Hack Manchester is a 24-hour coding competition that is being held during the Manchester Science Festival.  The idea is that teams of four turn up with an idea and just 24 hours later present a working product!

We decided to get involved by helping to sponsor the event. We love being involved in the developer community and see this as being important to continually improving our products and user experience.

We’re issuing attendees with a challenge:

We want to see our simple APIs used in smart ways. We’ve got a handy Push Notifications service for receiving messages and status updates, and a REST API for sending (and everything else).  There will be a cool prize for the winning team who comes up with a clever way of using them.

Hack Manchester will showcase talent, creativity, companies and students working hard to keep the UK’s tech industry thriving. Local companies and universities have been invited to submit teams of developers, designers and people with big ideas. There are even tickets for interested non-techies to attend the awards show to see the teams present their creations to the judges.

It’s not too late to get involved, visit: hackmanchester.eventbrite.co.uk … we hope to see you there.

Developed by the Centre for Nanohealth and e-Health Industries Innovation Centre at Swansea University and supported by the Academic Expertise for Business (A4B) programme, the new text messaging scheme involves the development of a new type of blood glucose monitor, which automatically sends readings to the mobile phones and computers of NHS staff.

The aim behind the exciting project is for the development of a cost-effective way for medical practitioners and family members to monitor the health of diabetic patients.

Diabetic patients suffering from low blood sugar levels can suffer from hypoglycaemia, leading many sufferers to faint, something that can prove fatal should they be alone at the time. The new SMS based system operates via a biosensor, which sends readings to NHS teams, as well as notifies family members immediately should a diabetic sufferer fall into a ‘hypo’.

This is just one example of how developers are using SMS API’s in new and exciting ways.

Although SMS use by business is increasing, particularly in the areas of advertising and marketing, many large organisations in the both public and private sectors are becoming increasingly aware of the potential of SMS to communicate with employees in a crisis.

The benefits of using SMS over telephone or email is obvious. Not only will an SMS service save you money, it will save you time, too: you can send a message to specific staff members or broadcast a message to your entire workforce within minutes and know they’ll get it, no matter where they are or what time of day it is.

A good SMS API will also allow SMS alerts to be sent to individuals or groups automatically when certain system thresholds are exceeded – great if you work in IT for example and need to monitor servers constantly.

It would be great to hear of any exciting ways how you have used SMS. Contact us if you would like to write a guest post – hannah.giles@esendex.com.

TxtVia was built in just 24 hours at Leeds Hack. The inventers of the App are Kyle, Chuck, Swav and Sean. The App won the prestigious Esendex Challenge for the best use of our SMS API.

The winning team looking pretty chuffed with themselves

It cleverly integrates the Android system into a Google Chrome extension, allowing the user to send SMS messages through Google Chrome on their desktop, through their own Android Phone and then to receive the replies. Similar to iChat yet for mobile text messages.

TxtVia App

With a fantastic user interface and great functionality, this App, when polished will go a long way as a useful and time saving tool. Take a look at their website for more information and updates http://txtvia.com/.

There were a number of other Apps created on the day. Have a look below for details on these;

• Commutapp – keeping you updated via SMS of any problems with your usual journey
• Hang the DJ – decide a playlist through the power of sms messages, last.fm, democracy and Spotify
• 999now.com – getting local, trained first responders to heart attack victims fast
• SMSafe – retrieve your important PIN numbers and passwords via SMS
• SMSHunt – a tresure hunt powered by SMS
• Let me know when – get an SMS when a product you like gets to the price you’d pay
• Voterbot - think the X-Factor voting is dodgey? Here’s the answer!
• PleasePledge! – pledge cash via sms for buying the product for charities
• SMS Pub Crawl – in a strange city having a drink? Want to get to the next pub? Never fear!

You can find out more about #leedshack on their website:

http://leedshack.com/

Teams could consist of up to four people and were generally a mixture of developers and designers. The event is free to the attendees and sponsorship provides them with the venue, food, drink and wifi for the weekend. We decided to get involved by helping to sponsor the event and we issued the attendees with a challenge: what’s the most creative thing you can do with the Esendex SMS API?

The teams working hard on their concepts

One of our Developers, @ruby_gem, headed up the M1 to get involved, she says;

“There was a phenomenal uptake on our API. Over a third of the apps created used it, and I don’t think it was all down to unlocking the beer”.

Event organiser The Hodge, cleverly issued a series of challenges to keep the attendees entertained whilst they hacked away. The swag was unlocked after the achievement of 1000 commits was met, the crisps were unlocked after 100 mentions of #leedshack tweeted and the beer after 50 people had sent an SMS using the Esendex API.

