 |
|
   |
|
|
 |
Mgreetings is a start-up founded in 2004. They developed an application that allows users to send animated greeting cards to any mobile phone in the Netherlands. The team also developed the associated content library. Last December, Mgreetings went live with its service under its own brand and they have plans to go live in the UK very soon. Luca Passani from Openwave had an opportunity to speak about the business with Yvo Thal, an Mgreetings founder. What is the business model for your application? What is the revenue opportunity? Users who want to send a card to a friend's mobile phone pay a one-time charge of about ? 2.00 that is charged to their mobile phone bill. This is done through SMS reverse billing. The application that we have developed allows partners that have a web portal to privately brand the mobile greeting card service. We earn a small royalty for every card that is sent through that portal. We believe that sending a mobile greeting is very personal, especially since people are so attached to their phone. We expect, in a year or two when everybody has a WAP-enabled phone, the market will be huge. Which technologies do you use to deliver your content? We use MMS, WAP and WAP-push. Our users can send a card from either the web site or the WAP portal (wap.mgreetings.nl). When advertised on print media they can also order directly via SMS (they send do it via a unique ordering code). Depending on the receiver's provider, they will either get an MMS message with the card itself, or a WAP-push message with a link to the card. This approach has allowed us to reach both Dutch and U.K. operators. Just in case the receiver does not have a WAP or MMS enabled phone, we also send them an SMS with a link to the Mgreetings website where they can view the card on the web. What challenges did you find when creating your solutions? It was very difficult to develop a solution that worked for all phones and all networks. We wanted to make sure that users got the best experience possible so we needed to know as much information as possible about their networks and handsets. When sending somebody a card, it's impossible to know their phone's specifications. But when the user picks up the card using the WAP-push URL, we can determine the phone's specifications and adapt our card dynamically to meet those specs. The problem here was that it was not so easy to do. We started looking around for a solution for this problem and decided that WURFL would give us exactly what we needed. How do you use WURFL? We use the WURFL database and API's to detect the device capabilities. When somebody uses their phone to view a card, we read out the HTTP header and the type of phone. Before we send the response back we use the WURFL database on the fly to determine whether the phone supports XHTML or WML only, and return a different page based on the information. We also read out the screen and deck size and include different content accordingly. We found this relatively easy to figure out - especially compared to other solutions. Did you explore other solutions? Yes. At first we looked at the possibility of the User Agent Profile (UAProf) standard as a solution to serve content dynamically depending on the device. We tried to read the profiles that are stored on the phone manufacturers' websites to create our own database. We found out that WURFL had actually done the job for us, and better. The other problems with the UAProf solution were that the HTTP header did not always contain the right UAProf. And sometimes the information in the UAProf was actually incorrect. As you can imagine, we where quite happy when we discovered WURFL solves those problems. Would you recommend WURFL to other developers? Absolutely. We don't believe there is anything out there that gives the functionality that WURFL does for solving the problems that we mentioned earlier. What do you see as the future for WURFL? We believe that it is crucial that the information within WURFL is complete, up to date and correct. For this, we need developers to use it and contribute to it. So the most important thing, in our opinion, is that the tool gets out there, gets used and is updated. We really appreciate Openwave's effort to make this tool available and their support of the developer community. From the beginning of WAP, Openwave has consistently tried to provide a way for the developer community to create the best user experience. For us, that translates into being successful with our products in the marketplace. |