I think the pieces should fit into place thereafter.

you too

time to go and get a drink and recharge, maybe it will come to me in a blindin’ flash of light, or at the bottom of a glass…

have a good weekend whoever you all are…

steve

All the companies i’ve mentioned in past 3 days have been clients of mine. You are also a client of mine.

Cogs turning yet?

lol

njar

njaR makes a good point about the scaling the image to fit the handset. I’m not sure of your development capabilities but it’s not necessarily a huge issue to do this yourself.

When a WAP browser makes a request to a site it passes a header called x-wap-profile that contains information you can use to resolve the capabilities of the device via publically available UAProf information.

http://www.developershome.com/wap/detection/ provides a good description of the process.

Adam

In terms of Ewan’s point that we at iTAGG might offer something to help Dan, well we do, maybe, perhaps, but if we did I couldn’t say, so I won’t.

cheers
steve

the main issue you’ll have is not delivering the content to the handset, it’s ensuring that the picture fits the handset screen size!

Sending a wap push to direct the user to your content is the easy bit.

In the best practice scenario – where a user hits a wap page the user agent of their handset gets passed back and from this you can ss the handset they have. Cross referencing the phone with a database that will tell you the screen size will then allow you to repurpose your content on the fly such that the handset always receives the best fit content.

Handset recognition database maintenance is an arduous task.

You have several options..

1) Bung out all of your content on wap push and don’t bother to resize the content based on screen size. (Or you do your own work in terms of handset recognition – i’d advise against this unless you want to maintain the database as a full time job!)

2) Use someone like Faspay who i linked above – they don’t need a handset database since the user has to select their own handset from a menu. Faspay will resize your image and deliver it.

3) Upload all of your content into a third party content management system and simply advertise keyword/shortcode combos to access the content. In this way your website is simply the advertising window and when a user texts in their SMS goes to the content platform and receives a wap push from the content platform before collecting it from said platform. The platform should handle billing and resizing.

4) You host your content on your site and remotely access a 3rd party content platform which will collect your content dynamically each time a request comes in. Once they have the content they can do the same as point 3) above.

With all respect if this is a small value add, i’d be inclined to find the lowest common denominator.

If you want a quick and easy fix, you could do worse than chat to Bango. Even if this isn’t something they won’t want directly, they’ll have clients that will be able to assist.

(I’m not associated with Faspay or Bango.. much. In fact I am kind of but it’s not really relevant. I could tell you to use my company, and i’m not, so i’m not being a total plug merchant)..

nJaR

This is a specially formatted SMS that when the handset receives it causes it to fire up the wap browser and navigate to the URL. If the content is a picture then the browser will give you options to save as wallpaper, etc.

One option is: http://www.esendex.com/uk/Products-SMS-SDK-WAP-Push-SMS-API.aspx

Chat to Bart Sidles.