Mobtex = Mobile Technologies

Shortcodes

2006-11-08T16:17:00.000Z

The Short Code Management Group (SCMG) has recently made some changes to the short code ranges available in the UK. These include:

Additional availability of 6xxxx and 8xxxx ranges
Harmonised UK and ROI 5xxxx short codes
Price restriction lifted on 6xxxx ranges

T-Mobile tests wifi and cell

2006-10-24T17:49:00.000Z

When will the rest of the world catch on to this little jem, it's the way forward, over the air download charges are insulting the customers and forcing them to buy their content on-portal, ala vodalive, if the world went mobile-wifi things would change for the better, users would get richer content without the download costs.

Voice over IP on your mobile phone is just a natural step forward, how many networks don't want to go there though as they'll lose minutes. Scary part is how do they compensate for it?

Digital Evangelist: Making mobile payments work 101

2006-06-19T21:53:00.000Z

Digital Evangelist: Making mobile payments work 101:

Another mobile geek! Cool reading!

Zend Optimizer

2006-04-24T17:14:00.000Z

The Zend Optimizer was recommened to me by someone I know and I finally got around to installing it today, as soon as I had I knew I should have installed it sooner as the page load speeds were quicker, I mean WOW-quicker!!

Now the site actually feels faster to me I wondered if there was something I could do to make the pages smaller and make it load even faster still.

It was time to revisit zlib compression to see if that would help make a difference, I know the Zend Optimiser made a difference but now I want to be able to measure the differences Zlib will make.

To start i load our index page and check the page size which without compression comes in at 20.97 kb / 21,743 bytes

Now I add the following to our .htaccess:

## enable zlib compression
php_value zlib.output_compression_level 1

Level 1 is the lowest compression, 9 is the most. The higher the compression the more the server will have to work, the harder the server works the slower it becomes so we're playing a balancing game here.

The Scores:

None - 20.97 kb / 21,743 bytes

Level 1 - 5.83 kb / 5,969 bytes
Level 2 - 5.71 kb / 5,843 bytes
Level 3 - 5.61 kb / 4,747 bytes
Level 4 - 5.34 kb / 5,465 bytes
Level 5 - 5.24 kb / 5,367 bytes
Level 6 - 5.20 kb / 5,326 bytes
Level 7 - 5.20 kb / 5,325 bytes
Level 8 - 5.19 kb / 5,316 bytes
Level 9 - 5.19 kb / 5,316 bytes

WOW

Level 1 is by far the most efficient in this test.

With the tiny differences in file sizes between level 1 and level 9 it's not worth the server load to go any higher than 1 but the difference between nothing at all and level 1 is stunning.

LOL This blog is pageranked

2006-04-14T23:18:00.000Z

LOL well it made me laugh, I just noticed this blog now has a humble pagerank of 2.

My www.andymoore.info site has a PR of 4 and Mobtex scores a 4 too.

So among my sites I have a collective PR of 10, lol I wish, it's only Google and W3 who have those for real I think!

PR is such a myth, this blog is a 2 and there's a shit load of content here yet http://www.ringtonesquad.com/has a PR of 4 yet all it has is a navimenu that 404s and a load of latin. It's bollocks yet it has no content and Google deem it more important. What bollocks.

Sending SMS Text Messages

2006-04-14T21:44:00.000Z

Some time back I posted a thread on Dev Shed's Forums entitled Sending SMS this was in response to the question I keep seeing over and over again "How do I send SMS text messages?"

