Effective email campaigns for mobile with bemokoLive v1.2.5
I’m really pleased to announce that v1.2.5 of bemokoLive is now released. This version takes a step forward in the management of mobile campaigns with the provision of sub-sites and content rules. We’ve also put together a great getting started tutorial you can download from our wiki.
Do you regularly send email newsletters to your customers? You might do this once a week, once a month or you might even manage email campaigns for many people. Now these campaigns most of the time may follow the the same format – perhaps it’s announcing latest books available or sharing information on your latest promotions – but you may also find that often you want to add something special to each newsletter, breaking out of the mold of the same old template. You might also be finding that perhaps 20% of people who receive your emails are accessing from a mobile phone.
bemokoLive, as always, makes it easy to take your message to mobile phone and engage with this growing number of people accessing from their phone, but with the release of v1.2.5 we’ve made it even easier to take 100% control of your email campaigns. With bemokoLive you can create a single site which defines your look and feel, as well as common functions such as getting content from your CMS. This site allows you to rapidly put together each months newsletter. sub-sites in v1.2.5 take this to next level by allowing you to customise each newsletter – by making as few or as many changes you need. Perhaps you simply want to include a different seasonal logo or even deliver the message with a whole new look & feel.
Context Rules is a great new feature that helps users of your site as well as site developers. Site users can now readily access either the PC version of the site or an optimised mobile version as they desire so that they can get the experience they want. Site developers can also use context rules to quickly test what the site looks like on different devices.
There’s the usual handful of other useful updates with this release – see the release notes for more details. And if you’re new to bemoko, please get in touch and we’ll help take you web sites to mobile (and other digital channels).
Doha Tribeca Film Festival Mobile Website featured in Mobile Entertainment News
bemoko today launched the mobile website for the 2009 Doha Tribeca Film Festival and it’s been featured online in Mobile Entertainment.
Have a read of the article here and take a look at the site for yourselves at dtff.bemoko.com
1st – The Exchange partners with bemoko to deliver mobile web to IFAs
ABOUT THE OPPORTUNITY
1st – The Exchange is a market leading provider of technology solutions to the financial services market. The company provides an integrated suite of technology solutions, software and consultancy to the financial services industry, to help support the key stages of a distributor’s business process.
The Exchange is the largest provider of online comparative quotations and electronic new business applications in the UK financial services portal market. Its main product is Exweb, which is the UK’s leading intermediary trading platform in the financial services market, used by approximately 27,000 registered users within authorised advisory firms. It provides online information and transaction services, with 185 million client illustrations processed to date over the service since January 2008.
THE CHALLENGE
As a membership organisation, it is critical to The Exchange that it provides up to date and relevant services for its users in an effective and easy to use manner.
Having built an intuitive and successful web portal, Exweb, The Exchange was looking to provide access to a mobile website to its users. This was important because when an IFA is with a client, they will not necessarily have access to the web portal. They may, for example, be at a client’s home. The capability to provide either an indicative or full quotation during a meeting enables the IFAs to deliver a quicker and more effective level of service to their clients.
Traditionally it has been difficult to create mobile websites that can be accessed by all devices. There is no single standard operating system for mobile phones and there are a variety of different browsers embedded within mobile handsets.
To further complicate matters, mobile phones have different screen sizes, meaning that creating one mobile website that can be accessed by all mobile devices has been a challenge. Typically companies have either gone to the expense of creating multiple versions of the same site for different handsets, which is a labour and cost intensive exercise. The alternative has been to create a generic mobile website that may not fit a mobile screen and can include broken links or content that cannot be properly displayed on the phone. This delivers an extremely poor brand representation.
Initially, The Exchange decided to create a mobile web solution for certain Nokia and Blackberry devices, in order to test how subscribers reacted to having a mobile website to use and to understand more about usage patterns. Once this trial had been concluded successfully, the challenge for The Exchange was to roll out a fully featured mobile website that could be easily accessed from all mobile devices to support members in the Annuities market.
THE SOLUTION
Having evaluated a number of partners, The Exchange decided to team up with bemoko to roll out a mobile website to their users. bemoko provides consultancy and software solutions that enable organisations to quickly and effectively create mobile internet solutions for all mobile phones.
Uniquely, bemoko’s software solutions allows almost every mobile handset that is internet enabled to access a mobile website and see the content as if it has been designed exclusively for that handset. bemoko’s solution recognises which handset is visiting a mobile website and delivers a fully optimised version of the site to that particular handset.
