RunSMS.ru - Innovative SMS service

The Client

Medvedev Group is:

• a fast-growing Russia-based company;
• an Internet marketing and SEO company, specializing in WEB 2.0;
• a group of like-minded people who do everything with great zeal;
• a team of IT specialists, inventors, and marketers who want to make the world a better place.

The Business Challenge

Sticking to their basic principles, Medvedev Group Team made a decision to create an innovative Web 2.0 service for SMS-mailing that combines functionality of mobile SMS and WEB 2.0 platform and can be used for:

• mobile marketing;
• information exchange using means of SMS-communications.

The goal of the new project called RunSMS is to give people and companies a new channel of communication. The main feature of RunSMS is its consumer-orientation. Each user has an ability to choose the sender, time and topic of communication.

Medvedev Group made a decision to outsource project to a service provider. The search very soon shifted away from the large vendors towards smaller and more specialized companies. Geographic and cultural proximity have been also important factors.

Finally INSART, with the development center in Ukraine, emerged as a right provider. INSART company was chosen because of proper focus on engineering excellence, in-depth domain knowledge and conveniently located development center.

The Solution

INSART put together a dedicated team, including software engineers, a project manager, quality assurance specialists and a system architect.

During the development cycle of product INSART team used Agile methodology. It allowed to organize the development process to take notice of any changes in the specifications (which was greatly modified throughout the development cycle) and customer's requirements (which were modified almost on each iteration).

Implementation of Web 2.0 principles

Each user of the service can:

• Create and subscribe to the SMS-mailing;
• Manage profile through the mobile phone by sending SMS;
• Manage contacts and group of contacts;
• Benefit from integrated semantic search by getting relevant SMS-mailings;
• Run own SMS micro-blogging.

Service has a unique SMS-mailing control mechanism. It effectively eliminates the SPAM.

Semantic features of the service

• work with external semantic API;
• mailing catalog;
• cloud tag;
• restrictions on the stop-words;
• identification of the user interests (by the user himself or/and automatically based on the profile analysis);
• semantic API for database cleaning and optimization;
• etc.

Interaction with aggregators

Service can interact with different aggregators. Switching between aggregators and new aggregators addition is easy and can be performed dynamically.

Multiple payment systems support

Each user has a virtual account in the system from which money is charged for sending SMS messages. Depositing of money into account can be performed via a set of payment systems, including deposit via mobile phone by sending SMS to short number.

API implementation

Service has a completely RESTful API for RunSMS usage on other services including gadgets.

Technologies

• LAMP + Zend Framework (PHP, Zend Studio, Zend Framework), Apache Webserver
• IDE: Eclipse IDE for Zend PHP, Zend Studio
• Web-design: HTML, AJAX/JavaScript, Prototype, Scriptaculous, CSS
• DBMS: MySQL

Results

INSART together with the client have developed a product with the following functionality and features:

• users can create their own SMS threads;
• users can create SMSs for their SMS threads;
• users can subscribe for other SMS threads;
• users receive SMS from different threads they are subscribed to;
• SMS-service has a variety of usability features and is socially-oriented;
• SMSs are sent with the help of mobile providers’ gateways;
• commercial accounts;
• semantic module;
• etc., etc., etc.

Benefits

• INSART provided to Medvedev Group the full cycle of product development (from specification development to maintenance and support of the released product).
• The customer worked closely with the team of smartest and most professional software engineers, QA engineers and project managers.
• INSART team still supports and enhances RunSMS service.