DOTGO for Developers. CMRL Version 1.0

DOTGO for Developers CMRL Version 1.0

Contents 1 Introduction 3 2 Some Definitions 3 3 Why Were Text Messaging Services Broken? 4 4 The DOTGO Difference 5 5 DOTGO Interactive and Broadcast Messaging Services 6 6 The DOTGO Affiliate and Reseller Programs 8 6.1 The DOTGO Affiliate Program........................... 8 6.2 The DOTGO Reseller Program........................... 8 6.3 Other Possibilities.................................. 9 7 Summary 9 3

1 Introduction DOTGO differs from any other mobile platform in that it is specifically designed to provide text messaging services for every single internet domain name from the largest dotcom brand to the smallest local business. Given this wide-ranging scope, there exist innumerable possibilities for marketing and reselling DOTGO, for internet domain name registrars, web development companies, digital and mobile marketing agencies, content management system companies, customer relationship management companies, and others. If your business has anything at all to do with the internet, then chances are that you should be interested in the DOTGO developer programs. This document describes the DOTGO developer programs. It is intended to be read by anyone seeking to market or resell DOTGO services and provides the information you need to describe to your clients why a DOTGO-powered text messaging service is superior to any other text messaging service available. The document assumes that you have some familiarity with DOTGO and CMRL (obtained, e.g., by reading A Brief Introduction to DOTGO). 2 Some Definitions Let s start by agreeing on some definitions as follows: Developer: Any individual, company, or other organization providing web or mobile development services to clients. Affiliate: Any individual, company, or other organization participating in the DOTGO Affiliate program. Reseller: Any individual, company, or other organization participating in the DOTGO Reseller program. Publisher: Any individual, company, or other organization making content or services available via text messaging. User: Any individual accessing the content or services of a publisher with a cell phone. Text messaging site: The text messaging content associated with an internet domain name. (This is analogous to a web site, which can be thought of as the content accessed by a web browser associated with an internet domain name). Text messaging service: A service that allows users to access the content or services of publishers via text messaging. Now let s continue by taking a look at what was wrong with text messaging services before DOTGO. 4

3 Why Were Text Messaging Services Broken? To understand the motivation behind DOTGO, it helps to first consider what was wrong with text messaging services before DOTGO. All text messaging services require the use of a short code phone number. In the United States, short code phone numbers are special five- or six-digit phone numbers that are set aside by the cell-phone carriers solely for text messaging services. The are several fundamental problems with short code phone numbers as follows: They are very expensive: Operating a short code phone number costs at least around $2500 per month and $0.03 per message. They take a long time to set up: Provisioning a short code with all of the larger carriers takes between eight and 12 weeks (and you probably have to pay the $2500 per month fee while you wait). They are technically complicated: The SMS aggregators (which funnel text messages back and forth between you and the carriers) will either pass you raw data via HTTP or SMPP and require that you develop your own software from scratch or provide you with a web-based platform that supports only a limited number of features. (For example, perhaps the platform will allow you to set up a poll but will not allow you to collect an e- mail address.) Integration with existing content, software, and analytics is often difficult or impossible. They are hard to remember and impossible to find: But perhaps the most significant shortcoming of short code phone numbers involves the issue of branding. Because short code phone numbers must be five or six digits long, they are usually totally unrelated to the brand of the publisher. Hence using short code phone numbers requires that users remember both an arbitrary five- or six-digit phone number as well as an arbitrary keyword to be texted to the short code phone number to activate the service. For example, while Google.com has the easy-to-remember short code phone number GOOGLE (466453), Starbucks.com has the impossible-to-remember short code phone number MYSBUX (697289). And what keyword should the user actually text to MYSBUX (697289)? Perhaps the keyword coupons, or is it instead specials or coffee? Given the cost, complexity, and weak brand value of the MYSBUX (697289) short code phone number, why would a brand like Starbucks.com give up valuable marketing real estate in a short television commercial or other advertisement (which they are perhaps already splitting between their internet domain name, Facebook page, and Twitter account) to promote a short code phone number and keyword that have little or no connection to their brand and which users are unlikely to remember? And to complicate the situation yet further, there is no search engine for short code phone numbers, hence no way to find them. Say that I am out with my cell phone and want to use but cannot remember the MYSBUX (697289) short code phone number. Then what? How could I possibly find it? Despite the fact that text messaging is by far the most popular feature of every type of cell phone (including smart phones), these four fundamental problems led to a situation in which 5

setting up effective text messaging services in a scalable and profitable way was essentially impossible. Text messaging services were broken. 4 The DOTGO Difference DOTGO was specifically designed to solve these problems. Not only does DOTGO provide an inexpensive, rapid-to-deploy, and easy-to-use mobile publishing platform, it also provides any publisher with an internet domain name the ability to customize that domain name for text messaging. It does that by operating five special short code phone numbers DOTCOM (368266) DOTGOV (368468) DOTORG (368674) DOTEDU (368338) DOTNET (368638) and using the first word of any text message sent to these short code phone numbers to specify the desired internet domain name. Rather than requiring that every publisher operate its own short code phone number, DOTGO lets any user text any publisher with an internet domain name simply by sending the appropriate internet domain name to the appropriate DOTGO short code phone number. As an example, consider which of the following calls to action you find to be more effective and memorable: 1. To find out more, text news to MYSBUX (697289). 2. Visit us on the web at Starbucks.com, or text starbucks to DOTCOM (368266). You would probably agree that the second of these possibilities simply makes more sense. Besides solving the fundamental problems with short code phone numbers, DOTGO offers an extremely powerful and flexible mobile platform because it is based on the first and only markup language for text messaging: CMRL or the Concise Message Routing Language. CMRL is an XML-based markup language designed by DOTGO specifically to express mobile content. You or your clients can use CMRL to implement pretty much any mobile service that you can think of. In particular, you or your clients can use CMRL to integrate DOTGO with existing web sites, applications, databases, content management systems, customer relationship management systems, and other software and web and mobile technologies. 5 DOTGO Interactive and Broadcast Messaging Services There are in general two distinct ways that text messaging is used to provide information: 6

