A New Platform For The Premium Sms Market Has Reached Its Second Release

Premium SMS (also called reverse billed SMS or Mobile Terminated Billing) is a payment method, which allows the Customer to pay with his mobile phone bill, but without usage of a Credit card. In order to pay for some service, the Customer sends SMS to the Provider's number and receives a digital access code to his phone. At this moment, the Customer's phone bill is charged and the money is transferred to the Provider's account. This payment style is ideal for so-called "micro-payments".

TechnoPark Corp. is developing a premium SMS management platform for Dialect Properties LLC., a Texas-based company, since 2006. The product is branded by MsgWire.com label on the US market.

"This project challenged our team, since it had a number of serious and unforeseen risks caused by connectivity with third-parties and the necessity to perform functional testing remotely" - says Arthur Petrenko, Marketing Director of TechnoPark Corp.

The mobile market has tremendously grown just in a few years. Premium SMS billing is also constantly rising and now has a significant share of the whole mobile market in the USA. The first ever Premium SMS Report, that was presented by Telephia, have shown that Premium SMS sales in Q1 2007 were about $273 million. Most of this revenue was as payment for mobile content and voting/sweepstakes entries.

The reason for such PSMS popularity lies in the fact that it is a very successful way to reach the Customer. The field of premium messaging became the field for marketing experiments due to extremely high coverage. As an example, NBC's 'Deal or No Deal' became a real premium SMS hit and generated nearly half of the volume and revenue of voting/sweepstakes entries in the first quarter of 2007.

"The new version of the system is making our plans of licensing very possible now. We will be able to deliver flexible, stable and powerful products. We already have a number of requests from future license-holders, who will buy the platform this summer with an annual flat fee" - says Vonn Butler, CEO of Dialect Properties LLC.

The newest version of MsgWire.com was released this March. The system is integrated with MX Telecom and OpenMarket XML gateways, thus reaching more than 98% of US mobile phone users.

MX Telecom is a leading international company in the field of wireless services. It has been a Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) Consumer Best Practices Committee member from 2005 and was two times named in the top twenty of the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 and led this rank in 2006. It was also featured several times in the Sunday Times "Tech Track 100", which lists the fastest growing UK technology businesses due to growth of more than 100 percent a year. Employing only 50+ workers, it provides various IT solutions to more than 500 corporate clients in the UK, Ireland, Australia, the USA and Canada.

OpenMarket, which was founded in 1994, offers OpenMarket SMPP API, HTTP/XML API and SMS SDK for development of e-commerce mobile applications. Among OpenMarket global customers are Lycos.com, AOL.com, and the Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition; major industrials such as Acer, Ingram Micro, Milacron, and Siemens; and 10 of the world's top 13 national telephone companies. Its content management software is used by companies including Lucent Technologies, Financial Times of London, Hitachi, and Chase Manhattan Bank. Headquarted in Burlington, Massachusetts, and it has international offices in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and The Netherlands.

MsgWire.com allows mobile marketing campaigns creation in a number of clicks. The manager defines a list of recepients (mobile numbers and names of users), and a chain of messages and dependencies between them. The system automatically tracks user behavior, sends/receives SMS and runs the campaign. The manager gets status reports in different formats.

The system is constructed with Adobe Flex - the most powerful Rich Internet Applications development platform from Adobe Systems Incorporated.

Adobe Flex is a number of technologies, developed by Fortune 500's "most admired" company, and is in active use by multiple Fortune 500 companies. It is made for designing and deployment of cross platform and rich Internet applications based on the proprietary Adobe Flash platform. Released in 2004, it keeps all media functionality that is offered by Flash but has much more capability. It successfully works for such famous sites like the Sony Ericsson Product Catalogue, Yahoo! Messenger for the Web, Pikeo online photo sharing and Picnik online photo editing.