If the handset supports certain technologies (for example Flash) the solution will deliver that particular content, however, if it does not, the content will not be delivered and instead the page will automatically be configured to be suitable to the size of screen, operating system and mobile browser embedded into the handset. The result is that, whatever handset is accessing the site, the mobile web pages fit the screen and do not display content that cannot be viewed, removing the broken links and poorly fitting pages that can be associated with the mobile web experience.
The Exchange had a series of specific criteria to fulfil: it needed to enable users to input important information such as a client’s age and requirements easily; it also needed to deliver usable results to IFAs quickly and reliably. Most importantly the site needed to be accessible from any mobile phone.
bemoko worked with The Exchange to develop a bespoke solution that delivered an effective mobile website within The Exchange’s criteria. Rather than suggesting a solution that would have required a major technology upheaval for The Exchange, bemoko was flexible enough to develop a solution that suited the core technology environment within which The Exchange operated its services.
Both the bemoko team and The Exchange technical staff collaborated to ensure that the solution was effective and deliverable. Considerable support was also provided from Microsoft, since The Exchange works in a .NET framework.
OUTCOMES
The collaboration has provided a highly effective mobile website that can be clearly and easily displayed on all but the very oldest mobile phones.
The solution has been launched and is now being used by IFAs across the UK, providing them with another flexible and relevant service from The Exchange and allowing The Exchange to demonstrate its market innovation and thought leadership in a new area.
The Exchange is now considering the implementation of the second phase of the mobile platform to deliver additional services to its customers.
CONCLUSION
The mobile environment has traditionally been seen as one that has been too expensive or too difficult to deliver a meaningful service. The challenge of either having to build multiple micro sites for different devices at significant cost, or relying upon automatically re-rendering content has meant that many organisations have avoided creating mobile web solutions.
Yet the ubiquity of the mobile phone, along with the increasing number of people who are using data services on mobile means that it is difficult for organisations to ignore the mobile opportunity any more. By recognising the value that a mobile solution could provide to its members, The Exchange has been a pioneer.
By partnering with bemoko, The Exchange was able to offer a truly personalised service to its customers at a fraction of the cost of creating mobile sites for each relevant device without compromising usability to the end user.
About 1st – The Exchange
1st – The Exchange is a market leading provider of technology solutions to the financial services market.
The Company provides an integrated suite of technology solutions, software and consultancy to the financial services industry, which helps support the key stages of an intermediary’s business process, whatever its size. In doing so, this enables users to service their clients more efficiently and profitability, whilst meeting regulatory demands, reducing costs and maximising profits.
The Exchange’s Exweb is the largest provider of online comparative quotations and electronic new business applications in the UK financial services portal market with over 27,000 users. It provides online information and transaction services, with 125 million client illustrations processed over the service in 2007.
1st develops, markets and supports software delivering financial planning, client management and full back office administration to financial intermediaries. 1st’s ‘Adviser Office’ software, is the market-leading client management solution used by more than 1,600 Adviser firms offering wealth management and financial advice, both Multi-tied and Independent. Based on Microsoft SQL Server and .net Technology, Adviser Office and Adviser Evolution link with over 60 partners, including product providers, portals and fund supermarkets to aggregate client data and avoid any data re-keying.
Cool … iPhone handles the HTML5 onstorage event handler
… or in other words we can readily synchronise local browser storage with back-send server persistent storage. This is one of the fundamentals of compelling off line web applications.
So a little background. You may know that you can store data in your local browser database with javascript like …
function store() {
if (window.localStorage) {
var count=window.localStorage.getItem("count");
if (!count) {
count=0;
}
count++
window.localStorage.setItem("count",count);
}
}
window.onload = function() {
store();
}
and you can even see it in action here, if you got a decent browser such as the latest iPhone 3, Firefox 3.5, Safari 4.
But this ain’t much good if you can’t get this data back to the server to do something useful with it, e.g. share with friends, share with your other devices, keep a backup, send a message … I could go on.
So what we really need is a way to easily listen out to storage events and deal with it in one place. Yep, we could create our own Javascript framework to do this and handle getters and setters, but that sounds nasty to me.
