Focus on the patients

As you know, mediaburst has been developing a very simple healthcare application that patients can get on their phones. Part of our demonstration was a Q&A session with three patients who’ve been using the system during the initial trials.

I’ll be completely honest and admit that during the development we focused purely on the needs of medical staff. We wanted to help them save time and improve the quality of healthcare they provide.

We’d not really considered the patients. Sure our partners at NHS Stoke were doing this, but we weren’t. It wasn’t a conscious oversight, patients don’t buy the system so we didn’t consider them. It was that simple.

Listen to the patients

So this demo was the first time I’d met some of the patients and heard first hand accounts of how they benefit from the application. And, having listened, I’m now completely blown away, totally bowled over. In their own words, we’ve given them their lives back.

COPD monitoring

Two of the patients were long term sufferers of COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease). They were housebound other than frequent visits to hospital and their current care plans impeded significantly on their daily lives. But now, using our application, they can lead much fuller, much more normal lives.

When I say ‘normal‘, I’m talking about the kind of things you and I take for granted. Going to the shops, visiting relatives, having a night away and going on holiday.

Previously they were tied to monitoring machines at home. Now they are up and about again, enjoying those simple pleasures. You can’t put a value on that.

Resettlement

The next patient we met was nervous presenting to us, she had tears in her eyes and needed the support of her care worker to speak. But her passion was such that she wanted to share her experience.

She’s a long term sufferer of mental health issues, was cared for at residential homes, frequently turned to drugs and alcohol and generally depended on others to get her through the day.

With the assistance of our application she’s now living in her own flat, has learnt to cook and clean, is doing voluntary work, has stayed clear of drink and drugs and, as you can imagine, her self-esteem is through the roof.

Referring to our app she said, “you can’t take it away from me, if you do I’ll cry”.

Changing lives

As I said, I’m completely blown away. This isn’t normal business, these are real lives and we’re changing them.

Changing lives is new ground for mediaburst, but with it our motivation levels are sky high, and we’ve learnt a lesson in mobile healthcare.

To make things really work, focus on the patients.

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?

It’s an SMS route that manages to offer an extraordinarily cheap price by making arrangements outside of the licensed international telecoms companies. It’s a shady part of the industry, lurking out there offering tempting and apparently innocent deals on SMS pricing.

But remember you only ever get what you pay for.  If you’re not getting a deal through volume, how are you getting it?

You may be offered a cheap route and find that your traffic is going via India, Russia or the Far East and getting clogged up on an overloaded connection anywhere in the world!

Beware of the 1p SMS. You know the old adage if a deal sounds too good to be true it probably is.

The standard interconnect fee between networks is circa 3p, so you do the maths. If it’s 1p then you can be fairly certain something not entirely legal is going on.

How do they do it?

Grey routes manage to offer cost cuts in a number of ways, a couple are outlined below:

Arbitrage:

Routing traffic via an intermediate country to take advantage of the differences in settlement rates

Re-origination:

Giving a call a different originator disguise at some point in its international journey to make it appear it is coming from the country it terminates in, so making it appear to be national rather than international

‘Special’ Carrier Arrangement

Carriers agree to terminate a certain amount of text messages from each other. Excess is charged at a higher rate. So what happens if a carrier has too much or too little traffic?

There is a wholesale market trading in this area. However, the quality of routes can vary, so traded traffic can go down a grey route, especially as the exchanges allow carriers to buy and sell anonymously.

In reality goodwill between carriers can be exploited.

If I’ve made an agreement to accept up to 10 sms in exchange for sending 10 sms to a network and they send me 5 of their own plus 5 of someone else’s, then have they stolen 5 SMS from me? My agreement wasn’t with that other person. If I find out about it, I’m probably going to at the least change my arrangements with the network, at worst cancel my agreement totally.

In Summary

In answer to our question, yes grey routes do seem to exist, however use them at your peril. They may be cheap but they frequently just disappear without notice due to a telco realising what’s happening and blocking the route.

A Grey route can’t guarantee it’s a quality route,  it can’t even guarantee it will be there tomorrow.

At mediaburst we believe in using quality routes for ourselves and our customers.

We wouldn’t touch a grey route with a barge pole and we wouldn’t advise you to either.