This is the original list of suppliers I put together along with a few other, Dev Shed user contributions plus others I've picked up along the way:

MX Telecom known before as WAP MX.
Echo Vox Swiss based
Enpocket
Esendex
Fly TXT
G8 Wave
MBlox
MChex
Mind Matics
Minick
Mobile Way
2 Ergo (I've been spammed by these before)
Broad System
Crosby
Dialogue
Net Size
Opera Telecom
Telecom 1
Wincast
Zamano
ZIM Epl known before as EPL Communications
Clicktell South African based
Agile Media part of BT
Quios
SMS2Email part of AQ Limited
Brainstorm
Boungiorno
Send My TXT
Red Rock
Telsis
2 SMS
IPIPI
24 X
Bulk SMS
Fast SMS
NYT Group
SMS Everywhere
Easy text Ireland
Dimoco Austria
Bond Wireless Australia
Text Anywhere part owned by WIN Plc
WIN Plc
M Blox
Web text
T4MB

Further resources:

http://www.developershome.com/sms/
http://www.developershome.com/sms/smsGatewayProvComp.asp
http://www.developershome.com/sms/howToChooseSMSGateway.asp

If you're just an end user looking for a few free SMS check out Text Me Free where Mobtex is listed as a free SMS text message provider for the UK.

How to make Realtone Ringtones

2006-04-12T10:35:00.000Z

So you want to make realtone ringtones?

This guide will tell you how you can create realtone ringtones for fun, friends or maybe for profit. High quality, original content as mobile phone downloads can generate revenues through sites like www.mobtex.net and others on the ringtone bandwagon.

Before you can create a realtone you need mp3 and wav versions of a file which you have licence to; some cool music snip or stab you just produced on software like Cool Edit Pro / Adobe Audition, WaveLab, QBase or similar. This tutorial assumes you've already created your new ringtone masterpiece and have copies of it as .mp3 and .wav – with these files as a starting point and less than an hour we can have ready to roll realtones that will work on a multitude of mobile devices!

May I point out the world doesn't need another Crazy frog remix, Jamster / Jamba will sue you if you try and any true friend with some self-respect should disown you for wanting to make one.

Don't try the methods mentioned here to rip your favourite CD's and make them into ringtones you then charge for. It's against copyright laws and record label legal teams are officious, litigious and have more money for the court system than you have. If you want to do cover stuff though in most cases it's acceptable, get your guitar, drums, whatever and bang out as many cool tracks as you can, be creative and enjoy!

Please be aware that in the UK ringtones are licenced by the MCPS PRS Alliance who publish a list of contentious works you're better off not reproducing.

Lets get the tools we need

The first goal is to download the software you need to be able to produce all the relevant file formats to cover the majority of realtone supporting handsets.

Those file formats are:

mp3
wav
mmf
amr
awb

For each ringtone we need these five files, if we're hosting the content our importing and WAP downloading system would do the rest. If you were making your own download system you'd need to script a query against the HTTP Content Accept variable from the handset, once you have this you can work out the best suited file to serve the handset.

I ran content accept queries against thousands of mobile devices over a couple a years and the resulting handset compatability guide lists all the phones that told us they supported the files we're about to make.

Once we have the tools to create the files I'll guide you through the process of making your first multi-handset realtone.

Setup: Step 1:

Download and install Nokia Multimedia Convertor - you will need to register with Nokia before you can access the 17.3mb download but by doing so you'll find a whole new world of resources and tools at your fingertips.

To install the converter you also need to request a serial number from Nokia, they'll email this to you and once you paste it into the installer you're well on your way.

Nokia Multimedia Converter will be used to generate the AMR and AWB versions of your ringtone masterpiece.

Setup: Step 2:

Download and install SMAF Yamaha WSD (Wave Sound Decorator)

This 9.6mb download is the tool to take a wav file and convert it to MMF and as such make it available to Samsung, LG and many more handsets. More info on SMAF-MMF can be found on the Yamaha SMAF website.

Before we go further, notes on naming conventions

If you're going to do this you need to bear in mind that for each track you make there are five files, now this might not sound like a lot initially but I'm telling you by the time you get 1,000 tracks done and put down it can easily get out of hand if you don't have a sensible naming convention that you stick to religiously throughout.

