This financial year we set ourselves a challenge to reduce our office energy bill by at least 25%. In terms of electricity, the largest user in the office and the first target was our comprehensive development and test environment of 10 ‘old’ servers.

But how do you create a development and realistic test environment for a dual site clustered Bulk SMS platform using fewer servers than the production service? The answer is with two high spec servers and, as you already know, hardware-assisted virtualisation.

To make the fast servers we simply fitted new motherboards, quad core CPUs and fast RAM into two existing chassis’ saving the cost of buying new cases, power supplies and drives. This left us with 8 redundant servers and a few leftover components.

Electricity

The old development and test platforms spanned 10 servers using a total of approximately 1.8kW direct power and air conditioning at an estimated 2kWh continuous consumption costing about £3,662 per annum in electricity and taking up over 24U of rack space.

Our new virtualised platform is 2 servers at approx 500W total, saving 1.4kW or approx £1,350 per annum plus an estimated saving of £964 per annum on air conditioning.

Space

Old setup = 10x servers @ 24U
New virtualisations = 2x servers @ 6U
Therefore we’ve cleared out half a rack of heat and noise

New equipment

Total £1,200, however we also managed to sell off the old servers on ebay for approx £600, leaving us only £600 out of pocket.

Licensing

Thankfully, not an issue as we already have the platform covered and the two host servers are using the free VMWare vSphere Hypervisor.

Estimated total savings

First year £1,714
Second year £2,314

Now, time to go find a more energy efficient kettle!

Once again we’ve worked with the excellent Phil Thompson and he’s produced something that echoes the main mediaburst site.  It’s simple, attractive, and most importantly fits nicely onto an iPhone screen.

If you need a link it’s on http://www.mediaburst.co.uk/m/

Let’s get straight into some screen shots…

As you can see the site’s very much iPhone orientated. Google analytics showed that 95% of our mobile visitors are using iPhones, hence anything other than an apple orientated site would be illogical.

That’s not to say it doesn’t work on other smart phones, we’ve tested on Blackberry and HTC’s with no problems at all.

We also made an assumption based on our own iPhone browsing habits. That is, none of us searched for products on iPhones or bought using our credit cards. We all tended to read article type information, be it on blogs, wiki or news sites. We use it more of an instant research tool, perhaps to flick through while our better halves are trying something on in the changing rooms.

With this in mind we have made the site really simple by focusing on:

• Who are mediaburst? (home page)
• How to get in touch with mediaburst (it’s on the bottom of every page)
• Some quality reading material (case studies and the blog articles)

So we hope you like it, go and have a play, send us your feedback and let us know what you think?

Although the ipad is more akin to a big iphone than a small laptop it does miss the vital ingredient that makes it mobile, that being a sim card to make calls and send texts.

So what I’m I seeing here, is it bloggers stuck for true mobile content or is it just part of the convergence of the mobile and digital worlds?

The book constitutes a number of short essays containing their advice on how to run a business.

Anyway, here’s our essay on service levels:

Punish Poor Service

We recently had a situation where one of our suppliers was processing messages slowly. We are talking about a small percentage of our Bulk SMS traffic running up to a few minutes too slow.

For us this is not acceptable. The messages our clients send can be time critical. Imagine someone staring at their phone, waiting to receive an SMS before they can get on with the task. Anything more than a handful of seconds is not acceptable.

We need to report this situation to our supplier and get it sorted quickly.

On referring to their Service Level Agreement it would appear a slow platform has a low priority assigned to it. It means when we report the issue they will “initially respond” within 24 hours and “aim to fix it” in 3 days.

This level of non-service is almost industry standard, it’s certainly replicated across our other major suppliers.

We can’t operate like this, we can’t wait 24 hours for an initial response. We can’t wait 3 days for them to resolve the problem, we have customers to serve.

You’ve got to take control of the situation, so here’s what we do now:

If we see any sign of an issue with a supplier or their SMS routes we switch them off instantly. No discussion, no phone calls. Just switch all the traffic to an alternate supplier. Job done.

It means our number one priority (our customers) is attended to. It means we continue to deliver all our messages in the rapid timeframe they are used to.

We then report the issue to the supplier and inform them as soon as they get it sorted we’ll switch them back on.

It means while they are reviewing the issue, initially responding and trying and fix the problem they are losing money. That should help focus their minds.

So it doesn’t matter what your supplier SLA’s are, take control, implement your own.

Aside from the usual junk mail which we just cross “Return To Sender” and repost. I’m surprised at the amount of post that could easily be sent via a digital mechanism. SMS or email are the obvious channels.

We’ve received a few purchase orders and a surprising amount of remittance advices covering payments we received electronically, typically BACS. Now correct me if I’m wrong but second class stamp costs 32p, an envelope about 1.5p, plus a sheet of cheap paper, and some print ink.

Why would you move to electronic payments but still incur these costs?

Why would you not move the remittances to an electronic means and remove all the cost?

Then there is the environmental argument. How many trees would we save if we eliminated unnecessary post, and the reduction in waste?

All this has been said before, but obviously not loud enough.

