Adam Bird - Where the Internet and Telecoms meet

Blue Ocean Strategy

2009-10-14T20:12:00.001+01:00

I bought this book a while ago after a reference on a blog somewhere. I never got round to reading it but it was referred to during a course Julian and I were on at the University of Nottingham as part of the EMDA High Growth Program.

I steeled myself for the read and it was entertaining and thought provoking in pretty much equal measure but I had to push myself through to the end of Part One.

The key chapters for me came in the Part Two. 'Reconstruct Market Boundaries' and 'Get The Strategic Sequence Right' represented the meat of the book. They actually provided something to action.

Was it useful to me? The jury's out on that really. I was up for a good session building the Esendex strategy canvas and looking for where we should be going next. What happened was I ended up post-rationalising our strategic decisions into the various elements of the Blue Ocean Strategy.

Which leaves me with a question. Is this book just documenting the process entrepreneurs like me go through anyway or am I missing the point and using it to praise myself by validating the conclusions I've come to.

The notion of a strategy canvas is great but it's something that is easy to dress-up in hindsight. Emphasise the elements of the business that worked, gloss over the elements that ended up being ill-advised. The businesses that are featured in the examples are undoubtedly success stories but does the strategy canvas tell the whole story?

It would be wrong for me to say reading this book wasn't useful but it wasn't the seminal experience I think I was probably hoping for.

Business Link - I might be about to change my view

2009-06-04T17:29:00.002+01:00

As many of you will know, I've been pretty down on my experiences with Business Link. Well, this may be about to be consigned to history.

As part of our acceptance on the EMDA High Growth programme, we had a business review which prompted Julian and I to consider some aspects of how we're running Esendex.

It was suggested we speak to Business Link as the gateway to a host of services and, in truth a little grudglingly, we did.

One meeting on and we're wiser to some relevant grants and services and action is being taken to help us.

I understand there's been a big shake up of Business Link in the East Midlands and if these recent experiences are anything to go by it seems to have done something approaching the trick.

Will keep you posted but if it is as it now appears, maybe the government has provide the help needed for us to trade our way out of this recession.

The Internet is a cess-pool

2009-05-29T10:51:00.001+01:00

Running the web site for Beeston Cycling Club has been a real eye-opener as to the crap that stands in the way of legitimate use of the Internet.

We run the site with a Wordpress blog at it's heart. Allowing our members to post and comment on rides, events and anything that takes their fancy, sadly it was thigh diameter last night, is key part of what makes our club different.

Problem is the couple of us that administer the site have to deal with pages and pages of spam comments.

Link building detritus that I'm amazed if it serves any purpose other than to keep several thousand Internet Cafe users the world over meagrely employed.

I guess this is what it was like during the Victorian era in Britain. Rich people able to pay others to mask them from the abject poverty and open sewers running in the streets. Anyone trying to work their way up, beset on all sides by scum.

Ain't progress brilliant.

A view on the economy

2009-05-18T11:10:00.001+01:00

A healthy stats obsession is no bad thing when running a business. Measurement, metrics, feedback, refine is all part of the rhythm of improvement.

The great thing about our stats is that they also give us a view on the economy in each of our markets. Our focus on business messaging and the size of our customer base means we see, first-hand, how busy an economy is.

Our traffic reflects the pace of business. The number of grocery deliveries, new furniture purchases, broadband installations, car sales and a whole host of other business transactions.

So, what's the news?

Business is looking good. I'm no economist but based on what I'm seeing, maybe this is a V shaped recession afterall.

Nott Tuesday - Where did all the geeks go?

2009-05-13T14:20:00.001+01:00

Last night we had the fourth Nott Tuesday event and from the feedback it was a success. However I've been left with the feeling that something wasn't quite right.

The start-up pitch competition was a new format for the evening and we had some great judges and great companies pitching but the audience wasn't the usual crowd.

As @alanodea said to me, he'd told Tadhg (a Nott Tuesday first timer) that this wasn't what it was usually like.