There are some big players in this industry who still can't get it right, I've had huge packs of content sent from studios before where they had no idea which file related to which tone and I had to reject the content as it was worthless. Honestly, I mean big names are messing it up because they're too big with too many people working on it and they've had no standard to adhere to.

Here is the standard that works best for me and from what other ringtone producers have told me many other tone retailers. It's the most logical:

Top level directory called REALTONES
Second level directories called MP3 WAV MMF AMR and AWB

Name the first tone you make "1"
Name the second tone you make "2"

Save 1.mp3 in MP3
Save 1.wav in WAV
Save 1.mmf in MMF
Save 1.amr in AMR
Save 1.awb in AWB

You need to keep a log of which tone is which and the corresponding files, open up Excel, Calc or whatever you use and make a simple spreadsheet that looks like this:

Then for the first tone and subsequent others you make you build up the spreadsheet like this:

If you're doing this for profit: When the companies you send this content to come to import it onto their system it will be easy for them to work with, I know this may seem like teaching you to suck eggs but so many ringtone producers get this important step so badly wrong. Example: One company I was importing the content for had it all wrong, what was labelled as being Madonna American Pie was in fact something like the Bulgarian National Anthem. Their content was rejected and they ultimately went bust as all retailers they approached would have the same problem.

Some time back I wrote a post with more info on content directory structures - it's worth viewing to see the logic and may help you manage your files in the long run.

For those thinking "Wouldn't it be better to call the files by name?" NO! Macs are limited to 28 characters in a file name, spaces in file names are bad practice and if you replace " " with "_" and remove all "'" you need to make the rules clear and stick to them totally. It gets too complicated, numbering really is the best way.

Let's make realtones!

By this point you will have your original mp3 file and wav files, these should be no longer than 30 seconds as after that point most mobile phone networks will have sent the call to the user's voice mail service.

Rendering: Step 1: AWB & AMR

Open Nokia Multimedia Converter > file > open > select mp3 file

The screen should now look like this:

The software defaults to AMR with a Bit rate (KBPS) of 12.2 - leave this as it is and hit convert and your screen should show you a progress update like this:

You've just made your first AMR file, this is needed for narrow band Nokia handsets and many more, play it to make sure it sounds clean, check the file size isn't too large to download by WAP. If all is acceptable save the file as "1.amr" inside your AMR directory.

Now revert back to the original Mp3 file by using the drop down menu on the software labelled View, then under Audio select WB-AMR, this defaults to a Bit rate (KBPS) of 23.05, again leave it as it is and click convert.

Once this has rendered the mp3 to wideband AMR and you've checked file size and sound quality save this as "1.awb" in the AWB directory.

Rendering: Step 2: MMF

Now that most supported Nokia handsets and many more are covered with AMR and AWB we need to take the original WAV file and convert this to MMF to cater for the Samsung, LG and other handsets that support SMAF.

Under Help there is an option called “Sample Type Spec Sheet” this will tell you the possible file formats and capabilities.

File > Open > Select the wav file you want to convert > select MA-5 from the drop down menu, and save as "1.mmf" inside the MMF directory.

This is nice software in the sense that it will report any errors to you, things like wrong sample rate, wrong bit rate. It will only let you output a file when it knows that it's okay.

Now as long as your Mp3 and Wav files are in respective directories and you have labelled everything as an exact match to the code field in the spreadsheet you should be onto a winner.

You've taken two source files and made them into five formats that will cover all the handsets listed under this handset compatability guide - please note this is a very generic guide to say the least as there are thousands of models of cellphone and each one may have different settings or internal configuration depending on what the network specifies.

To test files you need to upload them somewhere then access them on your cellphone to make sure they work and sound as good as you wanted! We suggest the Mobtex WAP uploader as it's ideal for the job!

For more information on specific cellphone capabilities the WURFL is an XML file containing over 5,000 handset specifications. I've part documented my use of the WURFL on my blog and it's supported by Yahoo Groups with a number of active members so answers to questions can be found.

