Member News

The Oxygen8 Group has announced that it will be working with Edinburgh Airport, one of the busiest airports in the UK, to support staff with their inbound voice communications.

Oxygen8 will be implementing its leading call handling solution, Direct Control Voice, which will allow the airport to manage and measure its call activity, which averages half a million minutes a year. Edinburgh Airport wanted to improve response times and eliminate the inflexible nature of its Interactive Voice Response ( IVR ) system. Introducing Direct Control Voice provides the airport with a more effective and timely way to make changes to its own IVR and call handling services.

Edinburgh Airport was particularly impressed with the solution’s capacity to allow it to make immediate changes to call routing and call flow management. This capability provides the airport with more control when communicating airport notifications, flight cancellations and poor weather alerts via IVR. In the instance of website downtime the solution will provide an effective continual flow of communication with customers, allowing the airport to respond to changes quickly.

James Harrison, UK Country Manager of Oxygen8 Group commented: “We are delighted to be working with Edinburgh Airport as Direct Control Voice will offer massive value to them during times of disruption. By providing scope, flexibility, detailed reporting and anywhere, anytime accessibility to make changes to updates and recordings, the airport will have peace of mind that it will be able to provide a consistent flow of communication at all times.”

Mobile aggregator and AIME sponsor member txtNation have partnered with Europe’s largest supplier of NFC tags and products, RapidNFC, to become the first to offer direct operator billing via NFC technology.

Using NFC tags, compatible mobile phones can scan the tag, launching a tailored payment interface. The user simply confirms payment and is billed. Users browsing via WiFi, rather than their mobile data plan, are prompted to enter their mobile number to continue payment.

The NFC tags are tiny microchips which RapidNFC can incorporate into a wide selection of products from stickers, smart posters and wristbands to promotional items such as pens, key fobs, bar mats and various other merchandise.

Whilst other NFC methods exist, txtNation have introduced a solution without any complicated signup process. Without additional linking of a phone to a bank account,card payment or by entering a username or password, users can be billed with txtNation’s solution with a quick NFC tap and a one-click confirmation on a mobile Web page.

Through their 3G or 4G connections, a user is charged securely and quickly to their monthly mobile contract or pay-as-you-go balance.
The solution works in any country where carriers support MSISDN pass-through, so the user can enjoy “one-click billing”. To kickstart this new solution, txtNation have been trialling it with Payforit, the UK’s latest and most prominent direct carrier billing scheme.

Popular already for charity donations, the solution has potential for event ticketing and even tangible goods. It could be used through a point-of-sale terminal, or the merchant’s PC, laptop, tablet or mobile phone.
txtNation Director and co-founder Jon Rowsell said ‘it’s great to be first to market with this. It’s something we’ve been conceptualizing for a while and to be able to finally offer NFC, combined with carrier billing, for those early end user and merchant adopters, means that anyone with an NFC-enabled phone in the UK can use this. More and more phones are coming with NFC enabled, and clients are wanting to take advantage of this impressive technology.’

He adds ‘It is expected that NFC will become a mass market payment system, with the likes of weve.com or or Visa’s payWave app coming on stream. txtNation’s solution, however, is available today without the need for further consolidation in the market or increased cooperation between operators. txtNation has pioneered mobile billing and messaging over the past 10 years and is proud to be at the forefront of what promises to be a popular payment method.’

Direct Carrier Billing through a user’s mobile network, unlike questionable bank-linked NFC, means there is an SMS confirmation for every transaction made, boosting consumer confidence and giving true billing transparency.

Consumers and businesses alike want an easy-to-use system that requires no user registration, providing friction-free, one-touch billing. txtNation and RapidNFC can provide this today, so clients can instantly deploy and get started in an exciting new sector.

“We’ve been approached by a number of clients looking for a quick and simple way of making NFC payments” says Phil Coote, CEO of RapidNFC, “and to date we haven’t been able to recommend anything as there has been nothing in the market worth shouting about. When txtNation approached us with this concept we immediately knew this was going to be a ground breaking product, and set to work on a prototype. The result is fantastic, nothing like we have seen before and so easy for clients to deploy to accept payments from not only all those with NFC on their handsets, but anyone with a mobile internet browser.”

txtNation are offering interested businesses the chance to try the service for free, by providing an NFC payment sticker to their door, by emailing Kelli Smith, Corporate Affairs; k.smith@txtnation.com with your company name, postal address and where you would like to deploy NFC billing, and txtNation will deliver you an NFC tag pre-encoded with their billing solution.

Spoke, consumer engagement and social TV experts, today announced winning a further 3 year contract with digame mobile, to work on the Eurovision Song Contest. Spoke provide live interactive vote management of UK voice votes from the semi final and final which will be aired on 16th and 18th May, 2013.

The 58th Eurovision will be hosted in Malmo, Sweden and broadcast all over the world. The BBC will be broadcasting the program in the UK, which will be hosted by Graham Norton. This year’s UK representative has been confirmed as Bonnie Tyler, who gained international success in the eighties for hits such as Total Eclipse of the Heart, with the song Believe in Me.

Spoke will aggregate UK votes in real-time across multiple platforms, including IVR and Voice Short Codes. This year will be the first time that Voice Short Codes are used on Eurovision, enabling transparent pricing for mobile phone votes. Spoke will be integrating their Vote Command platform with Eurovision’s own system and ensuring compliance for all UK votes.

