Archive for November, 2008
OneFishTwoFish are a marketing agency who were attending a large exhibition for startup companies. They wanted something different on their stand to make them stand out from the crowd.
Rather than providing the normal ‘goldfish bowl’ to collect business cards, OneFishTwoFish selected bemoko to provide a mobile based system where attendees were invited to text their email address to a shortcode to receive a mobile voucher for discount on a book been offered by the company. Along with the SMS voucher received by the attendee, there was also a link to a mobile microsite giving more details on the book.
Every 50th person who texted in was given a free book, added an interesting competition element to the promotion.
they say…
“bemoko quickly understood the goals for our mobile exhibition site and delivered the service on time and to a high quality. We were impressed with the ‘hands on’ approach and service we got from the team.”
- Carrie Bedingfield, Founder Onefish Twofish
bemoko was selected by TVEP to provide a mobile conference site and feedback solution for the recent Thames Valley Innovation Conference. The site provided attendees with access to the agenda and drill-down detail for the various exhibiitors. A voting system was also used which allowed delegates to vote on 20 showcase companies who had been selected to attend the event. This proved popular as it allowed delegates to participate in the event.
A feedback form was also provided to enable delegates to leave feedback at, or shortly after, then event.
We use Groovy has our primary technique to plug in with web services and bring content into our mobile UIs. We picked Groovy for the development speed and for it’s clarity (perhaps beauty) of code that is created – essentially minimal code scaffolding that we get so used to in Java so that what we get down to coding business and application logic.
For a recent project we also used TextAnywhere to receive and send SMSs to people who wanted to interact with our quiz.
As a quick demonstration of why Groovy is so useful I thought I show you the Groovy code that uses this API to send SMSs compared with the (less than elegant) Java example provided by Textanywhere to use their SMS send API.
def conn = new URL(SEND_ENPOINT).openConnection()
conn.requestMethod="POST"
conn.doOutput=true
conn.outputStream.withWriter("ASCII") { writer ->
[
"Billing_Ref":BILLING_REF,
"Body":smsResponse,
"Client_ID":CLIENT_ID,
"Client_Pass":CLIENT_PASS,
"Client_Ref":CLIENT_REF,
"Connection":CONNECTION_ENTERPRISE,
"DestinationEx":MSISDN,
"Originator":ORIGINATOR,
"OType":"0",
"Reply_Type":"0",
"SMS_Type":"0"
].each {
writer.write("&" + URLEncoder.encode(it.key,"UTF-8") +
"=" + URLEncoder.encode(it.value,"UTF-8"))
}
}
sendResult = conn.inputStream.text
You gotta admit – that’s pretty readable and succinct. Read a bit more about Groovy closures and looping if you want learn how this works and get coding Groovy today.