Instead we can know use the onstorage attribute on the HTML body tag to hook into a function that will handle all of these call backs based on local stored data.
function store() {
if (window.localStorage) {
var count=window.localStorage.getItem("count");
if (!count) {
count=0;
}
count++
window.localStorage.setItem("count",count);
}
}
function handleOnStorage() {
myFunctionToSendDataToServer(event.key,
event.newValue, event.oldValue);
}
window.onload = function() {
document.body.setAttribute("onstorage", "handleOnStorage();");
store();
}
Take a look at it in action here in the bemoko mobile test suite. It works on iPhone 3 and Safari 4. You can even see the complete code here.
Posted in: mobile, mobile web | No Comments »
Squeezing PC web into mobile is like listening to the TV on radio
Imagine if radio came along after television.
… would the first radio shows simply have been recordings off the TV?
Before the days of video recorders I used to sit and record the television with the new shiny mic onto cheap D90s I’d bought from the market. The novelty soon wore off and none of my friends seemed that interested in my recordings.
We’ve grown accustomed to see TV and radio as two very different media channels. In particular we don’t consider the radio as a lesser medium even though from a simple point of view it’s just a constrained TV. I love the radio – in fact I spend more time listening to the radio than I do watching the TV. Why? Not because I think there’s better content on the radio, and not because I think it’s physically better than the TV – more because it fits comfortably into my way of life and my context.
I work quite a bit – and I learnt pretty early on that I can’t work whilst watching the TV. Took me a while to realise that and I still experiment with it, but basically if I’m front of a TV I don’t get any work done. However the radio fits my mood – I can put on some back ground music, or even talk programs, to give me inspiration. It doesn’t tear my attention away and in some respects can enhance my work environment.
I do quite a bit of DIY, housework – my old paint splattered radio follows me around. I’m often amazed at how long a couple of AA batteries power the damn thing, even though I leave it on too much. It falls off tables, sit’s in damp rooms … it’s so simple and portable and it goes on broadcasting for me.
I can safely say I’ve never tried to watch a TV and drive. Don’t think I’ll ever give that a go, but I obviously do listen to the radio in the car. When good programs are on I don’t even mind sitting in traffic as it gives me a little time to think and relax … as long as it’s not too much traffic.
Radio production has learnt from the strengths of the audio only medium. You can in fact do things you can’t do on a TV, perhaps because of the limited budgets but perhaps because you can create an experience not possible when you’re distracted by the images. It reminds me of the classic line in Educating Rita when, in response to “Suggest how you would resolve the staging difficulties inherent in a production of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt” , … she simply replied … “Do it on the radio. ”
So where does this sit with mobile …
As we start to explore the opportunities with mobile, we’ll start to exploit the true value in an always on, context aware, portable communication channel. We’re starting to see it already. Rummble provide an excellent location based personalised recommendation service. facebook is being accessed regularly from mobile devices by over a quarter of it’s users to keep in touch with their community.
I see the next few years as pretty exciting, as we grab this mobile medium and let it power people’s lives. It’s why I’m spending a good bit of time at bemoko refining the way that we take everything we’ve learnt and created in the web world to power the mobile enabled web; taking the unique benefits of mobile to create experiences we only dreamed of before.
Posted in: mobile | No Comments »
Android arrives on PAYG with T-Mobile Pulse
Today marks an Android first: the launch of the T-Mobile Pulse – the first PAYG Android device on the market.
Priced at under £180 this could be exactly what’s needed for Android to move beyond the luxury smartphone market into more mainstream adoption. Infact, this price puts it cheaper than the popular Nokia 5800 XpressMusic on T-Mobile’s current pay-as-you-go price list.
T-Mobile Pulse (image from techcrunch.com)
Using the same processor as the HTC Hero (a Qualcomm MSM7200A for those that like detail) it’s not obvious that many corners have been cut; although the case design isn’t up there with the Hero, and certainly reminds me a little of an old HTC Touch Winmo handset.
Screenwise, the resolution is standard Android at 320×480, although physically its reported to be a little larger that the Hero at 3.5″, making it about the same as the iPhone. See here on why having a physically larger screen could be a good thing for Android usability.
This is great news for mobile consumers, and great news for us at bemoko – we’re huge fans of internet-centric devices with capable browsers. And the more people that use devices like this, the more opportunities this gives us as mobile web designers.
App store dictators, mobile services & who controls the pipe?