Follow up resources and tools:

Forum Nokia
Developer Discussion at Forum Nokia
Motorola's Moto Coder
Sony Ericsson Developer
Siemens / Benq Developer
Symbian Developer

WURFL and WALL Blog posting
Blog guide to configure mime types for mobile phone downloads
WAP uploader blog post

Search Engine User habits report

2006-04-12T10:22:00.000Z

Yes it is important to get high rankings, Mobtex comes first for a load of terms already and lower down for many many more yet when I check our referer log I see us listed on page 2 3 and often more of the results which tells me it doesn't matter how well placed you are in the rankings if the user doesn't like your site they click somewhere else otherwise we'd not get clicks on the terms we rank less well for.

Lynx text browser for Windows

2006-04-11T17:50:00.000Z

Worth having just to check the site out as a spider or screen reader would.

Dot Mobi TLD

2006-04-09T17:14:00.000Z

The new dot mobi top level domain is going live in May:

https://www.godaddy.com/gdshop/tlds/mobi.asp
http://pc.mtld.mobi/switched/findaregistrar.html

About time, why they had to make it four characters though when dot mob would have been a lot better I don't know.....

Banners are dead, long live banners!

2006-03-30T11:28:00.000Z

Banners are dead, well at least the standard 468x60 flashing gif style we're so used to seeing online we've learnt to ignore them but real-world banners are very alive!

I need a nice, cost effective way of getting the Mobtex website offline and visible in the real world and for this I needed a banner and somewhere for it to live.

www.partybanners.biz is the site I ordered our banner from, I place the order on Friday of last week, 1.8m (72") x .67m (27") with my text on there to promote phone downloads like poly tones, realtones and mp3 track downloads, also to plug the free SMS and try to blast the URL infront of people OFFLINE - real people in the street or wherever my cunning plan leads the banner to be placed.

It turned up today, I am really impressed with Party Banners, the banner is 100% what I wanted, was a fantastic price and turned around in no time at all. I'm happy with them and it's not often I can say that a company has met what I expected from it with no questions asked and no stress. I can recommend them with no hesitation.

If you're thinking of banner advertising your website forget about the online options, browsers can disable ads, there's ad blockers and the human mind has modded itself to now ignore flashy gif icon banners. Try the offline option, for less than £35 you can have a real live banner, that's the cost of buying 20,000 hits from popups and expired traffic and will get your site offline and into the everyday lives of real people.

Now all I need is a spiderman costume and someone who's enough of a monkey to climb up Buckingham Palace and display it on the Queen's balcony ;)

If anyone reading this is a complete fool or from Fathers For Justice are you up for the job? There's no fiscal reward but we guarantee you will get on television and obtain a Criminal Record too. Apply here.

Promotional Banners from www.partybanners.biz

Ugly Websites

2006-03-27T12:42:00.000Z

The surprising truth about ugly websites

An interesting article which says plentyoffish.com is doing $10,000 Adwords revenue a day!

Just don't get caught looking at it by the woman or the boss, "I'm not hunting a dogging partner, I was considering the use of the font" will not work as an excuse.

I don't think it's to do with the fonts or usability of the site, it's niche is that they don't charge in a subscription model environment - it's that alone that helps it bring in a whopping 600,000 visitors a day!

Accessibility policy introduced

2006-03-26T02:14:00.000Z

I've just launched out accessibility policy page, now the frontpage of the site validates (as most pages do) to XHTML 1.1 and also meets Section 508 and WCAG Priority 1 2 and 3 - the mission is on to make all of the site fully accessibile now. It simply can't happen as certain features would be diabled, a lot of this accessibility thing is knowing when you should and shouldn't use restrictive technologies like javascript or flash. There's a place for both and they can be accesible but how few quality design houses ever marry flash, seo and accessibility together?

