AKTEL, one of the largest telecom operators in Bangladesh, launched their new version of renovated WAP portal in dotmobi domain. aktelspice.mobi is the address of the new WAP portal. SPICE is the brand name of AKTEL mobile portal. aktelspice.mobi is available to AKTEL subscribers from 6th October, 2007.
So AKTEL is of course the FIRST telco in Bangladesh
and possibly the first telco in the APAC region who has embraces the .mobi as the domain and is running its Mobile Portal maintaining dotmobi coding standard. And I am happy that I got the opportunity to lead that march. So hopefully now other telcos will also be interested to LIVE their mobile portal in dotmobi.
As I was introduced with dotmobi concept and also was maintaining the AKTEL WAP portal so I took the risk to re-develop the AKTEL WAP portal following the dotmobi rules. Although the coding part was quite easy for me, but the hardest part initially was to make the management understand “Why dotmobi is necessary?”. But in this case ready.mobi test score helped me a lot. Thanks to dotmobi for that nice tool. aktelspice.mobi scored 5 out of 5 in ready.mobi test.
Steps to dotmobi:
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I must say that someone who does not know what dotmobi is, what the benefits are; it is very tough for him to understand the difference between the two domains .com and .mobi. So the hardest part of launching aktelspice.mobi was to make the management understand the necessity of dotmobi. But before going to the management I followed the below steps:
1. aktelspice.mobi is the address of the renovated version of AKTEL WAP portal. It is a dynamic portal. So the portal contents are changed based on the database contents. There are many things entirely changed compared to the previous version like: layouts, color schemes, link hierarchy and finally some additional features. |
This is my first dotmobi portal where I was engaged in all the parts of development (product concept planning, color and layout planning, feature planning, database designing, coding and finally launching in dotmobi ). The major focus I gave was in comfortable User experience.
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2. aktelspice.mobi got three new features: bookmarking a portal page, inserting personal links and finally link dedication (one can dedicate his personal link to others). In case of link dedication the B party gets a SMS to get informed. Also some specific portal pages (emai, news etc) can be requested through SMS. A WAP push SMS comes in response containing the URL of that specific page (suppose, email). Subscribers can click the URL and visit directly that page. |
3. After the planning phase I had to develop the entire portal in a parallel place.
4. Tested score with ready.mobi tool.
5. Purified my portal code until my coding scored 5 out of 5.
6. Then I informed the management about the dotmobi concept. The ready.mobi test score (which was 5 out of 5) was a great help and was easily understandable.
7. So now we (AKTEL) have our portal in .mobi domain.
In the coding, I followed the instruction on Addendum on Adaptation and Transcoding.
AKTEL has taken the lead to start dotmobi race in Bangladesh as well as in APAC region. And I hope many other telcos in this region will also be interested in dotmobi and we will see some new operator portals in the near future.
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