Thomas Niedermeyer, Director International Project Management at digame mobile commented, “Spoke bring years of experience and expertise in live vote management, which is essential because Eurovision runs across numerous countries and is therefore more technically complex than most votes, so it requires excellence in all the vote rooms across Europe. The team at Spoke have been very professional since we started working with them in 2010 and so we’re very happy to have them on board for another three years.”

Automated Donation Services from Spoke help supporters to donate quickly and securely to the DEC Appeal for the Syria Crisis.

Spoke, the consumer engagement experts, are proud to be supporting the Disasters Emergency Committee ( DEC ) in their latest appeal for the Syria crisis, providing the automated donation services which enable supporters to donate quickly and securely and help those affected by the disaster.

Disasters Emergency Committee unites 14 of the UK’s leading aid agencies such as Oxfam, the British Red Cross and Save the Children, in times of a humanitarian disaster when a large scale response is called for. The latest appeal is for the Syria Crisis, where over five million people are in need of aid and huge numbers of people are fleeing their homes and the country. Over one million are now believed to have arrived in neighbouring countries and conditions are worsening day by day

Spoke’s expertise in interactive donation solutions comes with years of experience working with charities such as Comic Relief, UNICEF, Depression Alliance and Save the Children, as well as live donation management for events such as Red Nose Day and Sport Relief. Spoke’s automated donation technology enables card payments to be processed to PCIDSS level 1, with its partners Eckoh and BT, so that donors are assured of a rapid and highly secure method of donating funds. All donations for the Syria Appeal are processed and received by the DEC in the shortest possible time, allowing the DEC, through its network of member agencies to deploy the aid to alleviate suffering at the earliest opportunity.

Helen Calder, of the DEC commented: “As with any DEC appeal , the highest level of donation security and processing speed is essential, enabling us to act quickly to support the millions of people suffering in Syria. Spoke have processed a significant amount of donations over the past few weeks, contributing to the £7.4million raised to date. We know we can rely on Spoke’s services, along with the support of the public, to help those affected in this ongoing crisis.”

Rob Ellis, Managing Director of Spoke commented: “We’re proud to have helped the DEC on previous appeals and so it’s an honour to be able to support them again for such an important project. Their work in the Syria Crisis Appeal is essential and so the speed and reliability of our technology allows us to process the generous donations from the public as quickly as possible, contributing to the speed in which aid gets to all those affected.”

Mobile messaging and payments provider OpenMarket has once again providing the mobile engagement platform and billing services for this year’s Big Egg Hunt charity event, sponsored by master chocolatier Lindt.

Full service fundraising agency Open Fundraising returns as the organiser of this year’s Big Egg Hunt, which has grown from a London-only event into a six-week tour of the UK. It kicked off in Covent Garden on February 12, and visited Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester and Glasgow, before returning to London on March 22. All money raised goes to children’s charity Action for Children.

For all six weeks of the Lindt Big Egg Hunt, OpenMarket’s Mobile Engagement Platform powered an SMS-based daily prize draw to win a year’s supply of Lindt chocolate, which participants entered by sending a text message to a shortcode. Participants in all five cities searched for 101 hidden giant Easter eggs that featured some of the UK’s best loved children’s characters as well as unique designs by leading artists. Participants also looked for the Humpty Dumpty egg, which had the key information needed to enter the prize draw to win a year’s supply of Lindt chocolate.

To enter the competition, they had to text ‘LINDT’ to the number on the egg’s plinth, the SMS being charged at the entrant’s standard network rate.
Even though taking part in the competition was free, participants in the Big Egg Hunt had the option to donate £3 to Action for Children directly, without entering the prize draw, by texting the word “FOOD” to 70123.
“Despite the various other mobile technologies available, SMS is still the number one method for effective engagement with people on their mobile device,” said Paul de Gregorio, Head of Mobile at Open Fundraising. “The OpenMarket platform enables us to quickly and easily create and manage an interactive messaging and donation campaign, for people to engage within each of the five cities hosting the egg hunt. OpenMarket’s ability to support our expanded event across the UK is testament to the reliability, scalability and reach of their solutions.”

This year’s expanded egg hunt follows the success of last year’s London-based event, also powered by OpenMarket, which broke the Guinness World Record for the world’s biggest Easter egg hunt and generated tens of thousands of pounds in donations for charity.

Open Fundraising used the OpenMarket Mobile Engagement Platform to manage the Lindt Big Egg Hunt’s SMS-based prize draw and donations. The platform’s reliability, flexibility and ease-of-use, together with its intuitive and user-friendly web interface, meant that Open Fundraising could build, roll out and manage the Lindt Big Egg Hunt’s SMS prize draw and donation system in a fast and affordable way.

The OpenMarket Mobile Engagement Platform manages incoming messages and generates automatic responses, while also administering the daily automated prize draw entry process.

“SMS is ideal for engaging and interacting with large numbers of people, in a way that is intuitive, familiar and also affordable,” said Adrian Sarosi, Head of Sales and Marketing for OpenMarket in EMEA. “This year’s hunt is bigger than ever and we’re delighted that OpenFundraising and Action for Children continue to trust OpenMarket’s expertise to power this high profile charity event.”