries around the world.

The deal with Maplin will make the MAXroam SIM available on the high street and means that anyone who regularly travels abroad – for business or pleasure – can now purchase the money-saving SIM.

Link: Customers lose sleep over SMS alerts-Chandigarh-Cities-The Times of India

SMS beeps at unearthly hours are known to give rise to suspicions of infidelity, causing rifts in relationships, but a private bank that has been sending transaction alerts to its users seems oblivious to it. It’s not just couples who have been complaining, but the elderly who are woken up from sleep with a start.

I wonder who HDFC Bank are using for their text gateway. This is a brilliant example of where it’s just not good enough to buy a ‘normal’ text gateway. When you’re sending account updates like this to lots of customers (brilliant idea, obviously) it’s critical that they don’t get queued and then sent out hours later. That’s just useless. It makes the bank look like a bunch of slackers with shitty technology. It might not be their supplier; it could be the way they’re connecting to the gateway…

Solution? Get a better, faster, more reliable provider. Someone with good carrier relationships and an excellent back-end — and someone who can help give your traffic priority ahead of bog standard text messages at carrier level.

[A good place to start, by the way? A company like SMS Text News sponsor Clickatell]

SMS Text News sponsor, MAXroam has signed a strategic alliance deal with Global Romaing Inc. (www.celtrek.com). The deal combines the marketing reach and technical know-how of both companies into a single partnership.

It’ll enable both companies to offer offer extended geographic coverage and data roaming on their existing products. This is a substantial step forward for both companies in their goal to provide a single global communication platform that brings an end to the monopolistic behavior of the large cellular operators. Bring it on — particularly the data roaming part. That’ll be brilliant.

Pat Phelan, top chap at MAXroam commented on the deal: “I am delighted that Global Roaming has decided to partner with Cubic [MAXroam] and I look forward to a world where anyone can call anyone at anytime without worrying about the cost.”

Me too. It’s more or less there with MAXroam. Speaking of which, I shall be announcing my SMS Text News local US number soon!

Joining messaging giant Clickatell as a sponsor of SMS Text News are MaxRoam, the Travel Global, Pay Local roaming SIM card service.

I very much appreciate their support — particularly as I’m on my way to Israel tomorrow — and now that I’ve got my MaxRoam SIM, I won’t be bothering purchasing a local SIM card.

I’m going to be publishing more on MaxRoam shortly — including a company and service overview and hopefully an interview with their top chap, Pat Phelan.

They’re helping fund SMS Text News so I’d very much appreciate it if you’d take some time to check out their offering at www.maxroam.com. buy mp3 music online|mp3 music download|download mp3 music

SMS Text News sponsor, Clickatell, has added some more hot shot chaps to the team.

They are Chuck Drake (who joins as Executive VP of Marketing) and Bill Wolfe (who joins as Executive VP of Research & Development).

Chuck joins from MarkMonitor and Corillian where he led both companies to achieve market leadership status in their respective Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Enterprise software markets serving Financial Services, Retail, Manufacturing, High Technology, CPG and other verticals worldwide. Here’s a pic of Chuck:

Bill joins from VeriSign and Openwave Systems where he was responsible for managing critical business cycles to provide complex, intelligent, highly secure, and reliable enterprise infrastructures to deliver core communications services targeting the Entertainment, Technology, and Telecommunications markets. Here’s a pic of Bill:

That’s not all the news though. They’ve recently added support for an additional 85 networks, enabling their 8,000+ customers to send messages to over 680+ networks worldwide — that’s more carriers and networks than any other messaging provider in the world.

For those companies concered about security, Clickatell recently received the SAS 70 stamp of approval (a widely recognised standard used as a proof point by Chief Security Officers to examine the due diligence process needed to assure data security, safety and integrity).

More about Clickatell here. As they’re a valued sponsor, if you’d like to do business with them and you’d like a direct introduction, wherever you are in the world, drop me a mail and I’ll facilitate.

Just a wee note to thank everyone at Clickatell for their support. They’ve been super valued SMS Text News sponsors for quite some time. Now and again I like to write a thank you message to them.

As a quick overview — Clickatell provide simple, reliable and high-speed messaging services. Their “any message, anywhere” solutions allow businesses and communities to talk to their customers in an immediate and personal way, no matter which communication device they use. I’ve introduced a lot of SMS Text News readers who were hunting for reliable service to Clickatell with super results.

SMS Text News is a commercial blog. We generate money from our sponsors which helps us continue to deliver service here on the site. So as a quid pro quo between you, the reader and us here at SMS Text News, please do take a moment to see if you can possibly do some business with Clickatell.

