But I think it’s all media hype. And it’s not just healthcare it’s everywhere, iphone this, iphone that.

But it’s not real yet. All these apps are small scale with limited reach, they target a specific health condition so ultimately are only accessible to those with the health condition, with an iPhone.

How’s that going to revolutionise healthcare?

The future points toward larger screens of blackberry, iPhone, etc. But they’re still expensive compared to normal phones and their penetration levels low.

I recently read that the proportion of iphone ownership around the globe is equivalent to the population of Poland, so if Poland’s your market then go for it.

The challenge with mobile healthcare (and no doubt other industry areas) is to find solutions that are accessible to all. Not just young ones with cool new phones but old ones who are new to phones, the visually impaired who can’t read lovely smooth screens, the ones who can’t afford Apple’s price tag, and those not in reach of a 3G networks.

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.

We’ll put more details up here in the next few weeks as the application goes through trials, but for now here’s the teaser page.

http://www.getflorence.co.uk/

In this case I’m warning charities away from Premium Rate (reversed billed) text messaging to collect donations. For clarity this isn’t about normal every day, free to the recipient messaging.

A changing market

There have been some ground-breaking changes to the premium rate market in the last year in regard to how much of the money charged to a mobile user the network operators will share with the charities.

More revenue

We have seen 100% of the revenue passed to the charities in massive high profile campaigns such as red nose day.

We have also seen increased amounts of revenue passed down to charities if they use specific “charity” short codes. But the use of these codes is currently limited by very expensive setup costs. But let’s not get too excited about additional percentage revenue. Some of the networks still retain nearly 25% of the donation. Don’t forget, this is the donation the consumer made to your charity.

Tighter regulation

Then there’s the regulation, Phonepayplus are tightening up their rules, you ought to be getting prior approval for premium rate services to ensure you comply with the regulations. Even if an SMS supplier will do this for free don’t underestimate the time you’ll spend on this part alone. The last thing you want as a charity is a regulatory fine and being named and shamed on their publicly available list of adjudications. If you want to avoid this then you’d better be involved.

Will it be successful?

So let’s say you paid the setup fees for a specialist charity code to get a higher share of the revenue. Or perhaps even you chose not to pay for the additional revenue and you’re receiving what can be as little as 35% of the donation. Then is it really going to be worth it or are you better diverting your fund raising energies to other areas?

Clearly you need to work on a case by case basis and calculate the likelihood of success, but I can’t help but feel it’s a massive risk.

Please, prove me wrong

I’d love to hear of some really successful campaigns that are not by one of the big national/ international charities, and if you know then send it through and prove me wrong.

But for now, I’m not convinced.

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?

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.

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.