Big sends, instant response.

Rather than making you wait around while we process large bulk SMS sends, the send page now responds instantly. 

We now process the send in the background. It means you can keep working while the send processes.

Manage scheduled messages

In the past if you wanted to cancel scheduled message you had to call us and we’d do it for you. 

You’ll now find a list of all scheduled messages within the application and can cancel them up to a few minutes before they’re sent.

Up to date groups

If you schedule a message to a group we’ll now pick up the list of group members at the time of send rather than schedule.

This means you can continue to manage your groups and the send will be up to date with your latest contact list.

Additionally, to make this change work we now deduct message credit when we process the send.

Faster uploads

We’ve made a few behind the scenes tweaks to how uploads are processed.  In our tests an upload of 50,000 contacts now completes 10 times quicker than before.

Bigger uploads, bigger sends

There used to be a limit of 10,000 people in a single upload or send. 

With the speed improvements above we’ve removed this limit and so far have tested with groups of 100,000 contacts with no speed issues what so ever.

Summary

So there you have it hopefully you’ll enjoy the benefits, but as always contact us if there  is something we can improve.

The notification has come direct from Orange and will occur while they carry out changes to their SMS network.

During the outage there will be a total loss of SMS services on the Orange network for approximately 3 hours, starting at midnight 7th April and ending at 3am on Thursday 8th April.

During the outage, outbound text messages for delivery to Orange customers will be rejected by the Orange Gateway and will fail to deliver. Messages originating from Orange customers will be stored by Orange and forwarded as soon as the connection is back up.

Orange appreciates the inconvenience that this will cause and has made assurances that they will work as quick as possible to bring the service back up again prior to 03.00.

It’s fortunate that they have chosen to conduct this work during a low volume period and hence the disruption will be kept to a minimum.

You do not need to do anything other than alert your technical teams or customers if applicable.
If you have any queries then please get in touch.

Next in line is Outlook Mobile Service.

With the forthcoming release from Microsoft of Outlook 2010 they have made some enhancements to the SMS side of the product.

Naturally we’ve included the functionality into our service, had it checked, and approved by Microsoft. I think we are the 3^rd company in the world this time to get approval, (note to self, must be first next time).

So the improvements are thus:

• Support for concatenated SMS (long SMS).
• Outlook 2010 will have an object model available to developers allowing them to build applications on top of it.
• SMS functionality is extended to the alert feature in Sharepoint.
• There is now batch mode to help with Bulk SMS. In short, it will improve the speed of delivery of multiple SMS.

Admittedly they haven’t gone as far as we would have liked. We’d still like to see functionality to customize the originator from within Outlook, and perhaps a direct link to purchase more messages from your chosen SMS provider. The idea being that these improvements alone would mean users could manage most of the SMS aspects directly from Outlook without having to log into the web front end of the SMS provider.

For now Outlook 2010 is another giant leap in the right direction for PC originated SMS. Our customers who have adopted Outlook Mobile Service in version 2007 find the efficiency of sending SMS from their email software much more convenient than signing into a web application. We should see 2010 build on that convenience.

Now although this will slot into our fun category in the blog this is no light hearted event. It’s sponsored by LG and offers prize money of US$100,000. There are 26 competitors from 13 different countries competing in teams of two.

Korea were the eventual winners followed by USA and Argentina.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=pj0_Kg-3M3c

Portuguese competitor Pedro Mateus managed to break the world record of texting the standard English paragraph used to measure texting speed using a single thumb in less than 2 minutes.

The interesting stat is one of the USA contestants is quoted as having sent 16,000 text messages in a single month (circa 533 a day), before her parents instructed her to take this down to a mere 10,000.

Surely it can’t be long before texting is an Olympic sport?

So where does mobile come into this, there has to be some relevance to this blog?

In the infrequently asked questions Gates addresses the question, “should companies help the poor”.

The very obvious point he raises is that companies are there to build great products and sell them, and therefore only consumers that have money can buy them. Hence the poorest are excluded from the cycle and benefits that can be derived from the products.

He argues that companies should invest a proportion of their R&D into work that directly helps the poor, and derive the benefits that come from investing in lower cost models and markets.

So here’s the mobile link:

He suggests that communications companies could benefit by figuring out how the cell phone could help with health needs.

