This was our first mobile application, written way back in 1999.
The clients
A consulting group working for a major game publishing company to introduce e-age communication between the customer and the company. The client till then (1999) used to still rely on mailers and postcards for communication.
The Requirement
A solution that would let the customer interact with the client using mobile text messages (SMS)
The Challenge
A shoe string budget and the client's specific requirement that the database and system be isolated from the internet, ideally within his premises. The client had a concern about consumer data being compromised if exposes to internet, a chance it did not want to take. Given the budget a GSM modem was out of question, third party web based services could not be used as the data was not to travel over internet.
The Solution
We investigated the possibility of using a mobile phone connected to the database server over serial port. The challenges were a plenty, in 1999 data cables were not easily available for mobile phones and nor were cheap SDKs. So we used the MFBUS drawing issued by Nokia for its cheapest phone 3310 to assemble a data cable ourselves. Using low level programming and some open source code an application was written that would allow 2 way communications between the end customer and the entertainment group's customer service. It would also allow simple way for customers to register products and receive updates. Later the same infrastructure was used to send ringbones and wall papers to customers for promotion of the games.