My vision for Nott Tuesday was that geeks and business could co-exist. Sharing ideas, discussing issues and seeing what opportunities materialise was what I hoped people would be doing.

The dirth of geeks at last night's event has made me wonder whether this is a) acheivable or even b) something that people want.

I feel Nott Tuesday is at a crossroads. I desperately don't want it to become just another business networking event for entrepreneurs to sniff each other's arses. I've no interest in committing my time to something like that.

So was last night just an aberration? Am I reading to much into it? Where do we take this thing?

Pointless Auto Follow from Singapore Democrats

2009-04-25T12:43:00.001+01:00

I travelled through Changi airport in Singapore at the weekend and naturally tweeted about it. Next thing I know I get an email from twitter telling me that the Singapore Democrats were following me.

What a load of mistargetted nonsense. I'm not a fan of auto-follows at the best of times but this has got to be up there as one of the worst.

Measure, Measure, Measure

2009-04-22T05:57:00.001+01:00

The focus of Web 2.0 this year was the power of less. While there was definitely a feeling that nothing really new was happening in the industry, a couple of talks I attended focusing on optimisation of your business were probably the highlights of the event for me.

Eric Ries (blog: Startup Lessons Learned) was almost evangelical in his talk: The Lean Startup.

He espoused the virtues of measurement, feedback loops and iterative, agile development. All music to my ears and things we're doing and continue to improve on at Esendex.

What really got me thinking though was the notion of A/B testing of application features and measure how that translates into improving your businesses KPIs (key performance indicators).

To date I had considered A/B testing to be the domain of web sites, try different graphics, messages, calls to action, processes, etc and measure the goal completion percentages.

We're deep into building the new version of our new application at Esendex and we're making important decisions about the functionality and features we're going to make available.

The problem is those decisions are pretty much based on opinion rather than any objective measure. While we think they're a good idea, it remains to be seen whether our customers find them useful.

There is a certain amount of inspiration required and going with our gut instinct. Innovation generally involves a step change after all. As Henry Ford famously said:

If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.

But, if we take the leap and put the feature out there, wouldn't it be good to know if it gave the desired results. We need to be able to measure a) whether people use it and b) whether not it had the desired effect.

Outcomes in the web analytics world are generally fairly well defined. A site visitor bought something, registered on the site or, in our case, signed up for a trial.

The desired outcome of introducing a feature could be more grey. Outcomes are very likely not to contribute directly to one of our KPIs. The path to KPI improvement will probably be circuitous and require a degree of assumption but at each step we should be testing the hypothesis.

Often we'll be introducing a feature because we believe that it will improve on of our KPIs but that could just be by offering something other services don't, encouraging people to sign up with us rather than someone else.

In this case we will need to measure an indirect outcome until such time as we enough of a population to then measure more directly against our KPIs.

Very much more art than science.

I'm very much working this through at the moment. We're adding feature measurement into the beta product we're launching in May and I'm looking forward to using this process to improve the product in the direction our customers want.

I'll report back.

All Hail the Uber-Geek

2009-04-05T22:43:00.001+01:00

One of the highlights of Web 2.0 was seeing Steve Souders presentation: Even Faster Web Sites.

His book High Performance Web Sites, is a well thumbed tome at Esendex and YSlow is required add-on to Firefox on our developer's machines.

Steve is an uber-geek. He has a passion for web-site performance like few others. He tirelessly investigates, tests, hypothesises, tests those hypotheses, and, importantly reports back to the rest of us.

His passion, and most importantly, the fact that he shares his results with all of us is something we should all be thankful for.

As developers we get adulation for building faster, more responsive and thus more usable web sites.

As web site users, we get a rich, responsive experience that does what we want quickly.

So all hail uber-geek and thank you to you all.

Twitter is a bag of w**k!

2009-03-25T17:19:00.001Z

I've just been at an establishment trying to buy something, doesn't matter which one, and had dreadful service. My immediate thought:

I'll tweet about this, that'll show them

What a load of passive-aggressive nonsense.

Tweeting, blogging and the rest allow us to whinge about bad service without having to face up to the people we're whinging about. In fact they encourage it.

