New features

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.