Smoothplanet » zong http://www.smoothplanet.com It is a smooth world Thu, 13 Oct 2011 14:00:59 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 en hourly 1 DigitURL http://www.smoothplanet.com/digiturl/540/ http://www.smoothplanet.com/digiturl/540/#comments Thu, 03 Jan 2008 09:24:11 +0000 jerome http://www.smoothplanet.com/digiturl/540/ DigitURL is a new service to help to access the mobile internet. We all know how painful it can be to enter an URL on our small handsets and DigitURL makes this easiest by accessing website through a numeric address instead of a long URL. This is a bit of what I have been intending to implement for some time (ages maybe) with scurl.ch (where “scurl” stands for “short code URL”)…

Improvements:

  • QR Code support: once you have the short code (ie numeric code) why not providing the QR Code (or datamatrix) that will lead to this URL.
  • SMS services: why not providing the service that sends you the URL by SMS so that you are one click away from accessing the mobile website (send “SCURL 1234″ to number 911 and you get the URL back). Somehow we implemented this with Kaywa and I am trying to do the same with Zong.
  • Add tags to an URL/shortcode to make easy discovering of new websites
  • Statistics for the community (for instance most visited, last visited websites)

Via Textually

]]> http://www.smoothplanet.com/digiturl/540/feed/ 0 Zong just does not work http://www.smoothplanet.com/zong-just-does-not-work/493/ http://www.smoothplanet.com/zong-just-does-not-work/493/#comments Sun, 07 Oct 2007 11:14:22 +0000 jerome http://www.smoothplanet.com/zong-just-does-not-work/493/ UPDATE: I apparently ran into a very specific problem (read bug) that Zong team has fixed in no time. See thread of comments. Good job, I go on with my testings and come back here for some more feedbacks.

ZongI have tested Zong for one of the blog I am running and I ran into a very unpleasant experience. Zong is a SMS gateway (what is Zong ?) provided by Echovox (based in Geneva) that lets you create your own mobile service for your blog. One of them is an alert system based on the RSS feed (called Z-feed) which seems to be a very good idea (we had worked out something similar at Kaywa for our own blogs). I thought I would give it a try to see how it works and even though I have my ideas for improvement (maybe I’ll come back later on that) it worked fine with my first test: I published something on the blog and a little while afterwards I get a SMS with the title and the content of the post (up to 160 characters of course). Worked fine for the first test but the decond one was a total disaster… I published a post on the blog and after a while I checked my mobile and I get over 40 SMS alerting me of a new post with the very same content. I had to immediately unsubscribe to the alert service as I was still getting SMS. Now this is for me a CHF 10.- experience (CHF 0.20 per SMS) I am not very keen about (not sure how I am going to deal with that yet) but I am glad I tested it before advertising it on the blog. It would be really a pain to deal with the community complaining about all those unwanted SMS they would be charged for.
Too bad the service is not mature. There is nice things to do there… I had already in mind my little RSS hacks to improve the service :-)

Zong - Echovox problems

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