I find myself standing there, working myself up into a disgruntled fury, safe in the knowledge that I can explode onto twitter and receive reassuring affirmation that I'm justified in feeling so insulted.

If I'm having bad service I should challenge the person there and then. Politely, calmly, assertively but then, when it's happening to the person who is exacting this distress upon me.

A friend recently tweeted about losing a bit of his soul in Carphone Warehouse, within seconds someone had @ replied to him asking him what was wrong.

Excellent, my friend thought, he asked them for an email address he could send a more detailed description of his issue to, it would have stretched way past 140 characters, and...nothing.

He asked again...nothing.

So Carphone Warehouse engagement 10/10, follow though 0/10.

Actually, while I'm having a twitter rant, auto follow and tracking really annoy me as well. I actually find it quite intimidating. I'm find myself getting nervous about mentioning any company in case they start following (stalking) me.

I mentioned about taking my iPhone unto CPW for a repair, seconds later 'Hi I'm Justin and i work for CPW....blah, blah'.

I mentioned the Beastie Boys this morning in a tweet. Next thing I know the Beastie Boys are following me. Their account following 8,000, 1 update, a link to their web site. Nonsense.

Leave me alone!

I like a lot about twitter but a lot of the content is starting to devalue the core proposition for me.

It's crossroads time for twitter. It's in danger of becoming the domain of celebrities and 'engaging' companies and not a place I want to inhabit.

Nottingham University Student Venture Challenge

2009-03-25T09:00:00.001Z

I had the pleasure last week of being invited to address the Nottingham University Student Venture Challenge awards.

My talk 'Being an Entrepreneur' took a fairly candid whizz through my story from graduating Nottingham University in 1997 to the success I now enjoy leading Esendex.

I included a few warts. My audience were just starting their entrepreneurlal journeys, hopefully some of my experiences and thoughts would be useful.

The evening was the culmination of many months of work by the student business teams, judges, mentors and the Nottingham University Business School team.

As I had arrived at the end of the process, I only got to hear the 3 minute elevator pitches from the 5 finalists. All sounded like promising propositions and I was left thinking that I wished I'd been involved in the judging, seen the full pitches and delved into the young entrepreneur's minds to learn more.

The winner was Andrew Webber with Sonix Media, his venture to provide a new software approach to learning a musical instrument. The other finalist that caught my eye was Alejandro Macedo with bGrantez a service to manage student placements in Spain.

What I liked about these in particular was not only were they both innovative, applying a new solution to an existing problem, but they were both obviously actually in progress.

Andrew had a working demo of his solution that demonstrated his unique approach. Alejandro was actually building the web site that was to be the hub of his service.

I've lost count of the number of people who I've met who have written a business plan about an idea and stopped their. Waiting for someone to confirm that it's a good idea by giving them the money they need to try it out.

So I wish Andrew, Alejandro and all the other finalists the best of luck with their ventures and thank Dan Edge and his team for the opportunity to speak.

I've included the slideshow below to give you a flavour of what I talked about.

Being An Entrepreneur

View more presentations from adambird.

Virtual Mobile Numbers - Out of Bundle?

2009-03-25T08:09:00.001Z

I heard something rather worrying yesterday. It seems that some mobile network operators are taking SMS messages to virtual mobile numbers out of bundle.

This means that when someone sends an SMS to a virtual mobile number instead of being deducted from the SMS allowance that comes with their contract, the message is billed on top.

This is not the same as operators charging SMS messages to virtual mobile numbers that look like UK numbers but are actually hosted off-shore, like Tyn-Tec's Isle of Man number range. This is apparently happening to UK mainland numbers from Vodafone, Orange, etc.

This is crazy and very short-sighted, but unfortunately typical.

Over the years ay Esendex we have time and time again convinced our customers to use Virtual Mobile Numbers when communication with their customers via SMS.

Just broadcast to customers and you might as well be shouting at them. Give customers a reply path and you are interacting.

