Wireless Developer Network - Daily News

[ View Today's WirelessDeveloper NewsWire ]
Today's News | WirelessDevNet DevZones | Yesterday's News | Submit News | News-"wireless" Top Stories! | Classifieds | Around-The-Web | Wireless DevZones!

O2 and Pure Matrix Announce Launch of Enhanced Text Messaging Services London, UK 24 June 2003 - O2 and Pure Matrix today launched ESCAPE, a new mobile service from software provider Pure Matrix that offers any mobile customer registered on the O2 portal the ability to easily create and share SMS based services. The initial 90-day launch is aimed at the youth market and focuses on enabling enhanced types of mobile terminated SMS services. Customers will be able to create open communities (such as "celebrity sightings"), announcements ("local grunge band info"), voting ("who’s the best looking?"), and info services ("insult of the day"). For the first time, mobile phone users may specify the keyword for a short code service and create their own service, which has specific relevance to the creator, their mates, or the world at large and during the launch there will be no cost to create a service. For example, if a football coach wanted an easy and inexpensive way to communicate with the team and other interested parties, the coach could build an announcement service and choose a keyword “Leytonfbclub”, for example. The team joins the list by texting “join Leytonfbclub” to 82054. The coach can tell the players about practices, matches, changes or directions by texting a message to 82054, like “Leytonfbclub No practice this Tuesday. Practice moved to Wednesday at Leyton Green.” The coach pays his normal rate for sending a single text message and the recipients pay 20p to receive the message. Furthermore, ESCAPE provides a sharing feature that allows the creator to notify others of the newly created service so they can immediately join in. Kent Thexton, chief marketing and data officer, mmO2, said: "Pure Matrix’s ESCAPE offers customers the opportunity to get more from mobile messaging. Younger customers, who are currently high volume users of SMS, are particularly interested in unique content and applications. ESCAPE is exciting because we are empowering our customers to easily build their own personal SMS based applications, helping us to hold our leading position as the 'home of text'" "Pure Matrix is excited to partner with O2, as ESCAPE presents a unique revenue generating and customer retention solution. By empowering O2’s customers to easily create and share services developed by the marketplace itself, O2 is enabling potentially thousands of grassroots messaging services which have greater relevance to individual customers and those with similar interests”, said Pure Matrix CEO Doug Holbrook. ESCAPE is available to nearly everyone in the UK and Ireland with a mobile device, including those on pre-pay packages. Customers can access ESCAPE in two ways: via the Internet through the O2 portal (www.o2.co.uk/escape) or by texting the keyword for a service to 82054. Customers can also search for applications by browsing through a directory or using the 'search' feature. Availability and pricing Escape is now available in the UK and Ireland. At launch, each SMS message sent by the users will be charged at the normal rate to the user. Messages sent from ESCAPE will be charged at 20p per message. Platform and Roll Out ESCAPE is powered by Pure Matrix (www.purematrix.com) and has been developed using the Pure Matrix Service Creation Environment. The initial period of this roll-out provides members of O2’s portal the ability to create personal applications around mobile terminated text messaging. It is anticipated that the offering will expand to include content and MMS services in Q3 2003.