Mogreet Develops MMS API for Cellphone Marketing
We’ve been able to watch videos on our phones for a long time. But what if you want to send those videos to another phone as simply as you can deliver a text message? This and similar scenarios are the challenge that SMS and MMS marketing vendor Mogreet has set out to solve via a new set of APIs. Now, the question becomes: Is the world ready?
Mogreet focuses on solutions for companies interested in delivering textual and multimedia content to users for marketing purposes. Founded in 2006, the company operates internationally and says that its platform reaches 2 billion consumers around the world — which is a pretty large proportion of the approximately 6 billion total mobile phone users across the globe.
Recently, Mogreet expanded the tools available for its customers to communicate with users by integrating a new set of developer APIs into its platform. According to the company:
This set of tools provides developers with a simple and cost-effective way to deliver and receive SMS, multimedia rich MMS, transcode videos for delivery to any mobile device as well as access mobile user data which can be used in a wide range of applications.
The company has also promoted the new MMS APIs as an industry first, providing novel functionality for marketers to integrate rich media — videos, photos, slideshows, audio and lengthy text — into the content they deliver via cell networks.
Challenges
Mogreet has already worked to address some of the most obvious challenges associated with making marketing via MMS work in practice. The new APIs automatically tailor content as needed to ensure it is delivered in a format appropriate for the particular mobile device on which it arrives. “With Mogreet’s APIs,” the company says, “developers no longer have to worry about creating multiple content formats or identifying which content is needed for each of the thousands of devices on the market. The service does the transcoding automatically for them.”
Still, with this new technology hitting the market for the first time, it remains to be seen how ready the world really is for widespread use of MMS. It’s 2012, but that doesn’t mean everyone owns a sophisticated cellphone. Despite Mogreet’s best efforts, some content simply may not be accessible due to hardware limitations on some devices.
Meanwhile, Mogreet also faces obstacles from bandwidth limitations. Networks are growing faster and faster every day, but bandwidth is still limited — not to mention expensive.
These issues, however, are largely out of Mogreet’s hands. They also represent problems for which the company is unlikely to have to answer directly, since consumers who are unable to access MMS content due to hardware or bandwidth restrictions will blame the marketer trying to deliver the content, not the technological platform behind it.
And these difficulties may also not turn out to be as serious as one might imagine. Mobile devices and cell networks may truly be ready for the next generation of media content, in which case Mogreet’s API investment will pay off handsomely. We’ll stay tuned as the endeavor continues.