Interactive: Interactive means an on-demand service in which users text to publishers to receive immediate responses from the publishers. Interactive services are analogous to web sites in the sense that users access content from web sites on demand. For example, a public transportation agency might set up an interactive service that allows users to text in to find the next few train departure times, or a retail book store might set up an interactive service that allows users to text in to find its hours of operation, location, and upcoming events schedule. Broadcast: Broadcast means a subscription service in which users opt in with publishers to receive text messages from the publishers on schedules determined by the publishers. Broadcast services are analogous to email lists in the sense that users receive content from email lists by subscription. For example, a night club might set up a broadcast service that sends opted-in users notification of the weekend entertainment schedule every Wednesday evening at 5:00 PM, or a dry cleaner might set up a broadcast services that sends opted-in users notification whenever their dry cleaning is ready for pickup. Before DOTGO, broadcast services comprised the vast majority of all text messaging services, since it is very difficult to provide a general method of creating interactive services without a markup language like CMRL. Yet the most effective text messaging sites offer a mix of interactive and broadcast services. For example, some users might want to receive textmessage coupons from a restaurant via a broadcast service once per week, while other users might want to obtain those text-message coupons via an interactive service only when they are planning to eat out and are in the neighborhood of the restaurant. DOTGO offers both interactive and broadcast services. At moderate message throughput, interactive messaging is free, while broadcast messaging is very affordable and is available in various paid messaging plans. The various paid messaging plans are differentiated by broadcast messages per month, with current plans offering limits of 1000, 10,000, and 100,000 broadcast messages per month. (The large increments between the plans are intentionally chosen to help publishers predict the fixed costs of operating their services.) All paid messaging plans provide access to DOTGO Publisher, which is a collection of webbased graphical publishing tools that enable anyone to quickly and easily set up a DOTGO text-messaging service branded to an existing internet domain name. Most paid messaging plans also provide access to the DOTGO Publisher API, which is a software interface to DOTGO that enables automated access to the DOTGO broadcast services. 6 The DOTGO Affiliate and Reseller Programs DOTGO offers two developer programs that allow you to market or resell DOTGO services: the DOTGO Affiliate Program and the DOTGO Reseller Program. The DOTGO Affiliate Program is easy to set up and allows you to earn commissions on sales of DOTGO services. The DOTGO Reseller Program requires more significant set up but permits deeper integration with DOTGO and allows you to purchase DOTGO services on behalf of your clients at a discount. 7

6.1 The DOTGO Affiliate Program The DOTGO Affiliate Program is a program that allows anyone to market DOTGO services for a commission by referring publishers to DOTGO. DOTGO affiliates simply place a link containing their affiliate identifications to dotgo.com and then earn a 20% commission on all sales generated by the customers they refer to DOTGO. DOTGO handles all aspects of customer billing and support. The DOTGO Affiliate Program is an easy way to get started marketing DOTGO. 6.2 The DOTGO Reseller Program The DOTGO Reseller Program is a program that allows anyone to resell DOTGO services by purchasing services on behalf of their clients at a discount. DOTGO resellers can offer existing DOTGO tools directly from their web sites but also have access to the powerful DOTGO Reseller API, which allows them integrate DOTGO into their existing web sites and content management systems, to create custom DOTGO tools, and to directly control client CMRL. DOTGO resellers purchase DOTGO services at a 50% discount. DOTGO resellers handle all aspects of customer billing and support. The DOTGO Reseller Program is a powerful and flexible way to integrate with DOTGO. 6.3 Other Possibilities The DOTGO Affiliate and Reseller Programs allow you to market or resell DOTGO services. Yet there are other ways that you as a developer can augment your business by helping your clients make the best use of DOTGO. Some possibilities include: Assist your clients in claiming their internet domain names under DOTGO. An internet domain name is claimed under DOTGO either by installing a file named index.cmrl onto the root directory of the web server of the domain name or by adding a special CNAME record to the DNS entry of the domain name. Assist your clients in creating and maintaining DOTGO content expressed in CMRL. Integrate DOTGO text messaging services into the existing web sites of your clients. Integrate DOTGO text messaging services into the existing content management systems and customer relationship management systems of your clients. Develop, market, and sell your own web-based tools for using DOTGO, using the DOTGO Reseller API as a starting point. Examples include CMRL editing, broadcasting, and analytics tools. More information about various aspects of these possibilities can be found in DOTGO Reseller Integration Guide. 8

7 Summary The DOTGO developer programs provide a way for internet domain name registrars, web development companies, digital and mobile marketing agencies, content management system companies, customer relationship management companies, and others to market and resell DOTGO services. The next step is to consult the other DOTGO documentation for developers, including DOTGO Reseller Integration Guide, DOTGO Reseller API Reference Guide, and How to Implement Basic Broadcasting with DOTGO. 9