Beyond the iPhone: Delivering Mobile Content & Services
by Dave Olsen
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This presentation was given on November 12, 2009 at Stamats SIMTech in Boston, MA. Hopefully from the talk users understand why their higher ed institution may want to explore and deploy a mobile ...
This presentation was given on November 12, 2009 at Stamats SIMTech in Boston, MA. Hopefully from the talk users understand why their higher ed institution may want to explore and deploy a mobile solution, some tips for developing their mobile strategy based on our experience, and then an overview, with links to solutions, from WVU's mobile ecosystem.
I'm really hoping all the notes associated with each slide are also available for you guys :)
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kabir
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Clearly, from the numbers (and I’m not going to hit you over the head with a ton more) mobile is becoming engrained in everyday Americans life and they’re quickly picking up a technology that we can & should adapt to and exploit.
So some more esoteric reasons why mobile is something your institution should look at.
The first is SMS, aka Short Codes or Text Messaging. It’s very simple. They offer limited interactivity but has by far the broadest support across mobile devices. An example of using short codes would be a poll like for American Idol voting. E.g. text your vote to 55555.
The second type of mobile solution is the mobile web and that can be further broken down into two types. We have the original mobile web with sites that are flat and not very dynamic and then we have our Web 2.0 influenced mobile web applications that offer a richer experience using JavaScript and AJAX. The WebKit browsers on the latest devices is really bringing a revolution in the mobile web space.
A mobile web widget is the bridge between a mobile web site and a native app. It’s essentially a mobile web app but one that’s built on a framework that’s specific to a particular device and actually runs on the device outside of the browser. Flash Lite or Yahoo! Blueprint would be examples of mobile web widget frameworks.
And last but not least we have native applications. These are applications written in the native language or framework for the device. For example, on the iPhone native apps would be written in Objective C and Cocoa. Though I should note that the line between web apps and native apps, especially on the iPhone, is blurring with projects like PhoneGap and Flash Professional CS5 gaining traction.
And getting something simple out there is a great way to gauge interest.
It’s obviously very easy to set-up. A joke really.
There are lots of clients to choose from on many devices and even if there isn’t a client for your device a user can always text their updates to Twitter. So no matter what device our reporter has they have the ability to at least share text-based observations from the event. One interesting note, we’ve had several occasions where we have had users who had Twitter accounts and had used them and everything but didn’t realize they could actual text their updates to Twitter. They had always returned to their computers to post updates.
There are a lot of 3rd party services for posting pictures and video. Twitvid, Yfrog, Twitpic, the list seems endless. You can even live stream video through a service like Qik from your mobile device and have the announcement/updates about it go out through Twitter. There are just a lot of possibilities for different kinds of content that can be delivered through Twitter. It’s not just 140 characters.
You can use a product like Twitter.js to quickly embed a twitterstream in your website or wherever you might be hosting information about the particular event your hosting, So essentially your Twitter feed can be integrated into the rest of the event content or, say, next to the live webcast of the event if you’re going to take questions and provide answers or something. I’ll have the link to Twitter.js as well as a couple of other resource in a few slides.
And if you’re a little more adventurous you can always tap into the API. The API is really useful if you want to combine multiple streams into one. With that you can have one central account follow all those tweeting and then use the API to display all the tweets for that central users followers.
Real-time updates sometimes lead to the expectation that there are going to be a lot of updates. Everyone gets all excited but if users aren’t at least updating regularly it’ll burn out.
I was surprised with our first set of reporters to see other Twitter users ask questions of them during the event. Twitter is not a one-way street and there are folks who expect to interact with the reporters so you have to tell folks to check their replies.
Obviously there’s the Twitter API if you’re into a really custom solution and feel comfortable programming.
Twitter.js can be used to really quickly embed a users Twitter stream into a web page using JavaScript.
And, recently, North Carolina State launched their own twitter directory site at http://twitter.ncsu.edu, it’s fantastic, but the bonus is that they open sourced the code they’re using to power it so that’s a great resource for getting your own Twitter directory up and running.
Works on a mobile device nearly instantaneously… give or take a few minutes but that’s still nearly instantaneously.
For a developer, you decide to use a service like Textmarks, and I believe their are other similar services out there, you can open up a text message-based interface into your web application. Again, you gain access to a new, very large market for your services.
Again, using a service like TextMarks, it can be really easy to set-up and manage not to mention fairly inexpensive.
And, SMS can be fairly expensive if you decide to purchase a custom shortcode. It can cost upwards of $1,000 a month. If you’re interested in checking that out you can use a service like Neustar to purchase one. And that’s N-E-U-star. But the shortcode you buy is useless until you sign-up with a service like mBlox to manage the text messages between carriers and your server.
Or you can use a service like TextMarks and skip a lot of those headaches and cost though you won’t have a custom short-code.
The more experimental stuff has been built using interactive keywords from Textmarks.com.
So we’ve used it to enable students to check the status of their application via SMS (and this seems to be moving beyond “experiment” and I’ll share those numbers in a second).
Users can text message our online directory and get information back which is kind of neat if not much more than a stupid pet trick, and unfortunately the numbers so far back up that that’s pretty much what it is…
And, finally, we have a generic account that we played around with at one point to try to deliver ringtones and other downloads for phones as well as using it to allow users to vote for their favorite posters at a poster session.
On that last point, if your interested in exploring polling via SMS I suggest you check out a service like Poll Everywhere which has a solution designed specifically for that situation. They were originally based on the TextMarks platform but eventually set-up their own system.
They have their own shortcode so it’s something you don’t have to purchase.
You do have to select a “keyword” though so Textmarks understands how to route your requests.
By default TextMarks is ad-supported but they do offer a white label service and prices start at $10 a month. If you want a three letter keyword you have to by the $49.95 a month package. We just upgraded to the $100 a month package.
Obviously requests can be forwarded to a web page or app. They also offer an API so you can push notifications out to users too.
And one of the most interesting things for us, the keyword can keep state between requests. Allows for much more flexibility and interaction.
One thing I don’t have listed here is that the primary purpose of TextMarks and what you can use it for with out involving a developer is as a subscription-based marketing list. Basically users can subscribe to whatever keyword you come up with and you can send them messages. So it might be good for an events organization or news updates.
For our text alert system we currently have over 8,600 users signed up.
The poster session we did, our one and only SMS-based poll, really surprised me with 300 plus votes. Frankly I was happy to hit triple digits but it really gained some interest. One thing about that project is that we made an effort to display the live results nearby the posters so that might have helped spur people to vote for their favorites that might not have been in the lead.
And over the last year or so we’ve had over 4200 uses of our APPSTATUS keyword. What makes me really happy and why it may no longer be an experiment is that 1800 of those uses have come since Sept 15th. And over the last few weeks we’ve been averaging over 45 interactions a day.
Obviously TextMarks is a great service
Neustar gives you the ability to buy your own short code. That’s the five or six digit number a user enters to essentially “call” your SMS service.
And then mBlox is a service that will forward SMS requests on a carriers network to your server.