Hugh Spear's Blog

envelos is live at www.envelos.com

As mentioned in a previous entry Dialogue has re-created an easy to use SMS product from a decade ago called envelos. This product went live earlier today. I'm hoping we can get some customers during this early phase so we can get feedback on what is good and what could be better. So please check it out at www.envelos.com.

Remember envelos?

A little bit of history. Back in 1994 we developed our first product at Dialogue. It was called pagemail, and it did one thing well. It allowed you to send SMS messages from your computer.  Over the years we developed that product further, but it was always an application which you installed and ran on your PC.

Then in 1998 we were asked to created a service hosted on the internet, that could provide an email to SMS service for Vodafone in the UK. This would become the Vodafone product Mobile-Alert. But the infrastructure behind this was something which would shape the company thereafter.

We had taken our E3 SMS gateway and put an application on the front of it. We realised that we were now able to do a lot more than just run a service to notify you by SMS when you had a new email. We had an internet hosted SMS gateway.

We had this gateway but we didn't know what to call it. So we had a bit of a discussion and came up with a word which wasn't a real word, but it kind of sounded suitable. The word was envelos, which we sometimes explained as a conjunction of 'envelope' and 'services'. The envelope was the almost universal symbol of an SMS on a mobile phone.

The other thing which turned out well about envelos was that it didn't necessarily sound like English. It was international and we thought that this could only help.

Over the past ten years we have used the name envelos less and less. But now we are getting ready to use it again. It is the new pagemail, but as it isn't an application you install but a web based SMS application, we won't use the name pagemail. But we will use the original pagemail 'paper plane' graphic.

We hope you'll like envelos and find it easy to use. It is almost ready for the world to see. Just a short wait now.

Dialogue Wins Prestigious ACOMMS award for WAP Billing Service

Here below is the story. It is one of me shamelessly taking the credit for someone else's hard work. The someone else is Pete Neal Dialogue Australia's General Manager and sterling product manager for our Mobile Payments product stream, together with our UK based technical team. Just for the record, Dialogue were shortlisted for two awards and won one. Our other shortlisted entry was our Mobile Site Builder.

There are only 8 awards available for the whole telecoms and internet industries. I think we did very well.

Dialogue Wins Inaugural ACOMMS Award

 

12 August 2009, The annual prestigious 2009 Communications Alliance (ACOMMS) and CommsDay Awards were announced this week with Dialogue Communications and Singtel Optus winning the inaugural Innovation in Content Delivery and Services through Partnership Award.

 

Judged by an independent panel of industry experts, the Award had to demonstrate innovations, clearly show benefits to consumers and how the content was driving the uptake of services.

 

Accepting the Award on behalf of Dialogue Communications, Hugh Spear, CEO of Dialogue said, “It is very rewarding to have been nominated and then to win this Award against some tough competition.  Through our partnership with Optus, consumers can now make payments for mobile content seamlessly from within their mobile phone’s WAP browser.”

The off-portal, on-bill WAP billing solution is based on Optus’ industry leading Atomic Premium Plus platform.  The significant benefits derived from this solution are increased protection and ease of use for consumers.

“By scoping out the consumer experience and building connectivity to Optus’ Atomic billing engine into our Mobile Payments solution, we have been able to deliver further consumer protection to ensure they are fully informed on pricing and terms before each and every purchase, Hugh Spear said.  As the WAP billing payment pages are hosted by Dialogue, compliance with Optus’ WAP billing guidelines is guaranteed, removing much of the burden of compliance from the Content Provider.  He continued, “Merchants also see a benefit from increased consumer confidence, leading to more visits to their mobile content storefronts and higher levels of repeat purchases.”

Dialogue have signed a number of partners to the WAP billing solution in Australia and it is expected that this number will grow significantly through the next year.  Speaking on the market, Hugh Spear said, ”The widespread adoption of WAP billing has the ability to change the mobile payments landscape in Australia.  He added, “By protecting customers and lowering support costs the case for its introduction becomes a compelling prospect for the industry.”

Dialogue is an international leader in the WAP billing space, operating WAP billed solutions across six countries and three continents and was the first accredited payment intermediary for the UK PayForIt scheme.  Dialogue is also the sole Billing Aggregation partner for Hutchison Australia’s Bonus Sites WAP billing environment.

For me the significance of this story is that the Australian mobile content market desperately needs some good news. The industry has been damaged by high complaint levels and now a very strict Code of Practice. With current revenue share levels it is difficult for content retailers to do well.  This kind of solution tries to give the content providers back the chance to be innovative, but with a clear and easy to understand interface at the point of purchase. In a way it cuts through all the veil of regulations controlling opt-in and subscription charging, by clearly and formally telling the end user what they are about to buy and how much it costs. It is a solution which can really cheer up the Australian market. We now need the other mobile operators to follow the lead from Optus, so that we can provide a true WAP Billing experience to all mobile consumers.

SMS Software doesn't rust

I got a support request in my email yesterday. I used to get these in the nineties which was about the last time I was able to write software. The support request was for a product that Dialogue had licensed to a large corporate customer a long time ago. The customer has been happily using the software ever since, but now had a query about whether and how it could access the software in a new way.

The software in questions was Dialogue's PageMail Expressway application which we created in about 1998. It is a multi-user version of our first SMS application PageMail which was distributed widely from 1995 to about 2000.

The company with the query has been sending about 15,000 SMS messages per month to their staff and wanted to integrate SMS into a new CRM application they had.

I was a bit out of touch with how the software worked, but after a bit of digging found the necessary documentation and forwarded it to our support team. What I noticed about the documentation and the source code was that it was a decade old! I was quite surprised because in that decade a lot has happened in the world and in terms of software and operating system environments. I was impressed that the software still worked and that it was still useful.

I did a quick check across the office to find out who had the oldest software in use which still made money. I won hands down (partly because I'm twice as old as most of our staff!).

I remember how hard it was back in the mid to late 1990s to persuade companies that SMS was a useful technology, but the ones who gave it a go, certainly found that it was 'sticky', and as the technology involved is so simple it can be connected up to many different systems to add to their utility. We spent a fair bit of time designing our software well so that it could be integrated into whatever the customer wanted to use it for, and those design principles look like assuring the software a continued lease of life.

I perhaps shouldn't be surprised that software still works a decade later, it isn't subject to the same  environmental impact as say a car or an office chair. It doesn't use something which has become obsolete, and provided computer systems are backwardly compatible, it will continue to live.

So the only thing which was ever likely to go wrong was the the customer would cease to need SMS in their business, and I've not found many businesses that go down that path.

So my message for the day is that SMS software has probably got at least another decade to run.