This tool here which I've already blogged was a great help to getting this sorted out, afterall specs are always a nightmare to understand from scratch and I found it to help me iron bugs out, it did involve getting my hands dirty to fix the code but at least I never spent three years with my head in W3C / DDA documents.

If you're putting stuff online then it has a global audience so your site needs to be accessible for those with disability, those who are blind or those who can't use a mouse. Simple enough in theory, with added SEO benefits so they say it should be worth the effort but what are the SEO benefits? I'm yet to discover, having validating accessible markup hasn't got me to number one on Google for ringtones or downloads yet but it says we actually stand up as one of the few who say "We do actually give a monkies about how this works to all people"

Affiliate scheme for ringtones

2006-03-26T01:29:00.000Z

I'm pleased to say that I can now launch the Mobtex Affiliate scheme!

Here's the lowdown:

People signup using our very simple form then they link to us.

We remember they sent the client to us for 999 days.

If that customer buys we pay the person who sent them to us 70p as a finders fee and way of saying thanks!

It's as simple as that, it can be done with a hyperlink but for those who are more tech savvy there are also options to produce your own product pages by integrating our CSV, XML or SQL data feeds.

We'll give you a keyword on a UK shortcode which you can sell the content through, we'll provide you with links to our preview player which also includes our PayPal order form so you can earn revenue by passing customers to us from all over the world!

This is where it gets cool and a little techie I must admit......

Affiliates link to USERNAME.mobtex.net

Our site knows USERNAME is an affiliate click so drops a cookie that lasts for 999 days and redirects the users through to www.mobtex.net or the page they were sent to.

Once this users sees the order info the page uses the USERNAME value and prepends it to our keyword (MOB) on a UK reverse billing SMS shortcode, example, one of our users opted for username Y so his customers are instructed to send a SMS with our keyword and his ID then the product code. Example MOBY 100100

These sales are then logged, royalties and production studios paid then the affiliate who generated the sale will see an increase on the realtime stats we supply.

So far there are two users but this has been on the site for less than 24 hours so we will see how it helps build traffic, sales and long term partners for the business.

Dive Into Accessibility:

2006-03-24T17:42:00.000Z

Dive Into Accessibility

More accessibility stuff.

Silktide: Sitescore Results

2006-03-24T14:50:00.000Z

Silktide: Sitescore Results I love this tool, it lets you know how your pages are in terms of accessibility, inbound links, quality of markup, quality of content and much more.

Mobtex score 8 out of 10

The thing that holds us back is the low number of links we have being such a new site.

I really need to get more links out there to us.

Section 508 Guidlines & WCAG Priority 1, 2 and 3 tools

2006-03-24T14:36:00.000Z

Cynthia Says Accessibility test tool. Covers section 508 WCAG Priority 1, 2 and 3.

An excellent tool.

The index page on Mobtex passes all the tests Cynthia threw at it, I now need to sort out the template driven bits on the site to make it all pass, afterall some would say accessibility is the new SEO.

Still need a million back links though for the efforts to be worth anything!

Free SMS Update

2006-03-16T00:56:00.000Z

WOW - we've had it online about a week and we've already had over 250 people sign up to our free SMS text message service!

Today was mad, about 90 new sign ups, sadly some of those were duplicate accounts so I had to trim the fat and bar a few users. Afterall, why should they get more from it than anyone else?

Just gone midnight tonight we had a spaz-load of messages go out and I thought it was a bit too late to be sending them, I don't want to be running a late night stalking service here so I modded the platform to now only send messages between 0959 and 2259 - that way nobody gets annoyed by being distured late at night and the speed the messages are being cained will slow down a little.

I don't want it to slow down, I'm just scared seeing how fast traffic accellerated today and how many 5 pence peices we're going out the window with each message!

Social Bookmarking

2006-03-06T19:51:00.000Z

mobtex's BlinkList page on Blinklist

I really dig all this social bookmarking stuff

Free SMS Text Messages

2006-03-06T03:09:00.000Z

Free SMS Text Messages - Become a member, register with Mobtext now and get a content bundle free!

