One of our goals at Mobivity is to simplify complex things. The whole point of Mobivity and the API, is to put a simple face on a complex thing.

The Mobivity APIs are a group of very simple interfaces for sending and receiving text messages. We just released an update, and I wanted to point out one of the features that we added.

When a text message is sent to a phone, it is picked up by the SMS inbox application. Essentially, that application listens on port 0 for any text message that arrives at that phone.

What many are not aware of, is that text messages can also be used to send and receive information to other applications running on a phone.

For example, you might have an application on your phone that shows tomorrow’s weather. Rather than that application make a mobile Internet connection, the application can be set up so that each night it receives the weather for the next day via a silent sms.

Using SMS allows us to PUSH information to a phone, rather than the user having to request it.

In order to do this, the application has to listen on a specific PORT. When an SMS is received on a phone, the phone checks to see which application has registered that port, and delivers the message.

Lately we have received a number of requests from customers to be able to send SMS on a specified port. Doing this usually requires things like Binary SMS, UDH headers, Hex Conversions, and a lot of testing.

To make this single task easier, we have added a call to our api.

It’s the same as our standard SMSSend API call, with an additional parameter. The PORT.

We have a test form here, documentation here, and the SOAP WSDL here.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 12th, 2008 at 4:41 pm and is filed under News, SMS. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.