White Paper

Executive Summary

Overview

Bulletin Wireless has led the way in business solutions for the wireless messaging industry since 1995. As experts in the field, we have patented aspects of our ground-breaking technology which provides our clients with unique SMS services that facilitate effective in-house business or marketing communications.

Bulletin Wireless' patented mTAG^TM technology enables real two-way messaging. mTAG^TM provides the ability to manage multiple threaded two-way SMS conversations between a computer system and a cellular handset. mTAG^TM technology has permitted a revolutionary new wave of SMS applications through Bulletin Connect that would not have been possible before. Our client experience a wealth of communication benefits such as; dispatch applications, and email to SMS bridges, to name just a handful of the possibilities.

Business Challenge

When someone replies to an SMS message, the mobile device does not tell the network which message the user is replying to. This restricts SMS applications to a flat request/reply flow, and requires that each application you run have a unique address. By associating a temporary reply address with each outgoing message we overcome these limitations.

The Opportunity

Consider an internet messaging application like Windows Live Messenger or Skype. Sending SMS messages from these applications is easy, but they can't accept replies to SMS messages because it is impossible to tell who to forward the incoming messages too:

1. Bob uses the chat application to send Alice a message.
2. Carol uses the chat application to send Alice a message.
3. The chat application forwards the messages to Alice.
4. Alice replies to the message from Bob.
5. Who is the message for?

You'll encounter the same problem yourself if you text two questions to a friend. They might send back two replies, or one, and they might send replies in any order:

What's your favorite color?

How are you feeling?

blue

It is impossible to correlate incoming messages with outgoing messages because the protocols used to send SMS messages don't retain any information about how the messages are related to each other; hitting the "reply" button on your mobile phone doesn't tag the message you send as being a reply to the message you're viewing, it just fills out the destination number for you.

Solution Description

Bulletin Wireless' patented mTAG^TM technology enables real two-way messaging. mTAG^TM provides the ability to manage multiple threaded two-way SMS conversations between a computer system and a cellular handset. mTAG^TM technology has permitted a revolutionary new wave of SMS applications through Bulletin Connect that would not have been possible before. Our client experience a wealth of communication benefits such as; dispatch applications, and email to SMS bridges, to name just a handful of the possibilities.

Solution Benefits

Features and Benefits

Technical Specifications

Details of the proposed solution

Features

Reply Tracking

Our patented mTAG^TM technology to transparently return replies to your messages through Bulletin Connect, or one of our other products that specialise in harnessing the two-way messaging mTAG enables.

Two Way Messaging

Our patented mTAG^TM technology enables real two-way messaging.

The Solution

By maintaining a pool of MSISDNs/numbers to send messages from, every time we send a message we pick a new address from our pool and store it, along with the message and destination number, in our database.
When the message arrives at its destination the "from" address that appears on the phone is the number we picked from our pool. When the user hits "reply" the "from" address is used as the destination. Then, when our service receives a reply from the handset, we can correlate it with the outgoing message by looking in our database for the message with a matching pool and destination number.

With Bulletin Connect it gets even more powerful. To make reply tracking easy for client applications we allow them to pass an ID with each outgoing message. The correlated ID is then returned to the client with each reply.

The diagram below shows the processing path of a message from creation to reply:

mTAG Message Processing

A client sends a message to phone number "+123456" using a chat application. The chat application assigns the message an ID and passes it to Bulletin Connect. Bulletin Connect assigns the message a temporary reply address from its pool of numbers. The number is stored in the database along with the destination address, the client's name, and the ID that the chat application assigned. Bulletin Connect then passes the message to the SMSC. The SMSC stores the message and forwards it to the destination phone. The recipient replies to the message. Hitting the "reply" button automatically addresses the reply to the sender (in this case using the temporary reply address assigned by Bulletin Connect, or one of our other services). The handset passes the message to the SMSC. The SMSC forwards the reply to Bulletin for processing. It also passes the source (handset number) and destination (temporary reply address) of the message. Bulletin Connect queries the database to find the most recent message with a matching handset and pool number. It retrieves the associated client name and client ID from the database and transmits the reply, along with the ID, back to the chat application.

Examples

True two-way messaging enables a class of SMS applications that could not be built before: chat applications (as above); dispatch applications, where drivers pick jobs from lists sent to them; auction applications, where bidders reply to notifications when they're out-bid; and email to SMS bridges, to name a few.

Patents

Bulletin Wireless holds patents in the United States and New Zealand that cover this technique (US Patent #6134432 and NZ Patent #330703) we call mTAG^TM.

More Information

For the latest information about our product and services, please see the following resources:

Web Sites

http://www.bulletin.net/

Contact Us

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Copyright Bulletin.net Inc. & Bulletin Wireless Ltd. 2004-2006

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