And there we are, he’s stepped on the holy grail of mobile. It’s an area that so far no one has successfully managed to figure out. Don’t believe me? Manchester University has even setup an M-Health Innovation Centre to act as the UK focus for such initiatives.

We are talking serious stuff here, helping people get better, improving lives. Forget all the premium rate muck that plagues the industry this is where we should be heading.

But the problem is healthcare is complex and longwinded, we all have different needs, differing ailments and issues.

Then you’ve got healthcare providers, government bodies who enshrouded themselves in an impenetrable layer of red tape.

We need to find a chink in the armour of bureaucracy, a way in. Perhaps someone who believes in the benefits so much that they help you unlock the door and guide you through the corridors to the right department.

And that’s what mediaburst have found, someone who understands what can be done with a mobile phone.

Someone who understands healthcare and can correlate the apparently unconnected.

Someone who’s drawn the parties together to collaborate and develop.

So watch this space, healthcare is coming to your mobile.

The jargon trap

We’ve liked all our previous websites but they have all been based on providing information on mobile technology. We’d fallen into the trap of using industry jargon and overcomplicating everything. This made it difficult for those new to mobile to understand our products. We’d used cliché photo’s of mobile phones and a site structure that didn’t lend itself to growth. Have a look here

So as well as making everything simpler and easy to understand, the key driver was to allow users to sign up and buy online. Such a radical change in direction for a website required a complete overhaul. The conundrum we faced was to retain all the useful information but create a site structure users could easily follow to the products they are interested in or obtain the information they are looking for.

The result

I think we’ve done this exceptionally well. The navigation into key products is easy, each product page contains links to relevant supplementary information, and pricing is crystal clear. Alongside this we’ve beefed up the blog and will use it to publish articles on how to get the most from mobile as well as company news and interesting facts and figures.

We’ve now got a dedicated section for agencies regarding mobile marketing. This area is small but crystal clear in what we are offering and how we can help agencies in the mobile marketing arena.

There is a dedicated customers section to showcase the brands using mediaburst and relevant case studies. Over the coming months we’ll be adding more content.

Significantly there is now a SMS API section. Not only does this contain the API code and samples but also an online signup mechanism and a showcase of products that are already using the API.

What do you think?

So there you have it, a new year, and a new site. It’s the most significant customer facing redesign we have ever made. It’s the culmination of 6 months of hard work, and we hope you like it?

Beyond the visual

Over the past 6 months we’ve really got into User Interface design. We’ve gone beyond visual appearance to understand how our products are used and how we can help users get more out of them.

This revamp of textburst has led to an interface that is built around the most used functionality.  We didn’t want to cram in tonnes of new but unused functionality. If we did that we’d create an unusable monster. We are all busy people these days and so simple interfaces help us quickly benefit from the tool we are using.

Oh, an on the visual appearance, we couldn’t help but apply some polish, it needed it!

Improvements

So what have we done?

The menu system is paired down to the key functions and logically structured. We’ve included a hot link to the send message page and tips on how to get the most from the product.

We’ve streamlined the Account Setting and Options to put the various features under logical headings that are easily understandable and configurable.

Uploading contacts in now streamlined and you can continue using the product while the upload processes.

Due to popular demand we no longer log you out after 20 minutes of inactivity. Once you have logged on in we’ll remember for up to 8 hours.

A significant difference is the elimination of a user guide. Instead we’ve included instructional micro-copy to guide users through the product. This is much a change in company ethos as an elimination of a user guide. This decision is about being honest with our self. Users don’t want to trawl through instruction books, they want something they can use instantly. The theory is, if you need a guide to get started on our products, then it’s us who’ve designed them wrong.

So if you see something you don’t understand, tell us, we’ll look at it and make it understandable.

More of an internal factor is that we’ve consolidated various web applications (Web SMS, Promobi, textburst) into a single product, still called textburst. With a single web application with harmonised price plans it’ll make support more consistent and upgrades both easier and offered to all users.

Grand designs

So as you’ll see this isn’t Changing Rooms slapping a quick coat of paint on. It’s more like Grand Designs building something for the future that goes beyond the visual appearance to consider how you use the end product.

We’re confident you’ll like it, so take a look around and let us know what you think?