This is the week that we saw Google Voice pulled from Apple’s app store concerning the industry sufficiently for the FCC to investigate.
Google Voice scares AT&T (and probably other operators) as it provides an alternative way for users to make calls as well as making it easy for user to switch between operators whilst keeping the same number (think roaming – pop in a local PAYG SIM).
I look back at my twitter stream from the week and I see a pattern of activity. We wait with baited breath to see if Apple will approve Spotify – an alternative to getting music from iTunes. We also see a pattern of rejections from Apple for PhoneGap apps. PhoneGap is an innovative service that makes it easy for web developers – with HTML, Javascript skills – to create iPhone apps … and Android apps … and Blackberry apps … and soon support for Palm WebOS, Nokia Symbian and Windows Mobile apps.
What is made clearly apparent is that an app store owner has control over what they choose to let there users install. Control is good – we don’t want apps to introduce vulnerability and stability risks to our phones and we probably want to avoid some of the shady sides of the industry – but who is to decide where to draw this line? When phone owners only have one place that they can go to get apps we are subject to problems of monopolisation control.
Apple cannot maintain strict control of application delivery to iPhones without seeing a backlash of people looking at alternative platforms with their alternative app stores. Apple have the user experience advantage at the moment – no where else is it so easy for user to get their hands on a rich set of applications – but as alternatives rise which have decent user experience and provide killer functionality missing from the iPhones, iPhone lovers may start to look elsewhere.
Michael Arrington (Techcrunch) quits the iPhone and Steven Frank (Co-founder, Panic) is “Not buying any future iPhone OS based devices” until the situation improves.
Apple, the iPhone and their app store have lifted the mobile industry in the past couple of years. I pray that Apple relax a few of their constraints, as I want Nokia, Palm and the Google Clan to have beat Apple by improving their user experience – not because Apple gives away the customers.
Update:
- Frustrating transcript of a call between Riverturn (provider of Voice Central one of the apps that Apple pulled) and apple highlighting some the challenges that app developers face
- Who refunds all those people who can’t now get support for the app they’ve downloaded and previously paid for
The first of the HTML (HTML5) mobile web app stores
So, “The market for mobile applications, or apps, will become ‘as big as the internet’, peaking at 10 million apps in 2020″ says GetJar – see BBC – Apps ‘to be as big as internet’ and GetJar forecasts 100,000 mobile apps by end of 2009. With Juniper Research predicting 20 billion app downloads by 2014 this a great outlook for mobile apps. But we shouldn’t be thinking of apps as an alternative to the internet. We really need to be thinking of them as one.
The buzz at the moment is clearly on app stores with the iPhone app store clearly leading the pack. See BBC’s click online summary from last week – Mobile phone applications grow up – for a great picture of the status quo.
We naturally turn to the ongoing debate of apps vs browser – Apps or browser? GetJar vs. Google on the future of mobile services. We needn’t think about either approach being right or wrong, or whether one approach will beat the other, especially when you consider that the user experience and commercials demands can vary wildly in different sectors or demographics. Let’s instead think about how the boundaries between the downloadable app and the web app can become blurred – creating a seemless experience for the end user.
Personally I’m getting pretty excited about the emergence of HTML5 web app stores as the HTML5 browser support arrives. We’re already seeing a taster of this HTML5 support, with the iPhone geolocation support in iPhone 3.0. Many apps currently in the app store realm lend themselves well to a personalised microsite with offline capabilities (such that HTML5 will enable) – take any of the information driven ones as examples, such as Amazon Mobile or Things. Developing in HTML5 brings with it the benefits of delivering to a wider set of devices and reusing existing web dev skills to create the apps. With these benefits in mind, the Open Gardens blog covers brilliantly the challenges that have to be tackled to create an HTML5 viable ecosystem – most importantly, what is the incentive for all the participating players.
We see the likes of (1) Nokia with their WRT widgets having foundations in HTML, CSS and Javascript and (2) Palm using HTML5 for native application – both providing potential alignment with the HTML5 web app store approach.
Now it’s really Google who is going all out for this HTML5 web app approach. With a slew of hot Android devices coming onto the market we can see Google slowly taking a slice of the smartphone. With the Android, Palm WebOs and Safari (iPhone) browsers all based on Webkit and with Webkit promising great HTML5 support things do look bright for HTML web apps.
