Mobile sales leads generation

Need more sales? Virtually every single Organization, no matter of its size, does.

Historically online sales leads generation had been done via different techniques such as e-mail blasts, newsletters, pay per click and banner advertising, SEO etc. Depending on the market, industry, geography and depending on how targeted your message is these techniques are more or less expensive and more or less effective.

Since the proliferation of mobile devices a whole new avenue of advertising was born. And it's a different ball game.

Mobile devices present a few different feature sets and a truck load of new opportunities. Essentially mobile search is:

- location oriented
- immediate action / trigger oriented
- growing

Let's take the opportunity and discuss these three features of mobile search.

Location oriented means that your customer can be presented your advertising message right where he or she is. This is a tremendous opportunity for local businesses or other organizations that conduct business locally (rather than nation wide, State wide or regional).

There are many verticals that can take advantage of such a powerful feature: some examples are restaurants, doctors, service companies, auto shops, beauty salons, shopping malls, hospitality providers, home improvements specialists etc.

Immediate action oriented means that your potential customer, while using his/her mobile device and while being presented with a strong call to action, will be very likely to take immediate action by either calling your company's phone or at least sending you an e-mail. The reason is that most of the people use their mobile devices to satisfy an immediate on the go need for a service or product.

That is great news for professionals like attorneys, doctors, service providers, marketing and leads generation companies, restaurants, hospitality etc.

The fact that mobile search is by far one of the biggest growing markets right now is no news. In the US more than 50% of the searches are currently done from mobile devices and the market keeps growing. It is very likely that over the next 3-5 years mobile search will strongly dominate the whole search market.

Our company is asked to present proposals on designing mobile leads generation systems including systems that target the customer where it is, when he/she is using his/her smart phone. And systems that store leads data such as name, phone #, e-mail address, location, search terms, preferences etc.

The systems that we currently have in place are hard hitting and highly profitable and customers always come back to us for more sophisticated features or to expand the service in other verticals. Some companies ask for comprehensive platforms / frameworks targeting multiple verticals, geographies and classes of services.

Whoever you are and wherever you are we are strongly recommending you to jump the wagon of mobile sales and marketing leads generation.

Make it a great day!

Adrian Corbuleanu
Miami Beach, FL
http://wittywebnow.com

On new search technologies

Organizing information, search and retrieval were always important aspects of computer science. Older management information systems used to store and index data in databases and used to provide the programmer with fairly robust and reliable ways to select & display the desired data based on certain criteria.

Depending on the technology, the size of the data and the nature of the data certain solutions delivered more performance (speed) and accuracy than others.

Since the raise (and fall) of different search engines- you can read raise for Google and fall for companies like WebCrawler, AOL and Altavista- the topic of searching in unstructured data became more prominent.

There is an enormous amount of data on the web, most of it unstructured and a lot of it noisy. The issue of relevance in search and retrieve, especially on free text searches, is more and more current.

While companies like Google do a very good job, there are many other smaller players who implement similar technologies to fuel their search.

Let's take the case study of a business that matches service providers with their clients in a certain industry. They maintain a fairly large database, a free text search field on their homepage and want people to be able to search & retrieve the most relevant companies to the search criteria based on what the user types in that free text search field.

The company chose Python with the django framework to implement their search. A module called Hystack allows for plugging in powerful search services like Solr or Elasticsearch. These solutions implement high performance, index based, natural search on free text fields.

With Elasticsearch for example you can boost the weight of a field, i.e. for example giving a priority to a match by title in comparison to a match by description.

Here are two very interesting tutorials.

Building a full-text search engine with django:

https://waaave.com/tutorial/django/django-design-a-complete-search-engine-with-haystack-and-whoosh/

Haystack:

http://django-haystack.readthedocs.org/en/latest/tutorial.html

Adrian Corbuleanu
Miami Beach, FL
http://wittymobileapps.weebly.com

Playing with the parking meter

The other day I had a meeting in Downtown Miami. As usually I had to drive around for about 10 min. to find parking. I eventually found a public parking lot where they had parking. There was a 7 hours minimum restriction at $7 (that was kind of cheesy but hey, it's the Downtown).

I gloriously pulled out my card to pay. Swipe it Adrian! ... But my first two attempts were not successful. The card reader does not react at all. Is the magnetic band of card scratched? I did not think so ... I had actually just used the card at Walgreens and it worked fine (I mean one time even at Walgreens the clerk had to wrap my card in a plastic bag to make it work!) ...

All right, my third attempt is successful, I am adding time, I am paying and I am pushing nice metallic buttons attached to what it looks like a fairly modern digital display.

It is now about 15 min. later. I made it to Downtown at 9:30 AM and it's now 9:45 AM. I am actually only a block away from the building where I have my meeting. I am relaxed. My meeting does not start until 10:00 AM.

Next thing that happens the pretty display comes up with this message. "Payment successful. There is no need to print a receipt. However if you wish to do so, press OK." Neat, I am thinking. So they have my plate # in their database (cause I had just inserted it) and the transaction confirmation. I should be good to go. I am sure the guy who patrols the parking plots is sophisticated enough to make the right determination. He won't give me a ticket.

But, somehow, I am still at unease. What if he is not? What if he/she will screw up like it happens many times and then I have to waste half a day to dispute a $18 ticket (cause you know I will; I don't like to pay for parking twice). Well, let's print out this ticket anyways.

I pushed OK. In about 20 other seconds, the receipt got printed out. I am picking up the receipt, going back to my car and proudly displaying my receipt in my windshield.

It is now 10 to 10 and I am happily leaving the parking lot. At 5 to 10 I am checked in by their receptionist. I made it on time for my meeting.

But I kind of burned a good 20-25 minutes looking for parking spots, parking, paying and printing receipts. Good thing I left half hour earlier than I should have left.

Now you guys tell me. Is this an efficient way of parking and making parking payments? Do all these help you out with your daily stress? (it's like we did not have enough of that)

The following scenario immediately comes up in my mind.

Let's cut our losses short. Let's do something like this.

I drive to Downtown and I make it there. As soon as I get into the closest "parking zone" to the building where I am going, my smartphone starts searching for available parking spots. In less than 10 seconds, it locates the closest available spot. It hooks those coordinates up to my GPS-es driving directions and it shows me where to go. I make it there in less than a minute. I pull in. I park. I get out of the car and head to the parking meter. I pull up my meter paying app, I push *one* button and I pay for parking. The meter's display gets automatically updates with my car's plate info because I am already in their database. I am out of there confident in one minute and thirty seconds.

Is this SciFi? Not at all. Our company can actually develop a technology like this. It would save people tremendous amount of time and headaches. And it will eliminate human errors while enforcing parking.

Is there infrastructure that needs to be build for this? Yes, it is. Are there software development services that need to be employed for this? I bet it is. But the most important thing for something like this is to have the desire to do it.

Hello ladies and gentleman at the City of Miami? Did you hear that?

Make it a great day!

Adrian Corbuleanu
Miami Beach, FL
http://wittywebnow.com