Rants And Ramblings About Mobile Technology
Anders Borg writing about the fun and crazy world of mobile and Internet service technologies.
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Wednesday, September 02, 2009
Looking for life in SMS services
I’m experimenting with a new service called “Mobilt liv” (Mobile Life), initially aimed for the Swedish market due to the issues with allocating short numbers in many countries and the costs involved, providing (hopefully) useful and fun SMS services, starting off with some simpler ones, including getting a map of where you are, calculating BMI, sending e-mail via SMS, getting Magic 8 Ball responses etc.
The only way I know to get revenue from SMS services is via subscriptions, but that’s a moral grey area that I haven’t found enough stomach to get into yet.
The name Mobilt liv / Mobile Life obviously has a double meaning, as in utilizing mobile technology as well as living a mobile life, which the services are also intended to convey.
I completely re-designed the “shopping window” page today, and added auto-detection of PC and mobile phone browsers, so the same short URL (mobiltliv.se) can be used for both. Doing it this way means there’s no need for any xxx.mobi, wap.xxx, mobile.xxx or other special domain for the mobile site. I also added “smsto:” links to the mobile page, so that it’s easy to spawn messages without entering them manually.
The service is completely housed in a single script file, including reception of the SMS, determining what service to perform, performing that service and sending back the response SMS. No point in making it complicated.
I set the price to 3 kr (40 cents), which is very low for SMS services, and might give the wrong signals, but experience will tell if I made a mistake.
The photo in the top banner is from my home district, captured a few days ago, and maybe you notice the Swedish flag colors in the logo. All for the national vibe.
Now comes the question about building awareness. It won’t be easy, unless I can piggyback on some other popular service.
For the daring, here’s a Google translation to English. Most of it makes sense. Oddly it translates “Wikipedia” to “articles”.
I invite you to try the service (if you are in Sweden that is; if not you won’t be successful). Try e.g. texting liv här to 72500.
