New features

We have spent quite some time recently making improvements to our Frequently Ask Question page. What we did was to go back though our support Inbox, and pulled out all the questions that are genuinely asked most often.

The new FAQ will hopefully allow people to find out much more easily the answers to the questions that they have, without having to wade through reams of other stuff that just gets in the way.

The most common question related to how long it takes for a text message to be delivered. Because of the investment that we’ve made in our system, and by selecting the highest quality suppliers to partner with, a typical SMS delivery time from sending to receiving is about 5 seconds! Any longer than this, and it usually means that the mobile phone is either switched off or out of coverage.

If there are any questions that you think are missing from the FAQ, then just let us know.

toText.net is very pleased to announce that our new affiliates campaign has just gone live.

We are a UK based company that provides an easy-to-use, reliable and fully featured SMS gateway to hundreds of companies worldwide. We deliver Web SMS, Email SMS, SMS API and a range of other communication services to help customers reach their customers and employees.

Main points for affiliates:

* 20% on sales
* 200 day cookie lifetime
* 10 day recall period

For our customers, these are the key features of our service:

* Range of price plans to suit businesses and individuals
* Flat rate SMS cost worldwide
* Easy to use and very reliable service
* Exceptional customer care

Here’s full details of the toText.net affiliates campaign

Today we kicked off a new project to create some reference implementations for our API. We recognise that generally people want to get up and texting as quickly as possible, so we’re creating some worked examples for integrating applications and websites into our systems.

We’ll be creating C#, VB, PHP and Java reference cases, that should shorten the development time in a green-field site dramatically.

The software will all be open-source, so customers are free to slice and dice the code as they see fit. Of course, we’ll be on hand to answer any questions that may arise during the integration process.

toText.net is very pleased to say that customer’s can now remind themselves of their password without having to contact our support department.

The login page now has a ‘Forgotten password?’ link, that shows a form where you can enter your account details. You can enter either your username, or contact email address or mobile phone number. Assuming that we can work out which account you are referring to, we’ll then send your password to you by email. To make it easier for you, we’ll also display the email address that the password has gone to.

If you still can’t find out your password, or have any other problems, then please don’t hesitate to get in touch. Alison would love to hear from you!

We’re currently developing a feature that allows customers to automatically create a password reminder email. This means that anyone that has trouble remembering what their password was will no longer have to contact us to help them out, although they are perfectly welcome to do so if they wish.

The password reminder will be available on the account login screen. Customers should enter either their username, or the mobile phone number that they used to create the account, and we’ll send a reminder by email.

We very much hope this feature improves the customer experience while using toText.net, and we expect it to be available sometime in the next few days.

toText.net is going to be updating and improving the API that developer’s can use to send and receive text messages.

The API is based on an HTTP Post in either direction, and HTTPS is also supported where required.

What we plan to do in the early stages in to make integration easier for our MS Windows based customers. We’ll release some open source reference implementations, so that customers can take these code samples and either use them directly, or customise them for their own requirements.

These new features will be rolled out over the next few weeks, so keep an eye out for updates. Please get in touch in the meantime if you have any questions or suggestions.

A standard text message can contain up to 160 characters. With toText.net it’s possible to concatenate messages together so that longer ones can be sent, but in priciple the 160 characters is what most people consider to be a text message.

One problem with the 160 characters though is that it assumes that the sender is only using ‘English’ characters – see http://www.developershome.com/sms/gsmAlphabet.asp for a list of the supported alphabet. Therefore, people wishing to use east european or asian character sets, for example,  have been largley unsupported.

The good news is that with toText.net we have full support for virtually all characters. For the techies amongst you, we can encode all text messages as UTF-8, which means we can send almost anything. The slight downside is that the number of characters in a message drops from 160 to 70, but it’s still possible for us to join texts together as usual.

One of our potential customers wanted to be able to send a set of text messages as a bulk upload. They have a spreadsheet at the moment that holds a list of customers, and they amount that each customer owes on their account.

The requirement is to be able to send a personalised text message to each customer that shows how much they owe on their account. The information is currently held in a spreadsheet that our prospect would like to be able to upload to toText.net, and have a text message sent to the appropriate mobile numbers, with the correct dates and amounts being substituted in each message

We were going to initially integrate the spreadsheet with a bespoke piece of code, but we think that this is such a good idea that we’re going to make the service more generic and offer it to all our customers.

After the spreadsheet is uploaded, and the validation checks had passed, the user will be asked to check the messages are correct before they were sent. Each text message will be shown in a table to the user, and they could perform whatever checks they saw fit. If the user is happy, then the texts will be sent to the appropriate mobile phones.

We’re developing this feature now, and it should be available in a couple of weeks. We’ll announce it when it’s launched.