These ranged from a first ever attempt at HTML and CSS to a gesture based iPad UI mockup tool and even a room full of laptops randomly playing parts of the electronic song  “Badger Badger Badger”.

Progress could be followed live on with live tweets, IRC chat and commits to source control.

At midday Sunday everyone downed tools and stopped hacking. With 2 minutes each to present their hack, time was of the essence!

The winner of the Esendex Challenge was TxtVia. A clever way of sending SMS using your desktop by integrating the Android system into a Google Chrome Extension. Keep your phone in your drawer at work! Manage your SMS on your phone with TxtVia. Run out of credit? Send using your Esendex account.

We’ll showcase the ones which used our API in upcoming blogs to give you a flavour of what some people chose to do with SMS.

This video takes you through the examples of legitimate marketing messages and also the types of messages that are considered spam. The rules for sending marketing texts are also explained, along side the consequences for the rules not being followed.

So last Thursday saw the start of the first Esendex Hack Day, with our developers taken off their day-to-day jobs and given just two working days to create a new product from scratch.  There were just 2 rules : to use our APIs to solve a consumer problem and to report back by 3pm Friday.  The wide range of new products they devised in such short timescales proved how flexible and powerful our APIs are (and how clever our developers are…).

Darren, John and Alex built an SMS messaging based directions finder, called “GetMe2″. Utilising our Location Based Services and Google Maps, the service allows customers to text in the place they want to get to (e.g. ‘London’, ‘coffee shop’, etc) and get directions back via SMS – perfect for the 70% of the UK population without smartphones – and all of us with smartphones who sometimes struggle for 3G reception.

Not every business has Outlook or Exchange – but by interfacing the Google calendar with the Esendex SMS API, John and Neil were able to create an appointment booking service, which used SMS to text appointment requests, updates and confirmations to both the calendar owner and the customer.

Jonathan’s product, ‘Atlas’ used a council’s car parking data stream to cleverly allow drivers to find out how many parking spaces were free in each of the city’s car parks by SMS.  Drivers could choose a town, a zone or even a specific car park and find out in real time the best place to park.

And Scott took the festive season as his inspiration, creating a Secret Santa Organiser !  Not only does it take all the administration away, but it works totally anonymously – meaning you’ll never find out who bought you that dodgy jumper…

The Hack Day was a great success and the team will be showcasing their work on their own blogs shortly.  We’re also looking to run a similar event next year for the wider development community, so if you’d like to join in please get in touch.

The C# SMS SDK includes examples of integration with some of the key Esendex features, including; Messaging, Inbox, Contacts and Sent Items. These examples have associated unit tests, in line with the TDD (Test driven development) an approach used by the Esendex development team.

For those of you who wish to start sending messages straight away, there’s comprehensive documentation for the C# SMS  SDK and a quick start guide within the developer area of our website which will explain all of the resources you can interact with in detail.

If you are an existing customer and would like to try the new C# SMS SDK simply log in to your account as usual and visit  http://esendex.codeplex.com/releases. If you don’t have an account then please sign-up for a free trial now – we’d love to hear what you think.

The NEW Esendex API offers a powerful, yet simple, interface to send and receive messages; manage contacts and contact groups; and your accounts. We’ve built it on simple and established standards following ‘REST’ (REpresentational State Transfer) principles based on HTTP and using XML. XML is widely implemented in programming languages and reduces the need for additional libraries which can be necessary, for instance, with SOAP services.

You will be familiar with the ‘REST’ style as it is the basis of the way the Internet works in general. A client makes a request on a resource to perform an operation and gets a response. For example, you are viewing this web page because your web browser formed an HTTP GET request for this page (resource) and the server returned you a HTML representation of the web page.

Instead of Services with a list of commands, the Esendex API provides a set of resources that you can interact with. These resources are identified by different URIs (Uniform Resource Identifiers). Resources represent the different types of data for Esendex. E.g. message headers, contacts, contact groups etc.

To perform an operation on these resources, you simply create an authenticated HTTP Request with an appropriate HTTP Method. The HTTP Method verbs of GET, POST, PUT and DELETE open up opportunities to retrieve, create, update and remove resources respectively.

One of the key advantages of the Esendex API is that you can start exploring the data you can get from it straight away using only your web browser. For example, if you navigate to http://api.esendex.com/v1.0/inbox/messages(and provide your Esendex username and password when prompted by your browser), you will get a paged XML response of your inbox messages.

There’s comprehensive documentation for the Esendex API within the developer area of our website which will explain all of the resources you can interact with in detail.

Our confidence in the reliability and flexibility in our new API is such that our Web to SMS application front-end, “Echo”, is based entirely upon the Esendex API.