I spoke with Eric Delfosse, CEO of AllisBlue about his company’s plans for its patent on sending information to mobiles following a request by customers. Allisblue proposed its method of sending information to handsets via SMS back in 1999 but carriers were unimpressed, saying SMS is very old…which wasn’t a big problem since mobile content wasn’t really ready to be used by consumers at that time. The intention of Allisblue is to make the mobile handset a “remote control” for the web. The company applied for the patent in 2000, so prior art claims and so on have to date from before then.
According to Delfosse one of the main reasons Allisblue obtained the patent was to prevent people harvesting mobile numbers for spam. “We ensure by our business model that no 3rd party could use the email address obtained by our system for push campaigns,” he said. “It is the essence of SMS2MAIL that it is based on customer request (pull) instead of push info towards them…On top of of the patent, we have made a specific agreement with FEDMA (Federation of European Direct Marketing) and consumer association for allowing them to be a trusted third party for allisblue and its patent application. Thanks to that, consumer data will be always protected by our platform and in the same time it could be used by all players on the market.”
Allisblue is distributing the system through mobile operators and has already signed deals in Belgium and Holland.
In the comments section of the previous article Tom Chamberlin wrote a different strategy for responding to consumers via SMS which he said would avoid infringing the patent. Delfosse claims the proposed system does in fact infringe on the patent (specifically Claim 13: Method according to any one of claims 7 to 11, wherein said manager (12) associates a URL address with said mobile phone number, said method comprising the step of the manager (12) sending an SMS message (4) comprising said URL)…when asked if Allisblue would consider legal action should Chamberlain’s proposal be implemented Delfosse responded: “It would be better for all parties to have an agreement for our mutual benefit”. Which I take as a “yes, if they don’t license”.
Incidentally, Allisblue has some other products (CALL2MAIL, SMS2MAG, CALL2MAG)…an example of a magazine is available at Pressisblue which is a joint venture with Magwerk. Check it out, it’s very cool, and this sort of thing would be great on the higher-end mobile phones.
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