Today,  I built an 1/72 Scale “Crusader” tank with my son. “Yes, Daddy, but what was it for? Was it any good?” We paraded through to the computer room. A few moments on Wikipedia gave us a pretty good answer, and Youtube has footage of the under-gunned armoured fighting vehicle trundling around at a show.

A few years ago, we’d have had to make a special trip to the library or thumb through military bookseller catalogues for something on 1940s British tanks.

Maybe next year, all I’ll have to do is point my mobile at the barcode.

There, in my hand, will be archive footage… original blue prints… historical details… links to Museums… an invitation to enter a competition by uploading a photo of the finished  model… and links to other model kits and related books.

A few clicks and I’ll be happier, and perhaps a little poorer – can’t… resist… those… tank… books – and I won’t have even got up from the workbench.

It’s called Mobile Marketing, and it’s turning the world into a point-and-click environment.

The snag with Mobile Marketing is that it mixes the Internet with mobile devices and the real world. You have to be able to field and send text messages, put up special mobile-friendly websites (WAP pages), generate barcodes… all technical stuff, some of it quite complex.

Historically – in this context, that means perhaps “the day before yesterday” – the complexity was expensive. You had to be a big player or a gambler, because no excursion into new marketing channels is guaranteed to succeed.

Then, along came Moozey. They’ve automated the thing. You can sign up, design a campaign, activate it and analyse the results, all online. You don’t need to speak to a salesman or any other sort of rep.

They’ve not so much “cut out the middle man” as done away with consultants as well, reducing the whole thing to just another application, albeit one you use on the web. Better yet, they’ve hacked down the cost down to the point where you can afford to test the waters.

Products that hide their power behind a simple interface are always impressive, so I was very pleased to be asked to help optimize Moozey’s documentation, check the interface for consistency, and give the homepage a polish.

Working on software that’s undergoing development is never a “surgical strike”; you have to engage with the product and its purpose, and build up real working relationships with people you’ve never met, while at the same time not getting underfoot. I think Can, my contact at Moozey, feels the same: 

As a fresh startup developing Moozey, we were constantly in rush; trying to catch up with our countless project deadlines. We are glad that we have found a “co-worker” like Documentation Doctor. Most of the time he was even faster than us, completing his job always in a timely manner and in perfect quality. He is now virtually a part of our team and we hope he will continue to work on Moozey and our other future projects.

In truth, I had such fun messing about with the Moozey user account, I even considered replacing my old mobile with something that can actually read barcodes and display WAP pages…

This entry was posted on Monday, August 18th, 2008 at 8:51 pm and is filed under Satisfied Clients, all. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.