Where virtual mobile numbers differ from shortcodes is that as far as the recipient is concerned they are just like any other mobile number, and, importantly, SMS to them are billed liked any other mobile number.

This means there is very little resistance from the customers to interact. The messages are essentially free and more interaction occurs.

I don't understand why an operator would stand in the way of this.

Interaction = more engaged subscribers = more messages = plan upgrades = higher ARPU

Isn't that how it works?

I've had some brief interactions with operator interconnect teams and based on these experiences I suspect this is where this 'initiative' originated.

There is very much a sense of 'we're not doing it so we're going to do our damndest to spoil it for everyone else', like a petulant school child.

Am I wrong?

My Second Bike Race

2009-03-24T10:27:00.001Z

Slightly more successful this week. Stayed with the leading bunch pretty much all the way.

Fast and furious at times. Cornering literally shoulder to shoulder with other riders at speed was a real buzz.

When I got to 10 laps to go I was confident that I would finish with the pack and really started to enjoy myself.

I experimented with different positions in the pack, different lines round corners and straights and was planning to be somewhere near the front when the final sprints kicked in. Not to join them, I hasten to add, just to get a view on what happened and how more experienced riders got themselves ready.

Unfortunately I was caught the wrong side of a crash on the final lap. Nasty one, we were travelling at around 35mph at the time. I ran out of road to navigate round it and my race was over.

Absolutely hooked, training hard now and maybe, just maybe I'll trouble the leaders in a few races time.

Found this picture of me in action http://www.veloriders.co.uk/gal/album60/IMG_0523

My First Bike Race

2009-03-15T22:21:00.001Z

I took a step into the unknown this weekend and competed in my first bike race. A 22 lap criterium at Darley Moor Motor Racing Circuit, near Ashbourne, Derbs.

Armed with my new British Cycling race licence I joined over a 100 other cyclists all gunning for the top ten positions where national ranking points were available.

I didn't trouble the leaders.

I've posted about it on the Beeston Cycling Club web site: A Racing Education

BBC Weather, a mobile service I actually use

2009-02-25T22:09:00.002Z

A link to this is on the front page of my iPhone. The weather for the next 24 hours in Nottingham from the BBC.

Being a cycle commuter, I'm probably a little obsessed by whether it looks like rain or not but this is dead useful.

Simple, clean access to the information I want when I'm on the move. That's what mobile services should be about.

Twitter - The Internet is Coming to Get You

2009-02-25T10:54:00.001Z

We are at the dawn of a new technology era. Search is dead, arise the era of being found.

Twitter is big news at the moment, celebrities seem to be falling over themselves to establish a presence, national news agencies are running stories on the power of the medium, even my non-geek mates are signing up.

Much of the discussion centres around the usefulness or not of twitter. "Where's the ROI?" scream the business people and cynics, "it's just a fad", "it'll be dead by next year".

It's true that it can draw you in and you can suddenly find yourself one hour older and not necessarily wiser however the same can be said for the Internet in general.

I signed up for twitter in late 2007 but only really started actively using it in the summer of 2008. It took leaping in feet first to really understand the power of what I was tapping into.

I have been blown away by the useful connections that I and my colleagues at Esendex are making. For example:

Jonathan (@jbjon) and Darren (@darrenliddell) have been doing some R&D that led them to investigate some of the Google APIs. Jonathan tweeted about his experiences and was contacted by someone from Google pointing him in the direction of some new test APIs that would help.

The chances of Jonathan & Darren finding these APIs via searching were remote, not least because they didn't know they existed. The important difference with this new paradigm is that the information came and found them.

It's like walking into a library and the books knowing what you want to read about without your rummaging through the shelves.

Don't get me wrong, I like a good rummage and you still need to do the good old manual trawl through Google to find most things. What twitter brings is those serendipitous moments that enhance your life. Another example

I follow @charlesarthur, Technology Editor at the Guardian, as I'm interested in his take on the technology stories of the day. He tweeted about catching up on the The Wire, I'm doing the same and @ replied about a particular scene I thought was brilliant.