BTW – to make my bias known – I co-founded bemoko which specialising in the delivery of the web to mobile. We have created a platform that allows existing (normal) web developers to deliver excellent mobile web UX – along with this wave of HTML5 (and widget) dev that is coming.
Automated Mobile Web Testing with Canoo Webtest – we’re impressed
Over the last couple of months we’ve started to use Canoo Webtest to functionally test our mobile web sites. We now use it for both product deployment cycles (we spin up a full version of bemokoLive and test a sample site prior to packaging up the platform) and site development.
What has particular impressed us about Canoo is the way we can rapidly create clean and succinct tests that address all of the functional aspect of a mobile web site that we can need to automatically test. There is a rich set of functions in Canoo to click around a site, interact with a page and test functionality and content of a page. We write all our scripts in Groovy which provides a language that is light on scaffolding syntax (i.e. code just what you want to do), allows us to dig into misc Java libraries as we choose and provides a functional language that is human readable (well to us techies).
For example, take the following test script:
package com.bemoko.webtest.live
import com.bemoko.commons.test.webtest.BemokoWebtest
import com.bemoko.commons.test.webtest.WebtestXmlParser
import com.bemoko.live.devices.data.conf.HeroDevices
import com.canoo.webtest.engine.StepFailedException
/**
* Test that welcome pages are rendered correctly to the hero devices
*/
class PagesTest extends BemokoWebtest {
void test() {
def parser=new WebtestXmlParser()
// (1) Iterate over HeroDevices
new HeroDevices().all.each { deviceData ->
webtest("PageTests : ${profile} : ${deviceData.id}") {
config(liveConfig) {
deviceData.evidence.each() {
header(name:it.key, value:it.value)
}
}
// (2) Invoke the welcome page and verify some of the content
invoke "/welcome/i",
description: "Index page : ${profile} : ${deviceData.id}"
verifyTitle "bemokoLive - i"
verifyLinkedContent
xpath:"/html/head/link[@rel='stylesheet']/@href",
accept:"text/css"
verifyLinkedContent
xpath:"//img/@src | //input[@type='image']/@src",
accept:"image/gif;image/png;image/jpeg"
// (3) Validate document using an XML parser
groovy {
parser.parseText(step.context.currentResponse
.webResponse.contentAsString)
}
}
}
}
}
The bemokoLive test suite provides a collections of devices that allow you to easily simulate requests from particular devices. The HeroDevices class, in the script above, provides a collection of around 10 devices that provide a representative coverage of different types of devices. We (1) iterate over this collection and pass in the evidence for the device, i.e. the HTTP headers, into the webtest configuration. We then (2) invoke a particular page, test its title and verify that the linked content is good. Finally (3) we validate the document against the DTD in the document – great for making sure nothing bad has slipped into the page.
Reports get generated with a full break down on the tests and any step failures along with a quick summary, for example the following screen shot shows the summary of test run of 431 tests which we ran against one of our customer sites. I’ve deliberately included a report with failures to make the summary a little more interesting:
There’s much more you can do with canoo and the Groovy scripting approach – take a read of automated testing on our bemoko wiki for some more pointers.
With this approach we can build up a robust set of scripts that verify our deliver and provide great foundations for our real device testing – no more burning time on real device testing dealing with functional issues that could have been caught earlier in development. This is also good black box test, so whether you’re using bemokoLive or a.n.other approach it’s equally applicable. If you’ve got a mobile web site that you want us to test, or help you get started to run this testing yourself just get in touch.
Posted in: mobile | No Comments »
Add Shadow and Border to Images with ImageMagick
We’ve started using a quick ImageMagick script to add shadows and borders to images. Useful for making screen shots stand out a little clearer on our blog and wiki.
For example, in a unix shell, create the function below (either by cutting and pasting the code into your shell window or adding to you shell init scripts) :
image-shadow () {
out=${1%.*}-shadow.${1#*.}
in=$1
echo "Converted file : $out"
if [ ! -z $2 ] ; then
convert $in -frame $2 $out
in=$out
fi
convert $in \( +clone -background black -shadow 60x5+10+10 \) \
+swap -background white -layers merge +repage $out
}
and then run
image-shadow myimage.png
to add a shadow to the image … or run
image-shadow myimage.png 6x6
to add a shadow and 6 pixel border.
Very simple to get images like …
More examples and details on our wiki @ http://bemoko.com/wiki/ImageMagick.