AU2004100952A4 - An SMS search engine - Google Patents

Description

Description In most business marketing the use of the Internet integrated with the mobile phone technology for 0 text messages Simple Message System (SMS), we see that the public user or customer has to subscribe to the SMS service provided by the business. The business then will send repeated marketing messages to all those subscribers in some cases unsolicited SMS messages are sent to mobile phone ?lists? the business has purchased.

0\ Part of our innovative process is that the consumer public has the absolute choice to send and therefore receive a response SMS from a business. The consumer enters the businesses phone number that appears in the business advertising as THE KEYWORD or ?code? and then sends that to our dedicated number 1999 1333. What sets our system apart from other SMS systems in use in business, in that we are not a single business identity implementing a service which requires the consumer to send an SMS to their dedicated phone number (example: coke cola SMS competitions or promotion), but we innovated an SMS service that provides every individual business in any location, irrespective of the business size, an ability to utilize the SMS technology as an adjunct to their established marketing programs.

The accumulated database of businesses including the data on their product and service provision, their postcode and address are combined to provide us with the capability to create an SMS based search engine. Consumers who are mobile can text a message to our dedicated number 1999 1333 and the result of their search is sent back to them as an SMS to their mobile phone. Consumer sends "find motel cairns" and receives back a listing of motel names and their phone number (located in cairns). The consumer can then contact the motel by phone but can also enter the motels phone number into a text message to send to us at 1999 1333, which results in an SMS being returned to the consumer with any special offers, rates, deals etc that that motel is offering today.

In essence we wish to claim that we have innovated upon the current technologies available via the Internet, PHP programming and the SMS system and have invented the first SMS based Search Engine (to be referred to as smsSearch as well as innovating a circuit of technological processes that provides a dynamic and interactive consumer driven business marketing via SMS. A key element of our innovation is the use of the unique phone numbers of each business (as their identifier) as the keyword to be SMS ed to our dedicated number.

Claims (11)

1. Businesses will visit our Internet Web Site and complete a registration process during which they provide us with their business name, address, phone number, etc and a list of products and services they provide.

2. They will then make a secure credit card payment for their registration with us and to purchase our license in the form of a download in Adobe Acrobat format ie a .pdf file) that contains our 'Instructional Logo' that is personalised for the business by capturing the businesses phone number and the ?type? of service they will provide, that they entered on the form, and inserting it automatically into the instructional logo they will download.

3. This logo can then be used in all forms of advertising and promotions that the business is normally involved in and this is a prompt to the public as to what they can do when reading an advertisement.

4. We use the PHP programing language which has the ability to write gathered data (from a form) to a database, to create a record of the business, and also read the data in the record on request (called a Query) as required.

The result of a Query provides data that can be used in many ways as exampled in Step 2 where we used the data (eg. the business phone number) in the Instructional Logo so that each logo is unique to that business.

6. Our process provides the innovation that the registered businesses can change or update the content of their message by accessing our Internet website to do so or being able to update the content by using our SMS service on their mobile phone (text "update theirphonenumber theirpassword messagecontent" to 1999 1333) thus creating a dynamic and interactive service to businesses.

7. The dedicated number, that the consumer send their SMS to, connects the consumer to an SMS Gateway Provider who receives the SMS and forwards it to our computer (called a server) where our database of business records and messages are stored.

8. In the message that we receive from the gateway is contained a lot of information including the O o mobile phone number of the person who sent the SMS originally, and the text message itself (in this case the text message is simply the phone number of the business the consumer wants O Sinformation from).

9. By using PHP scripting we look up the database record that contains the phone number that was sent in the message, and send the businesses current message, along with the consumer?s mobile Sphone number, back to the SMS Gateway Provider who redirects it, via the correct Telco, to the consumer?s mobile phone.

Thus, as a consequence of being able to build a substantial database of businesses, we have developed a SMS based process of extracting a range of information as requested by the consumer who can send a SMS text message containing three keywords and this creates the first Localised SMS Business and Services Search Engine by the consumer entering the text,for example ?find motels cairns? and sending that text to our dedicated number.

11. The consumer receives a SMS in return showing a listing of search results of which the consumer has a choice of texting the motels phone number to 1999 1333 to obtain that motels rates,deals etc for today before using the supplied phone number to contact the motel.