Sending by Phone Number

My goal is to sell wallpapers.

Even though a phone supports WAP technology that doesn't mean the user can browse the Internet. Since web browsing is normally an additional feature that providers charge extra for, I guessing allot of WAP phones can't get to my services. I noticed that other wallpaper websites send the image directly to a phone number.

How do I send an image to a phone number?
What is this technology?

You might able to use a wap push. I've never looked into it though.

I use a PHP script to send e-mails to an e-mail address. All major carriers have the ability to send pics and text from phones to e-mails. Each phone number is assigned an e-mail address. Most cell users don't know about this though. Example if you were sending to a tmobile customer it would be "5551113333@tmomail.net"

So all you would have to do is ask them for their phone number and carrier then the script will fill in the domain.

the problem with the email solution is that limited providers support it, the problem with wap push is that si (service incdicator) will only send the url as an alert which requires the user to then connect, sl (service loader) is when you send the url to the phone and it auto loads it however sl is again limited but this time on the handsets, i understand nokia dropped support for it as it could open up too many loopholes for people like premium sms spammers.

hth

What providers don't support it? I've tested it will all the nationwide carriers in the USA (tmobile, verizon, cingular, att, sprint, nextel). Now I'm sure some regional carriers won't support it, and there's probably a few companies over seas that don't as well. I'm honestly not at the point to even start worrying about other countries yet.

andy: What would you suggest if not email or wap push? Or perhaps just supporting both?

why not send it via premium MMS? with MMS, you could even add DRM capability to your wallpapers. sending via e-mail is a very amateurish solution for selling wallpapers. and while many providers may support SMS via e-mail, not many will do that for pictures/files.

premium MMS is still new and may not be available but premium SMS is. that is where the user's bill gets charged for the recieved SMS and part goes to the service provider, rest to you. so you send the premium SMS to charge them, and then an MMS containing the wallpaper/ringtone/game/whatever.

of course you'll most likely be required to use a 3rd party for this and may also be required to get a shortcode for sending.

The mobile marketing company that I work for in the UK have used WAP push to deliver wallpapers to consumers. Although using WAP push has the following problems
- Some users don't have the wap setting enabled on their phones
- Some users are not smart enough to save the content
- Not all phones support WAP (I believe it is about 70-80% in the UK at the moment)

Nemik has the right idea about chargine via Premium SMS. I would also suggest you limit the amount of times someone can download the content and lock the content to a specific mobile number/handset on your server.

I believe that DRM can be used via WAP downloading as well as MMS, but bear in mind that if the phone dosen't support DRM it may error or just ignore the protection.

It's also worth noting that (At least in UK/Europe markets) WAP (And WAP Push) have a greater market share than MMS. MMS also costs more to send to a consumer than a WAP push (Or so my money minded boss tells me)

premium mms is only available in norway from what i understand.

yes, your money minded boss is right, sending a wap push si is cheaper than sending a mms.

premium sms is the way to go for billing of mobile content.

drm can be added to any file you send to a phone through wap, it's just a case of checking the phone supports oma drm and if it does wrapping the binary data for the file inside a boundary you set when setting the drm.message mime type.

if you want to send something to a phone, the best bet is to send them over the link in a text and wap push, at least that way they will still get the link if the have wap push disabled on the handset. still, saying that though sending standard sms to the us can be problematic as many networks there reject sms from the uk etc...

first of all if the mobile phone that you use is the latest model normally has browser for www. so you can access any websites you want as you log to any address.
the problem is when you down load the page it is probably too big and it cost money for hand held user, that's where you need to make page small say 10k and write it in XHTML.
check this site.
http://www.globalsoftware.co.uk
also if you want to sell wall paper or images on mobile phone.
you can set up a text back system that is clients text to short code and receive a picture or wallpaper to their mobile phone.
Or if you have a web site that shows all the wallpapers.
your clients can choose one and once you have their phone number simply use your mms from your cell phone and send them that wallpaper or image.

Hope this helps.
Homayoun