Not only are the entry instructions printed in black text on a dark red background rendering it almost unreadable. But the instructions are so complex.

See for yourself.

Also note the use of white text on black background and good line spacing (just above the entry instructions)  is very clear and easy to read, why not use this for the entry mechanism?

I’ve challenged and timed a further 2 people to enter. Both have taken in excess of 2 and half minutes to read, work out, and compose their entry. Both admitting that under normal circumstances they would have given up.

I wonder how many others have given up?

What’s in this release?

This milestone release doesn’t contain any major new features for you, our users, it’s all about making our lives easier at mediaburst and allowing for future changes.

We’ve changed to .NET 4

Microsoft released version 4 of their .NET framework a couple of months ago, along with it came Visual Studio 2010. Although there are no groundbreaking changes in this new Visual Studio it solves various day to day niggles.

Code rewriting

We’ve re-written some internal code that passes messages around between systems. It’s just housekeeping really, making use of the improvements between versions 2 and 4 of the .NET framework. The biggest change is the switch from ArrayLists of messages to strongly typed Lists using the new support of covariance and contravariance in generic types. This change allows the compiler to check what we’re adding to the list at compile time, rather than run time, hopefully avoiding any mistakes.

No more image messages

We’ve removed support for Nokia and EMS image messages. They’re small black and white bitmaps which look awful on modern phones, a much better choice, with wider handset support, is MMS. Processing these took large chunks of bespoke code, without them our sending scripts are so much easier to maintain as there’s only one set of logic.

Updated logging

And finally we’ve tweaked our sent message logging to make a number of internal reports run off a single database table. We currently have to link two databases on different servers if we want the same level of detail.

How does white labelling work?

Our Online SMS product textburst is the main one, but we also get requests for our SMS API, and our email to SMS product.

The reseller offers the service to their customers or markets in any way they feel fit. They take care of the billing, collect the money, provide support etc. We just exist in the background as their little secret.

The truth is we have offered while label services for many years but have had little success other than via a few reputable organisations such as O2.

The Problem

Many resellers see your application as a nice piece of technology. They think if they rebranded it as their own they could sell it to their existing customers, make a million and retire on a beach in the Bahamas. But it just doesn’t work like that.

We used to do loads of free while labels in the hope that we’d benefit by extending our reach, but so few come to anything it’s not been a priority.

About 2 years ago we introduced a nominal £500 to while label textburst, what happened was interesting. We certainly scared a few would-be resellers off. In my mind anyone not willing to pay £500 was indicating that they were not confident of their own ability to sell the product. Those that did pay in general sold more than those that hadn’t.

A solution?

Back in January we released our latest version of textburst and removed the ability to produce new white labels easily. Hence the £500 option is now gone completely. All white labelling is bespoke and we don’t look at it unless we feel the potential reseller can actually resell.

But the question I’m now left with is this: In our experience very few while labels have been successful at all, so why does anyone do it? We spend an inordinate amount of time developing our services and intellectual property, should we really be passing this on to anyone who thinks they can sell SMS?

There are literally hundreds of web applications out there who offer white label services, but is that not undermining the value of your own investment and brand. If your application is so great why would you want to make it look like someone else and let them take the brand value?

What we do now is much simpler, we say just introduce the client to us, we’ll do what we are good at, you do what your good at, and by way of a thank you we’ll give you some commission. Surely that can’t be wrong?

To put textburst onto our smartphones the first step has to be a site optimised specifically for the most popular devices. iphone and blackberry sping to mind instantly.

This being the first release of a Smartphone version of the application we wanted to keep it as simple as possible. The theory being we use our smartphones to access applications when we don’t have time to fire up the PC or when we’re out of the office. Either way, when using a small screen we really don’t want to be presented with a cluttered mess and too many choices.

Fortunately Google analytics backed up our suspicion. We found phone users spend less time on the site and use less pages.

                  Pages per visit                  Time on app

Mobile                3                                     3:55
PC                     4.5                                   7:20

Here’s the spread of smartphone usage, notice the heavy skew towards apple devices, at least this was conclusive about what design style we should opt for, iphone it is!

iphone or itouch          71%
Blackberry                   26%
Sony                              3%
Android                          0% (very interesting!)

So here it is:

After logging in you’ll find a simple, self explanatory menu:

Send message screen

As I type the send screen is still giving us a few headaches with the curved corners on the boxes, and hopefully will be rectified before we launch.

Sent Items and Inbox provide a scrollable list of your 20 latest messages

And clicking through to a sent item will show you a summary of the campaign as follows:

Hopefully the use of standard iphone formatting and navigation will make this as simple to use as the iphone itself. I personally can’t see any iphone user struggling with this in any way.

Just to clear any risk of users needing specific functionality there is a link on every page to use the full version.

So there we have it, simple, clean, easy to use, and due for release early next week.

In recent months the number of requests for a iphone/smartphone version have been increasing. So too has the usage of textburst from the whole range of internet enabled devices.

So it’s moved up the priority list, and we’re on with it.

I’ll get some screenshots posted in my next blog.

Exciting times ahead!