Mobile News

Customers should clearly and distinctly be given the opportunity to object free of charge and in an easy manner to a direct electronic mail marketing campaign. In short, this exceptional opt-out mechanism provided by the directive has to be free and user-friendly. Most operators and mobile marketing ASPs have implemented this rule from the beginning of mobile marketing. The interpretation of the word “free” in article 13.2 should not necessarily be read to mean that the mobile marketing provider should have to bear all cost of communication. Some national legislators may insist that all transmission costs of opting out should be born by the marketer or service provider. The directive only protects consumers from the service costs that may be incurred above and beyond the basic costs of transmission.

The ease of opting out has been used by some consumer groups to raise doubts regarding whether any opt-in or opt-out mechanism can be legally implemented over mobile. Some groups have claimed that permission cannot be legally obtained over mobile. The case for such an approach is tenuous, since even basic SMS technology allows users to easily write a key word such as “close” and send it back to the marketer. Most jurisdictions are expected to allow mobile marketing to become a valid channel for legal opt-ins and opt-outs.

1. VoiceXML-capable IVR servers are an important exception to this. VoiceXML is a mark-up language backed by industry leaders in voice technology, such as AT & T, Lucent and Motorola. VoiceXML’s main goal is to bring the power of web development and content delivery to voice response applications, and to free the authors of such applications from platform-dependent call-flow programming. A voiceXML document specifies the call flow to be conducted by a voiceXML interpreter.

2. Bit rate describes how many bits a digital audio file uses to describe the amplitude of the sound it is recreating. Each bit doubles the accuracy with which an amplitude level can be described, e.g. 16 bit = 65,536 possible levels. The bit rate, in turn, determines the dynamic range, which is the difference between the loudest and quietest sounds produced in an audio file. It is defined at 6dB per digital bit, e.g. 16 bit = 96dB dynamic range. Sampling rate is the number of values (or samples) measured per second in the conversion of sound from analogue to digital. The rule governing sampling states that in order to accurately reproduce a sample, the sampling rate must be equal to or greater than twice the highest frequency to be reproduced. For example, a standard 64kbps ([mu]-law 8kHz) sound file restricts the maximum sampled frequency to 4kHz. In comparison, human hearing is usually said to be 20Hz to 20 KHz.

3. Generally, the term “short message entity” (SME) is used, which stands for anything that may send or receive short messages.

4. SGSN in GPRS networks

5. When an organization has access to a list of subscribers and uses it to run a promotion, the scope of the campaign is expanded to enhance the data already available about existing subscribers, e.g. to find out what their names are and where they live. When the purpose of the campaign is to enrich profile data, we refer to such a campaign as a “mobile interaction management campaign”.