ATT has Best Performance & Most Reliable for Mobile Messaging

A good friend of ours at Keynote Systems, the network monitoring company that tracks and monitors performance in various locations, has a compelling set of numbers in his email signature. I am ALWAYS shocked to see how well some networks perform over others. You know what I mean whether it’s ‘America’s Most Reliable Wireless Network’ or as another hangs their hat on ‘More Bars in More Places’ - but how do they really compare? And what does each mobile user care about most at the end of the day? Service that just works when we need it to work.

So these results may shock some of you:

	Average Availability (%)	Average Performance (secs)
AT&T	98.6113	8.9673
Sprint	94.7547	16.1505
T-Mobile	98.5483	11.1372
Verizon	97.1555	15.8996
Overall	97.2675	13.038

Want to learn more about these numbers and how they impact your business, give our friends at Keynote a call. Tal Turner can be reached at 650-403-3435 or via email: tal.turner @ keynote.com (tell him Dave from QWASI sent you). He’ll have a good laugh.

July 13, 2009 in Blog   |   No Comments

QWASI Taps Keynote to Monitor SMS Text Messaging

SMS Monitoring important to future for mobile according to QWASI

Apr 23, 2009 (COMTEX) – KEYN — Keynote Systems, a provider of on-demand mobile and Internet test & measurement solutions, announced that Qwasi, a mobile marketing company providing cross market interactive solutions, has selected two Keynote solutions for monitoring and testing its services: Keynote Mobile Application Perspective (MAP), which monitors SMS service, and Keynote Mobile Interactive Testing Environment (MITE), which offers interactive testing and validation of mobile content.

“We selected Keynote because it was very flexible in its monitoring approach and methodology, allowing us to conduct testing on our own terms,” said Dave Geipel, COO and co-founder of Qwasi. “We also liked the fact that Keynote specializes in network monitoring and is a publically traded company.”

Keynote’s SMS monitoring service was created to meet growing industry demand for a solution that offers increased visibility into the performance, availability and delivery of messages sent via Common Short Codes. The company stated that MITE is the industry’s first desktop testing tool that allows mobile developers to interactively test and validate mobile content over the Internet or live carrier networks across more than 1,600 mobile device profiles. Users benefit from the end user perspective MITE offers right from the desktop.

Qwasi uses the Keynote solutions to test and monitor a service it runs for a large multimedia retailer. The service includes a mobile transaction system that allows customers to use their mobile phones to purchase products that the company sells on cable television. The service also delivers daily text message alerts to customers about new products on their mobile phones. Customers have the option to purchase these products by clicking on the phone number to call, texting in the product ID or clicking on a URL to make a purchase over the mobile Web.

“We use Keynote Mobile Application Perspective to monitor the performance of our SMS text messaging systems to keep uptime as high as possible to meet service level agreements,” said Geipel. “The solution tests our SMS service using different types of handsets across four major wireless carriers from two different locations in the U.S. several times an hour. The service initiates a message from the mobile handset, which travels through our aggregator service, applications and then back through the aggregator and to the handset. This gives us an accurate representation of the user experience. If Mobile Application Perspective receives no response or a slow response, it triggers an alert to Qwasi’s engineers, who can then immediately troubleshoot the problem.”

“We’re pleased to help Qwasi optimize the performance and availability of its SMS services and perform QA testing on its mobile Web sites,” said Vik Chaudhary, vice president of product management and corporate development at Keynote. “By using Mobile Application Perspective for SMS performance monitoring and MITE for mobile Web site testing, Qwasi can be confident that the end-user experience for its SMS services and mobile applications will be world-class.

April 23, 2009 in Press Releases   |   No Comments

Four questions with David W. Geipel, Cellsigns Co-Founder

David Geipel, vice president of business development at CellSigns, says that the mobile experience is underpinned by awide array of services. And newspapers better have strategies for each one.

● What are some of the issues facing newspapers when it comes to implementing mobile phone technology?

Mobile isn’t new for many newspapers that have deployed WAP (wireless access protocol) sites with news, weather and sports content. They have been out for several years but most of those investments have not paid off. That’s because “mobile” encompasses a wider range of services to create an experience.

It’s not a single technology. The cornerstone of today’s successful mobile strategy is SMS (text messaging) and WAP. When you consider that a mobile phone can be a Web browser, an e-mail client, a telephone and an instant messenger, you really need to look for a strategy for each of these modes of communication. It also needs to reach consumers across various cell phone carriers like AT&T, Verizon and Sprint/Nextel.

Video will be the next big thing in the mobile space. Newer technologies like location-based services are still generating a lot of buzz right now.

● How has the mobile technology industry changed over the past few years?

Over the last five years, the fastest growing form of wireless communication in the U.S. has been SMS/text messaging.

In just five years, text messaging has grown from over 18 million text messages a month to over 18.5 billion text messages sent each month in the U.S. It’s been growing 250 percent year over year. In other countries, there are more text messages sent than calls placed.

The mobile Internet will also revolutionize communication and entertainment in the near future as bandwidth increases on mobile networks. New services such as mobile video, photo sharing and music downloading will be all the rage over the next few years as the cell phone morphs into the next-generation communication device. Can anyone say iPhone?

● Do you think mobile phone technology will help newspapers attract the young readership demographic?

Absolutely. According to Forrester Research, 78 percent of cell phone subscribers aged 18 to 26 use data services. Whether it’s teens, tweens or Generation X, Y or Z, they can all be lumped in as the mobile generation, or the consumer on the go.

The only way to reach this demographic is to talk their talk and create services that are useful and are of interest. They may not be picking up the paper, but their phone is with them and they know how to use it.

SMS is to Gen-Y as e-mail was to Gen-X.

● What Web 2.0 technology trends should newspapers pay attention to?

The newsroom has changed. Breaking news is now being reported as it happens through text message posts, mobile e-mail, camera phone photos and mobile video taken from cell phones. Some reporters are being equipped to report from the street and are now being called mojos, or mobile journalists.

Publisher Web sites will soon morph into places where collective intelligence resides. Blogs from actual editors and reporters will become the norm and garner greater readership across the Internet.

The move toward hyper-local puts the spotlight back on the street-by-street news. It also puts the spotlight on social networking applications, microsites and mash-ups — blending technologies.

Mobile technologies will allow advertisers to publish mobile special offers and specials to an opt-in list managed by the publisher. The customer will get the offer immediately on their phone, which reiterates the value of the subscriber relationship.

In the end, mobile is the universal connector between the customer and others with similar interests across all of the newspaper franchises, including news, weather, sports, promotions, and classifieds. — OT

October 7, 2007 in Press Releases   |   No Comments