Just mail me and I can connect you straight into the right person.

This Thursday, it’s the SMS Text News Unlimited Drinks evening (there is a fair use policy — that is, once my money runs out, you have to buy your own beer, soft drinks, wine or food).

A special, special thank you to Sonus PR who generously agreed to sponsor the evening. Patrick Smith and team from Sonus will be there on the night so if you’re looking for public relations advice in the mobile sector, do look out for Patrick, or find me (pinstripe at the door) and I’ll introduce you. Alternatively, pick up the phone and dial +44 207 851 4890 and ask for Patrick, telling him I sent you.

Even if you’re not hunting for PR right now, I would most sincerely appreciate it if you would familiarise yourself with Sonus PR. They’re the only telecoms-focused agency in the PR Week Top 40, they’re in 3 regions (San Francisco, London, Singapore) and their name comes from the latin for ’sound’ or ‘communication’. Plus, they only hire very nice people and often very good at Foosball.

Check out this page for more information on Unlimited Drinks, particularly if you’d like to come along and you haven’t got your name on the guest list yet.

This is rather hot news from SMS Text News sponsor, Clickatell:

International broadcast news network CNN has chosen leading mobile messaging provider Clickatell to power the promotional version of its “Breaking News Alert” SMS service to mobile phone users around the world. The promotional service is set to go live in June.

That’s most certainly an excellent coup for Clickatell. I get the CNN breaking news email alerts and they’re really useful. I’ll definitely check out the text alerts.

The service will allow users to receive a headline alert as text message to their mobile phone as soon as a major international news story breaks. The only thing is I think it takes their system quite a long time to send the updates as I often get them when I’ve already heard about an update, so I’ll be really interested to see what Clickatell can do to help them get their updates out as soon as possible.

Clickatell’s market-leading messaging aggregation and delivery solution ensures that users of the CNN service receive breaking news information via SMS as it happens, immediately and reliably, wherever they are in the world.
Users can then link through to CNN’s mobile news site, www.CNNmobile.com, via their handsets, for the full story.

“We are delighted to be working with CNN to deliver its ‘Breaking News’ service,” said Deon van Heerden, VP of sales for Clickatell. “CNN’s selection of our global message delivery technology means that mobile phone users everywhere now experience - free-of-charge - a service that keeps them up-to-date with world affairs as they happen, via their mobile device.”

Clickatell is able to keep CNN “Breaking News alert” users informed of all news updates as they happen, irrespective of their location, thanks to its robust, carrier-grade global messaging infrastructure that delivers high-priority alerts to approximately 600 mobile networks in 200 countries.

Global messaging company (and site sponsor) Clickatell have today announced the launch of a mobile terminated (MT) premium rate SMS service in South Africa.

Currently offered by Vodacom and MTN in South Africa, mobile terminated services are used for subscription-based content. Because the networks offer these services in different ways, Clickatell provides an easy-to-use open interface for value-added service providers to access the networks and bill their customers. Uniquely, Clickatell pays out the full revenue share to its customers.

Good stuff, and useful if you’re wanting to enter the South African premium SMS market. Here’s two interesting things I noticed from the press release.

Firstly, the service offers variable billing - so a shortcode isn’t tied to a particular price point like it is in the UK. It’s up to the operators to support such a service, and fortunately both Vodacom and MTN do. Here in the UK a shortcode is fixed to a certain price - so if you wanted to run a service on a particular shortcode at a different price to the one it’s locked to, you’d have to send the reply from a different number. A complete arse when it comes to branding and can confuse consumers.

Second, Clickatell pay out the full revenue share they receive from the mobile operators. That’s a refreshing change - most PSMS service providers take their cut along the way, and have a habit of hiding the true income they’re making from your service. Given a choice between a company who are open with their payouts and one that surrounds it with smoke and mirrors, I’d chose the former.

Clickatell have partnered with Dutch self help service provider Growerz.com to create an interactive, mobile-powered self development programme that can give you a nudge via email and SMS when your willpower wanes. Even better, the messaging technology keeps members in touch with each other to stay motivated, making Growerz a pioneer in this new world of tech-enhanced self-development and motivation.

Growerz.com’s Web-based service offers users customised programmes, consisting of an interactive online course and additional self-help reference material, to effect changes in their lives. Using SMS and email messages, users (called ‘Growerz’) are prompted to focus on goals and assignments for personal growth and make the necessary lifestyle changes.

