DeviceAtlas to add TAC for device recognition

Last week was the Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona. Thousands of mobile developers, marketers and geeks met in the beautiful Fira area. dotMobi was there too and among the other things we announced the cooperation with the GSMA (also on of the dotMobi investors) to provide the TAC database in DeviceAtlas.

Why is this interesting? Well, it is going to change the life of many of us, in fact if you are developing "in-network" or connected to a network infrastructure such as a WAP gateway, SMSC or MMSC you might have access to TAC. TAC is the acronym for Type Allocation Code which is the first half of the IMEI (type *#06# on your keypad of any GSM device and you'll see it). Given the TAC number you are able to recognise a device with the highest possible confidence as the TAC number is assigned by the GSMA to vendors when they register a new GSM device (and they are required to do so!). The list includes tens of thousands of devices ranging from the latest cool device to the oldest GSM 900Mhz phone or the little GSM dongles that many for truck location services.

TAC numbers are going to add a key feature to DeviceAtlas which will make it very easy to recognise devices even before they visit your mobile site. Get in touch with us if you want to know more about how this will work and when it will be available. Also, you might want to talk to your local operator to make them expose a nice API to you, wouldn't that allow you to provide a better service? I think so. Think for example of SMS services, you receive an SMS, query an operator API, get the customer's IMEI, check against DeviceAtlas and you know exactly which contents and services you can deliver to that customer. Most appropriate ringtone or midlet game, greeting card in MMS, push message to visit your .mobi site, configuration SMS to connect to your syncML server.. Oh, SO many use cases!