A small interchange ensued in which he suggested a book I should read by the writer David Simon. Now Charles actually got the title wrong, but no problem, Gary Marshall who also follows Charles saw this and tweeted me with the correct one.

Gary and I then had an exchange about David Peace books, he hadn't yet read The Damned Utd, so I was able to recommend it to him.

None of us are friends, despite what twitter says, but for the that moment we were able to share a common interest that enriched our lives.

This would not have happened otherwise.

Yes, technologically twitter is nothing new and since the early days of networks we've had ways to share snippets of information. Twitter however has captured the imaginations of enough people to make it useful.

How it's done this, through luck, celebrity endorsement, who knows. But whatever the magic sauce or confluence of factors it is enriching our lives and that should be applauded.

SpinVox, a day of woe - UPDATED

2009-02-16T20:43:00.001Z

I like SpinVox, I think its core voice mail service is excellent and probably how excellent it is the reason why I find it so infuriating when I'm prevented from using it.

It seems to have developed this annoying habit of turning off conversion, ie just acting like a normal voice mail service. I didn't even know this was an option.

I've posted before about how infuriating I found their IVR interface, well it has improved but not enough for me to pay a monthly fee, as I do, to have my voice mails converted to text messages.

Today's tale of woe started with me forgetting my phone. Not a biggy as I was office based today so I could just wait for the messages to arrive as emails.

+44xxxxxxxxxx Just left you a voice message that you need to listen to and conversion is off.

Not again!

So I go to the web site to see about turning it back on and am greeted with the most astonishing home page 'upgrade' I've ever scene. 6MB of marketing masturbation culminating with an impenetrable home page that took me ages to discover where I needed to sign in.

Finally get there and discover that Firefox hasn't remembered my PIN from last time. Bit of a pain that I haven't got my phone but no problem I called home and clicked the forgotten PIN link as the phone was ringing.

It didn't work.

Not only didn't work it didn't tell me it didn't work it just did nothing. No feedback, nothing. So I hang up the phone, count to 10 and fire off an email to service@spinvox.com.

This was at 11:48, I've still not heard anything.

I was sharing my woes with the people of twitter and agreed with @whatelydude to be patient, but my patience has worn thin. Poor guy was earning his social media dollar today with the majority of twitterers coming out against the new SpinVox home page.

Finally I got home around half six to my phone and called the IVR service but apparently there were no new messages! Seems that the messages I'd been notified about had been marked as read and I would need to trawl through all my messages in order to get to the new ones.

Ridiculous.

I pay for this service.

It's just crazy that a company having raised $200M can have such an abysmal web interface to it's service. Let alone the random switching off of the functionality that makes it useful.

So SpinVox, the next time you get carried away with a funky new way to brand your service just syphon off a few of those dollars into the core service development team's budget.

Focus on making your service work and put the crayons away for a while.

UPDATE

Contact by a product manager instead of customer service who saw my twitter comments. Who arrange for customer service to call me.

Turns out that the switch off conversion is a billing issue. They're taking the money from my card but something's failing passing that to my account. They've given me a complimentary account for the moment until they can find what the problem is.

It's just a shame a Product Manager had to come to my aid rather than the customer service team who I emailed.

Are SpinVox drinking a bit too much social media kool-ade and not concentrating on the basics?

The most powerful tweet about Steve Jobs

2009-01-14T22:41:00.001Z

Twitter has been awash with the announcement that Steve Jobs was taking a 6 month break for health reasons. While many were debating stock prices or rushing to voice their opinion, one tweet cut clean through the self-interested chatter. Way to go Lance.

Nottingham Tech Scene

2009-01-07T16:13:00.004Z

This year will mark 15 years in Nottingham for me, all of them working in technology in one capacity or another. I worked for local companies in the early days and the last 11 have been spent running technology businesses.

Like many people in tech I follow the exploits of the Silicon Valley and London tech scenes with a sense detached interest. Interesting to hear what's going on but with knowledge that I will never really be part of it. A 3.5 hour total train trip to London costing north of £100 makes it hard to justify 'popping' along to tonight's networking event.

