iTAGG -- overview & case studies by co-founder Steve Procter
This is excellent — here’s an overview and some case studies about iTAGG, penned by Co-Founder, Steve Procter.
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Steve writes:
“Delightfully vocal” hey!! 😉 I like that one…I think!! As always though Ewan, a fantastic blog, frankly the only mobile industry one I read.
iTAGG is now one of the longer established 2-way sms gateway providers in the UK. We started back in 2002 and our first service was to provide live goal alerts for the Japan worldcup. With no access to premium rated sms at the time and with people signing up by credit card, and with delivery times being, lets say ‘not guaranteed’, it was certainly an interesting time! iTAGG was started on the back of my first internet business Easily.co.uk which became one of the leading domain name and hosting companies before we sold it to Netbenefit a few years ago. It was the concept of searching for available domain names and letting people register them that led us to the idea of letting people register keywords on a shared shortcode. I am not 100% sure we invented the concept but with nearly 20,000 keywords having been registered on various shortcodes and virtual numbers we’ve had over the years, I feel iTAGG has led the way in bringing low cost 2-way text services to small and medium businesses in the UK.
In 2003 we also became the first company to provide a location based service across all network operators across the whole of the UK (as opposed to a couple of trials in London and a few that still didn’t include Orange). I have to add that we don’t count Three because until this day they don’t offer their location gateway out. The service was for The Good Pub Guide and we are now running it for them for the fourth year running.
When the networks finally provided inbound MMS to shortcodes last spring in time for the world cup, iTAGG was again the first to upgrade it’s 60300 shortcode and offer sms and mms keywords on a shortcode to all it’s clients. We already had a lot of experience with this having provided inbound MMS on long numbers for the likes of Live 8, so it made sense that we expanded our core services to be 2-way sms and also mms. We’ve played around with our pricing over the years but with the huge takeup of MMS capabilities over the past 6 months we decided to stick to the £25 per year model which is seeing keywords fly off the shelves. The bulk and premium sms sends then usually come off the back of that, but we do have a number of clients who do pure outbound delivery.
The core iTAGG system provides a web based control panel for people to setup sms sending and receiving services (voting, subscriptions, autoresponders, etc) in 10 minutes. But the other side is our programming interfaces for developers and this is now growing faster than ever with a lot of small and large businesses realising how easy it is to integrate their own systems with ours. One example of this is a Global 100 company that has been integrating with us to be able to send out MMS to UK users for a new web and mobile based social networking service they will be launching very soon. Their developers had sent the first MMS through us within 24 hours of us sending them the technical documentation – they had allowed 4 weeks in their plan to get this part of the system working!
We also did some fun stuff with Ellen MacArthur a few years back when she sailed round the world, in taking image and video feeds directly from her boat webcams and showing them on a wapsite and within java apps that we built and hosted. We also sent sms alerts every day on her current status and are proud to say that apart from the BBC 10 o’clock news (who funnily enough happened to be broadcasting as she crossed the line!!), we were the first medium to announce she had finished. So with careful planning sms really can provide a timely and accurate method of communication.
One last case study to show how diverse and wacky small business use of sms and mms can be; we provide a service where workmen who go round digging up holes in the road all day long can send in MMS photos of the start and end of each of their jobs which get automatically fed through to the company’s own systems where they are logged. This allows the company to provide full records to the local councils, etc to show that each job has been completed. The workman also gets a text back detailing his next job, etc. In terms of volumes, we are talking thousands of them every day – which makes “reviewing” our inbound traffic a lot different from when 90% of images were of an adult nature 😉
One thing we’ve always excelled in is knowing the rules. And wow are there a lot of rules in this game!! But 5 years experience with a few complaints and ICSTIS raising their eyebrows at you really teaches you that you can’t knock up a gateway overnight and run it from the bedroom. Sorry but anyone who says they’ve never had a problem has one hell of a surprise coming and some serious procedure altering moments and sleepless nights in store!!! And just like the domain name game, it may soon be time for some culling of the dodgier players who have jumped on the band wagon thinking this is an easy ride. Well for anyone thinking delivering millions of sms is easy then please take a read of the several hundred pages of different industry guidelines and then think again.
It is always very interesting to see new players come along in an industry, and as more and more professional companies take part (and there is no doubt, there are some amazing looking companies now!!) it helps establish mobile as a real industry. For a few years it certainly felt like it wasn’t taken too seriously, and people wondered what the hell it was I did. It’s also fun to look at who is who in the food chain – we are by no means at the top but even iTAGG have something like a couple of dozen other mobile/sms players using our gateway, and I daresay they have others feeding in to them. So far from being a nasty back stabbing industry (hey I worked in domain names for 5 years!), and with great blogs like SMSTextNews pulling people together it is amazing how tightly knit and friendly it all is. Long may it continue…
Steve Procter
iTagg
Tel: +44 207 043 3607
email: steveprocter at itagg.com
MSN: steve at itagg.com
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Steve, super. Really, really good! Thank you for taking the time to write that. It’s thoroughly interesting — I knew just a little bit of that. It’s brilliant to actually read — from the horse’s mouth — what you’ve been up to.
So — if you work in and around mobile — please do send me over a case study and/or an overview of your operations so I can publish it for all.
