I wanted to take this time to share with our Stun! customers what our product road map looks like for the rest of our quarter. My CTO Ojas Amin and I just got back from a weeklong trip to Hyderabad, India where we met with our developers to plan out our future upgrades and integrations. It was a very successful trip and we accomplished many things. If you ever get the chance to go to India make sure you properly prepare yourself. India is a total trip. It\’s very loud (everyone honks), there are people everywhere and I mean everywhere (India now has a billion people.)
As a result of these meetings, I\’m excited to announce that we have some major upgrades that will be released over the next 2-3 months. We have staffed two more full time developers (probably with doctorates) just to get all of this done by April. The following upgrades will be released in order:
- 1. Premium SMS: Mobile marketers will now be able to charge subscribers for their content or services. We will first launch with $.99 and $1.99 price points. As subscribers agree to get billed by double opting in, these costs will show up as a monthly charge on the subscriber\’s cell phone bill. We will support all major U.S. carriers.
2. New messaging type – Video broadcasting: mobileStorm will allow our Stun! customers to upload and broadcast video online to many different video sharing sites (11 in all) such as YouTube, MySpace, and Revver. We see video as the future of the Internet (watch my interview on this subject). There were 22 billion views in 2007, and the average user generated video had 10,695 hits according to Accustream. We want to help our customers build their brands by having a very easy and quick way to distribute their videos.
3. New messaging type – Blogging/RSS: Clients will soon be able to have their users subscribe to an RSS feed, which will be powered via Stun! They can also have this information published on to their own customized blog. We will be integrating into WordPress, a leading blogging application. They will also able to push repurposed content from email messages on the blog via RSS feeds, which will help drive traffic via search engines.
4. Mobile Couponing: Measuring ROI is very important to mobile marketers. One of the best ways to do this is offering a coupon to their database. To be truly effective, such coupons should be unique and trackable as well as have the ability to thwart fraud. With this new upgrade, our clients will be able to use Stun! to create and redeem coupons. For those with a POS system, they will be able to integrate into our new web service API for synching purposes.
5. Mobile Video, Image & Ringtone Delivery w/ Custom WAP Pages: Imagine being able to upload a video, wallpaper or mp3 file to a custom WAP page built in 5 minutes and with content encoded on-the-fly and supported on 5,000 different handsets worldwide. That will soon be the reality of any Stun! mobile marketer. We will even have digital rights management (DRM) features such as forward locking.
To our readers and clients, I ask you two things, #1, get really excited! #2 please don\’t ask me to give you any launch dates. As always make sure to check our product updates blog to find out when these features are live. Subscribe to the RSS feed so you can get updates into your inbox.
Jared Reitzin
CEO
Small Business Advice