In the last 15 years I've met very few people who work in the tech sector in Nottingham, mostly just the people I've employed. I know they're out there but there is no forum for us to meet, discuss and help each other, and Nottingham, be successful.

Yes there are networking events around but these are primarily generalist, allowing small business owners to connect and sell services to each other. Great, but not really a forum for discussing the specific challenges and opportunities facing the tech sector.

So I give you Nott Tuesday, my attempt at invigorating the Nottingham Tech Scene.

The plan is to meet on the second Tuesday of each month in a bar in central Nottingham. The invitation is open to anyone working in the technology sector in/around Nottingham. Developers, entrepreneurs, investors, web designers, online marketeers, all are welcome.

I'm going to have a go at organising sponsors, speakers, etc. First time I've done this so I'd welcome any support/advice. Not sure what I'll be able get for the first event, suspect we might need to demonstrate a few successful meet-ups first.

If you fancy coming along or get more involved then contact me through the Nott Tuesday web site, email (adam dot bird at esendex dot com) or twitter @adambird.

Best Present this Christmas?

2008-12-22T11:11:00.001Z

Discovered the Guitar Hero: Air Guitar Rocker in John Lewis yesterday.

Got to be up there with some of the best, daft Christmas presents. Perfect for who I bought it for.

VAT Reduction worth more than 2.5%

2008-12-22T11:05:00.001Z

I was Christmas shopping with the boys yesterday and was struck with a realisation about the VAT reduction. At checkout after checkout, the price was always a little bit lower than I was expecting.

Most retailers haven't changed the price tickets, so it's not till you get to the till that you see the saving. On a £30 clock it was 75p, not a huge amount but still cheaper.

The feel-good factor was far in excess of 75p.

The continuous little reductions were adding a little shiny glow to each purchase. Put shoppers in a good mood and they'll spend more. Simple but effective.

Like many people, I had some doubts over the impact of the VAT reduction and questions remain over the affordability. However, I didn't consider this benefit of retailers not being able to change the price tickets quickly.

Some good Christmas retailing figures certainly won't harm sentiment and as we've learned recently, sentiment seems to be the foundation of the Western economies.

Picture credit: Simon Aughton

Wahay! My Photo Was Selected

2008-12-12T20:17:00.001Z

Melbourne - Trips & Activities - Fitzroy

Seems I'm one of quite a few, but hey.

I'm trying to like Rummble, I really am

2008-12-12T14:18:00.001Z

Rummble has real potential to be a mobile location service I would use. The promise of being able to:

find out what's good where I am right know
add my own views and contribute to the knowledge map

is a tantalising proposition. With Rummble, unfortunately, it still remains just that.

To really succeed, a service like this has to operate from my mobile. If I've got something to say about somewhere, I'm far more likely to be there rather than in front of my PC. I'll be still queueing because I'm in the middle of a bad service experience or (just finished) enjoying whatever I want to share with the world so they can experience it too.

Enter the Rummble iPhone App, perfect device for this. GPS built in, advanced user interface capabilities, fantastic connectivity. Problem is the Rummble app has taken advantage of the first two and assumed the last one.

If you build a mobile app, you can't assume it will be connected to the internet

I've tried a number of times to Rummble on the move now and it's just painful. For a start the start screen takes an age to load, even on my work WiFi connection it's ponderous. Immediately barriers are preventing me from expanding the network of knowledge.

Trying to add a Rummble when you haven't got 5 bars worth of 3G coverage is a joke and has resulted in a number of app crashes. What's really cute is how the app doesn't remember anything you've typed in so you have to go through the whole painful process again. Probably fair to point out that this hasn't crashed on me since the latest update.

I'm in danger of this turning into a rant and that wouldn't be fair at this stage. I've developed enough apps in my time to understand the issues and I'm also a big believer in the concept. There is still time for Rummble to rethink their mobile app architecture.

I believe mobile apps should be built from the ground-up to be able to operate without network coverage. Especially if they're capturing data. Work from that base and make the app synchronise when the connectivity is available.