With the July 1st ban on public smoking in England looming, maybe it’s time to quit the habit? Hop over to Growerz.com and you can get their quit smoking programme for just $49.95. Bargain!

Link: webitpr | Get Instant Cover Before Travelling

Congratulations to Clickatell (sponsors of this site), who’ve hooked up with insurance giant Metropolitan Life to pull off a world first - offering insurance by mobile phone in South Africa.

Here’s the deal. Insurance, as we all know, is usually a hassle. You’ve got to fill out a ream of paperwork, sign in triplicate in ten different places, and then wait for a few days for all the bumph and policy documents to turn up. Not good, especially if you’re not exactly comfortable with locking yourself into a deal, or don’t have a bank account that will allow regular monthly payments to be sucked out to pay for said insurance.

Step forward then Cover2go. For around R10 (approx €1), handset owners can take out life cover of R60,000 (approx €6,300) for six days at a time, just by texting a premium SMS shortcode. The cost is automatically deducted from their mobile prepay balance (or charged to their monthly account), and they get a confirmation text back with the policy number. As soon as six days is up, Cover2go sends them a text reminding them the policy is about to lapse, and offers the chance to renew it.

What’s the market for a six day life policy, you may ask? CEO of Cover2go Derek Pead explains:

“Every day, a large majority of South Africans have to board minibus taxis, many of which are notoriously unsafe. For people travelling over the most dangerous periods such as the Easter weekend, the risk to the wellbeing of their families is very real – 276 people died this past Easter holiday. Unfortunately, the common perception is that life assurance is a luxury that’s unaffordable and complicated to obtain. With Cover2go, people can get basic cover instantly, at very affordable prices, when they need it most”

So there you go. What a great use of mobile technology - it’s simple to use, doesn’t rely on the latest flashy phone with all singing all dancing software and a 3G connection, and it’s filling a gap in the market.

Will be interesting to see how well this service performs in the coming months. Maybe they could offer a minicab insurance service for revellers in London’s Leicester Square? Provides cover in case of driver getting lost, overcharging, falling through hole in floor, or being stopped by police as the driver got his driving licence from a cornflake packet.

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.)

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!

News in from SMS Text News sponsor, Clickatell. They’ve just hired a hotshot in the form of John O’Leary who assumes the position of VP of Sales, North America.

John’s job will be to continue to…

…drive Clickatell’s successful launch into the enterprise market, particularly into the financial services, emergency first response, logistics and government sectors.

O’Leary brings more than 25 years of experience in sales, marketing and partner development to the Clickatell executive management team. He will head up a strong sales team in Clickatell’s offices in North America, which are successfully bringing enterprise-ready messaging solutions to their respective markets.

Do you think I could get him to do a 15 question Q&A? I’m gonna try and see. At the very least, I reckon I could find out what his first mobile handset was. I’m guessing he’s a half-techie, particularly since his most recent position was heading up worldwide sales for enterprise content security company, Tablus. He was the guy supervising the sale of multi-million dollar solutions to some huge companies. Just the chap you want spearheading your growth. John’s pedigree? DEC, Progress Software an a load of Silicon Valley startups.

Nice!

I stuck up the new Clickatell banner. I always wanted them to do a big skyscraper one along the top — so they were good enough to create a 728 pixel one. I reckon that looks a lot better than the old 468 pixel banner.

Thank you for supporting SMS Text News, Clickatell!

In other news, I welcome a new telecoms public relations firm to the fold as a sponsor shortly. They’re absolute geniuses and I’ve recent first hand experience of their skills. More on that soon, it’s rather exciting.

I haven’t yet managed to do my fly-across-Europe-with-ShopQwik project yet although I hope to do this shortly.

Today I welcome Clickatell as a lead sponsor of SMS Text News alongside existing sponsors ShopQwik and Infomob Public Relations. I’m sure you’ll have heard of Clickatell — they’re the world’s leading provider of Bulk SMS messaging services and SMS Gateway connectivity with reliable coverage to 578 networks in 192 countries worldwide.

I am absolutely stoked to have them on board and I’ll be doing quite a bit on them here over the coming months. I’m hoping to perhaps be able to talk to some of their customers to do some real life case studies, that sort of thing — e.g. They’ve got a rather extensive customer showcase on their site — I’d like to have a look at some of them in a bit more depth. I’m hoping to see if I can get some Q&A interviews with the Clickatell founders and day-to-day management team as well.

Given the amount of emails I receive with questions and queries, I was also thinking of doing a how-to guide setting up a mobile web application using Clickatell’s services. Just ideas at the moment. I’ll solidify them shortly.