Triplog.co.za : SMS vehicle log book launches.

WTF - SMS to record mileage!???

I use a freeware vehicle manager app on my phone to record mileage and fuel consumption. The application can export its data to a spreadsheet.

If an average sms costs about 75c, then it would cost users of your application R75c X 5 - when they could just write this information on a piece of paper - for free.
If the user works a 22 day work month, he or she would spend almost R100 a month - to record a number....

How do you justify the existence of your application??
:eek::confused:
 
plazma said:
I use a freeware vehicle manager app on my phone to record mileage and fuel consumption. The application can export its data to a spreadsheet.

If an average sms costs about 75c, then it would cost users of your application R75c X 5 - when they could just write this information on a piece of paper - for free.
If the user works a 22 day work month, he or she would spend almost R100 a month - to record a number....

How do you justify the existence of your application??
:eek::confused:
Click to expand...

AGREED.. why don't u partner with a tracking company to get ur positions after each engine start and stop. let the user filter out the not so important stuff at the end of a week. and have some reports..ur target market probably has vehicle tracking device on the vehicle.. should keep u busy for a while..
 
Why SMS and not data?

A basic little Java app, and just let it sync once in a while. Or if you insist on SMS, let the Java app cache the info for the month, and burst it down every month or so. If you send only the date and mileage, you can easily smack 10 of those onto one sms.

Either way, scribbling a number on a piece of paper tends to be faster than that. I've resorted to taking a quick photo of my clocks if I don't have a scribbling tool on hand, just because numbers on a phone tend to be a schlep.
 
Wow peeps, talk about slating a good idea to death. There are lots of verry good points to this app:
- This app can utilise a R150 phone with a R5 sim card and an SMS bundle costing R20 per month.
- Insuring the expensive phones for the use of a truck driver is a nightmare.
- When the truck driver's friend that was hitch-hike takes the phone home, a replacement is not difficult for the driver to organize.
- The driver can use somebody-else's phone to submit the log details.

Now ... once the app is up and running and tested, he can begin to look at the custom devices that are attached to vehicles that can transmit tower locations using a modified cell-modem. And then move on to linking in a GPS reporting device.

And ... through all of this .. the adaption to also then deal with the fancy phones is easy peasy.

But, I really hope that Neil_mybroadband is paying MyBroadband for this free advertising.
 
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Feedback from me:
1 - Quick site, good.
2 - I need to be able to use a phone number other than my phone number to send the sms to you and still have the entry under my "account". If I could include a unique code or something that would identify the sms as mine when sending from a different phone, that would be more useful. e.g. I start my sms with stoke123 and if you see stoke 123 as the first chars of the sms, then you assign the details sent to my account, irrespective of the phone number that sent the sms. This is for when I lose my phone . the battery dies and I cannot get the sim out / i run out of air time and end up begging for somebody else to send the sms.
3 - I'm not happy with entering my phone number into your site ... I hate SMS spam. Is there perhaps another way I can use to identify my messages to my account? See point 2 above.
4 - I need another option besides the R1.50 per SMS. Gimme a contract with you instead on a normal sms gateway without these excessive charges. Yes, paying you 60 * R1.50 a month for this service is excessive to me), and it means that the phone has to be charged with a lot of money, which is waaay to easy to transfer to friend number 7.
5 - How do I know that you got my sms? Do you return an SMS to me saying that you got the message? Can I have this as an option? [ALREADY THERE]

In short, as it stands now, it's too expensive for what I would use it for. You should always go in ultra cheap and grab 100% of the potential market with this kind of offering. But, your approach of going for the richer gadget market will probably fail, because the technology the gadget market uses is waay past SMS'ing.

[edit : I see point nuber 5 is already there ... wicky!]
 
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Thanks stoke, I could not have slated this "good idea" better than you did in your second post, after you actually looked at this crazy idea properly.
 
triplog

Heh,

I really thought I subscribed to this thread. Shame it got lost for so long.

Some response if it still matters:

The site was all in all built in 10 days with the idea to improve it on feedback. The users we have are happy with things at the moment so we haven't changed much.

Stoke- Your points:

2. We'd wanted to do this but it made the SMS more complex. There are more stupid people than people with multiple phones.
3. Yeah we don't care to spam you. We mention this on the site. You won't get any SMS's from us.
4. R1.50 is the only way. We couldn't even get hold of a R1 shortcode (we did try)

Yes we could partner with a tracking company and make you pay for a device, yes we could have some java app thingy but this has already been done.

We just wanted a nice simple solution. If you want features just send an email through and I'll build it in no problem.
 
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