Well why not? The contract with our main SMS supplier is that we send a minimum of 1,000 messages a month, well we're a brand new site and we're not upto that volume yet so if we have to pay for them we might as well share them with whoever wants them, that way we can plug our site on the back of the message so we both win!

Free WAP Uploads

2006-02-24T01:41:00.000Z

Free WAP Uploads - Upload your files here then download them to your mobile phone

I thought some time back this would be a neat tool to offer users, it's being used and although I can't publish the links to the files people are uploading I can say some good, funny as hell stuff has been uploaded!

The following files formats can be uploaded from your PC then downloaded to your mobile phone through WAP:

3gp aac amr avi awb bmp cab gif jad jar jpeg jpg mid mmf mp3 mp4 png sis wav wbmp

The thing I like most about this page is the feature which shows an animated clock and a please wait message as soon as you click submit. I know it's only a div tag shown onclick but it's sweet and makes me smile when I see it!

Blogger links!

2006-02-24T01:40:00.000Z

Welcome to Mobtex. We are your one stop shop for ringtones and downloads for your mobile phone!
We've got one of those cool add this my blogger links now on every page of the site! Neat!

I just added Mobtex to my blog with one click, neat. Dead easy really, just understanding how Blogger takes the get requests and uses those on the create a post page:

http://www.blogger.com/blog-this.g?u=URL&n=TITLE

Simple but hopefully this will encourage people to Blog about us, we're picking up customers and steam now and it would be nice to burst onto the blogosphere!

HTTP Authentication with PHP

2006-02-10T01:43:00.000Z

I'd wondered for a while how I'd do this but didn't really have the need to go and find out till now, I wanted to be able to password protect a a few functions within a script so I've put this inside it's component and it works a treat.

Users now get forced to validate before the application runs.

Cool.

// lets not just have anyone accessing this
if (!isset($_SERVER['PHP_AUTH_USER'])) {

header('WWW-Authenticate: Basic realm="Mobtex Limited SMS Sender"');
header('HTTP/1.0 401 Unauthorized');
echo "You need to be authorised to use this application";
exit;

}else{

if(($_SERVER['PHP_AUTH_USER']=="**********") and ($_SERVER['PHP_AUTH_PW']=="**********")){
echo "

Authenticated

";

}else{

header('WWW-Authenticate: Basic realm="Authenticate"');
header('HTTP/1.0 401 Unauthorized');
echo "You need to be authorised to use this application";
exit;
}

}

?>

Yes, I know the blog has been slow in the last two weeks, I'm getting around to sleeping every second night and working on the site, back end and a million other jobs so the blog is way down the list right now but we're moving along and I thought this was a nice little snippet to drop in here.

Spider Simulator Report

2006-02-01T15:53:00.000Z

I'm on the Web Credible mailing list and it came through today with a cool link to Summit Media and their Spider Simulator which I used right away, wow, a newsletter worth reading as it holds some value to me. Staggering.... lol

I don't know what it is that's made me such a standards freak all of a sudden, all pages I'm working on validate as XHTML 1.1 and the validate as CSS, the domain is running a watertight DNSreport.com report and now there's this little tool setting me another test to work upto.

robots.txt

2006-02-01T12:07:00.000Z

http://www.mobtex.net/robots.txt

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /gif_icons/
Disallow: /sandbox/
Disallow: /screenshots/
Disallow: /wall4php/
Disallow: /tinymce/
Disallow: /includes/
Disallow: /content_uploads/
Disallow: /components/

Cool tool to validate your robots.txt file:

http://www.searchengineworld.com/cgi-bin/robotcheck.cgi

References:

http://www.searchengineworld.com/robots/robots_tutorial.htm
http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/robots.html

The most paranoid robots.txt file I have ever seen:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/robots.txt