The key thing Rummble needs is data, it needs to get enough reviews in enough places that I visit to be useful to me. It must allow users to enter these into the app without connectivity. Even if that means creating stubs that I then need to complete when I'm next online, either with the app or on the website.

The really valuable information is in my head right now, allow me to write a comment quickly, get it off my chest. If I can complete the review there and then marvellous, but don't deny me just because my mobile network isn't giving me the coverage the app needs.

I wish Rummble every success, it would be great for a UK company to succeed in this space.

It's all about the resources

2008-12-12T11:14:00.001Z

Our new web application, codename Doyle, is being built on the ASP.NET MVC framework. The primary driver for this was enabing Test Driven Development for web apps. Increasingly frustrated with the brittleness of the traditional approach this represents a fantastic architecture for building robust web apps.

The big challenge however has been conceptual. Patterns the team are comfortable with, have turned out to be unsuited to this approach. Discussing one such question at the whiteboard yesterday, it occurred to me that the issue we were having was we thinking in terms of method based architectures rather than resource based.

To date, our approach has been to have thin Data Objects that are passed to facades and sub systems that perform operations on them. We're a messaging shop so I guess that's where it came from. A message gets passed around, operations are performed on it, decisions are made about it.

The term Controller implied a co-ordination role with knowledge of controlling one or more sub-systems. However MVC tells us that is bad, Controllers should be thin and Models should be fat.

A good example is our new send message page.

The first pass involved the controller iterating through the recipients, constructing message objects and passing them to the Esendex ReST API SMS Message Dispatcher via our C# SDK.

Very quickly the controller got fat, validation, error condition handling, suddenly it was squatting behind the view like a Sumo Wrestler tucking into his 7th chicken of the day.

The light-bulb moment was the realisation that rather than thinking about sending a message, we were actually sending a batch of messages. Enter the MessageBatch resource.

All the controller has to do is load up the MessageBatch resource with the parameters (recipients, body, etc) and call Send. This returns either true or false, successful or failed.

The controller then just has to make one decision go to one page if successful, or another if not. Safe in the knowledge that the MessageBatch object will be duly populated with an error/validation info required for the view to render and give the user the option of what to do next.

Yes this has just moved the logic to another part of the system but being in the Model layer gives the opportunity to refactor, inherit, and most importantly, mask the complexities of sending a message batch from the front end. We're comfortable unit testing and doing it this way forces as much logic as possible into units.

So, if you're making the transition to MVC then consider looking at some of the thinking behind ReST web services (I read: RESTful Web Services as a good primer). I've come to the conclusion that ReST and MVC are intrinsically linked.

Photo credit: alarch

Business Messaging - Your Server's Gone Down

2008-12-11T17:28:00.002Z

Server monitoring is key to the availability of many business systems so knowing as soon as a server or services is having an issue is critical.

It's also not just the engineers that necessarily need to know. Other stakeholders like support personnel, account managers (who are going to be taking customer calls) and even key customers can all benefit from being kept in the loop about issues.

Most system monitoring solutions can send an email in response to a monitoring event. Just wire that up to an Email SMS service and you can notify anyone, pretty much wherever they are.

However there are times when SMS is not enough. They can be missed. If there are key people that you need to notify and need to know that they've got the message a Voice SMS is a great option.

Using IVR menus you can have the recipient acknowledge receipt of the message. It can keep ringing them until they do or your escalation rules kick in contact someone else.

Business Messaging - Your Taxi's Outside

2008-12-04T17:02:00.001Z

A local taxi firm, DG Cars, schedules a call back when your taxi is on its way. This is a great way of improving customer service as well operational efficiency for the cab firm.

This can also be achieved simply be sending either an SMS or Voice SMS message direct to the pickup as the taxi is approaching.

The customer knows when to come outside/get their coat on/say their goodbyes
The taxi not sitting idle waiting for someone who's not ready when it could be moving onto the next fare sooner.
Include the drivers mobile number in the message and the customer can all the driver if they're held up.

Dead simple and dead effective.