We’re please to announce that Tim Lloyd has joined has joined Interactive Mediums as the Director of Sales and Marketing. Tim comes to us with over 15 years of sales and marketing experience and has been successful in helping to build and grow high-tech start-ups. Outside of work Tim loves to travel, is an avid music fan, and a don’t-train-as-much-as-he-should triathlon hack.

And that makes a total of two blog posts in one month :)

Apparently we totally forgot about this blog, as we haven’t posted anything for the last six months. I guess we’ve been busy.

Lots of exciting news for Interactive Mediums:

• In January we started working on our first iPhone application for a client, and that will be provisioned in the app store in the next two months (more on this app when it’s ready). We’ve got a couple more applications in the pipe, and would love to take on more.
• Also in January, John Wood joined the Interactive Mediums team as Lead Engineer. John most recently worked at Orbitz as a Technical Lead responsible for the technical direction of the air service layer (in short, he knows a ton about searching and booking flights). Prior to that John was a Software Engineer at Motorola, developing a high availability platform for call processing applications. In addition to his technical kung-fu, he’s also a karate instructor. John has been cranking away at new features since he started, including the ability to override messages for specific carriers.
• In March (actually last week), we released a redesign of TextMe. We’ve rolled out a whole new look and feel which we’re super excited about. We’ve gotten a ton of great feedback from customers and we’ve been making tweaks every day.

Over the next few months we’ll be working on new features for TextMe, more iPhone apps, our first BlackBerry app and looking to partner with companies who offer solutions for which it doesn’t make sense for us to tackle.

Lots and lots of exciting mobile stuff happening right now. If you’re reading this and we can help you with anything, please send a note to hello@interactivemediums.com.

Alright…so it’s been quite awhile since our last post. We’ve been busy working on a lot of new features with our TextMe platform, here are just a few:

• Web voting widgets: No you can create true multi-channel voting by adding a web voting widget to your website. Web votes can be unlimited, or limited to the number of allowable entries that are defined on the campaign.
• Dynamic tags for vote response messages: A ‘dynamic tag’ is a small string that can be inserted into a message that will be changed in real time at the time of vote. For example, inserting ‘[TOTAL#]‘ into a vote response message will change the string to ‘42′ if there are currently 42 total votes. We’ve added a slew of tags available for each voting option (keyword, description, current number of votes, current percentage) as well as total number of votes.
• Contest response tags: We currently support four types of unique contests, and we’ve added a ton of tags for each type of contest. A few examples include, current number of entries, count of entries left until a winner has won, etc.
• Routing campaign management updates: What’s a routing campaign? This is the simply the mechanism that we’ve setup to route incoming text messages to and from another system. When we receive a text message with a matching keyword, we’ll forward on to the third party system for that system to do their processing, and once they’re done with that processing the third party can then send a message back to the user through our messaging API.  We also support nifty stuff like sticky sessions (basically locking a phone number into a route for short period of time). We’ve also added keyword management to the API.
• Email and SMS notification of activity: A great example of this is with our info on demand campaign. Upon receiving the corresponding keyword, we can send a notification to any email address or mobile phone number via SMS. To test this out, just text DEMO to 839863 and you’ll get a call from a member of our team.

If you’d like to chat about any of these features in more detail, give us a ring at 866-683-9863 (866-6TEXTME), or email us at hello@interactivemediums.com.

In addition to that stuff, I just wanted to let people know that we’re working hard to build the best mobile marketing platform out there, and are adding new stuff each week. We support clients from big (Orbitz, Anheuser Busch, Ogilvy) to small, and we understand that everyone has their own unique needs. Here are some bread and butter features that we think are important, but we frankly don’t spend much time talking about:

• Support for multiple accounts: Need to manage multiple accounts? Want to assign different permissions to each user? Want to get setup with your own domain/sub-domain? No problem.
  
• Support for multiple short codes: Yep, we can do this.
  
• Aggregation partner managment: We currently work with three different aggregation partners are and are building relationships quickly. We can work directly with an aggregation partner, or you can setup an account with them directly and just provide us your account details.
• Short code management: We’ll work directly with the CSCA (Common Short Code Administration) on your behalf to secure your code and manage billing. Or you can work with them directly.

Finally, there are great things happening within mobile right now outside of mobile messaging, and we’re jumping in (hint: it starts with iphone).

The Mobile Marketing Association has released their latest update (version 3.3) to their Consumer Best Practice Guidelines today, you can download it here:

http://www.mmaglobal.com/bestpractices.pdf

Highlighted in the guidelines are updates to general conduct (section 2), advertising and promotion (section 3), marketing to children (section 4) and explicit honoring of SMS STOP commands (section 8). We’re happy to see MMA continue to push forward with policies demanding that participants in the mobile ecosystem honor consumer’s choice and participation. We actively review our logs and add additional opt-out phrases that we see commonly used, such as sentences starting with “please remove”, or “take me off”, for which we honor just like any of the other required opt-out commands (STOP, STOP ALL, CANCEL, QUIT, END, UNSUBSCRIBE).

I’m blogging from BrandSmart 2008, a brand marketing event put on by the Chicago AMA. It’s been a great day so far, with keynotes from thought leaders from Miller, Thinktopia, Digitas and Google. Interactive Mediums is lucky enough to have the opportunity to co-sponsor the event, and provide the ability for conference participants to text their questions for speakers throughout the day. It’s a really simple thing to do, but it’s also very useful as people are asking questions that they might not otherwise (I think some people don’t like raising their hands).

As you can imagine, the key message from this conference is: the world is changing. What was is no longer what is. People do not want to be communicated at, they want to be communicated with. The mobile phone has a strong seat at the table in this new world…and we feel right at home :)

It’s a big day of news for Interactive Mediums.

First off, welcome to Doug Barth. Doug is joining the Interactive Mediums team as Lead Architect. Previously, Doug worked for Orbitz Worldwide, where he helped build out Orbitz’s complex event processing framework, recently highlighted at JavaOne. We are super excited to have Doug join the team.

Secondly, we’re blogging. It’s silly that it’s taken us this long to fire this up, but we’re here now and we’re excited to start posting about some of the things we’re working on, and things that we find interesting.