Product: SMS Gift Card Portal
Company: SparkBase and Inspiron Logistics Corp.
According to the National School Safety and Security Services, 15 school shootings took place on U.S. campuses in the 2005 to 2006 school year, resulting in 27 deaths.
In response to that tragedy, Inspiron Logistics Corp. developed the wireless emergency notification system (WENS) - a system that sends out emergency warnings in the form of text messages to individual cell phones and other wireless handheld devices.
Leveraging that technology, Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio-based Inspiron began marketing Inspiron Mobile as a short message service (SMS) business application in mid 2008. Like WENS, SMS sends out and receives text messages wirelessly - not as warnings for emergency situations but as ways for businesses to reach new customers and retain existing customers.
Recently, Inspiron teamed with private label gift and loyalty card processor SparkBase to offer the SMS Gift Card Portal as a valued added service to clients in SparkBase's merchant portfolio.
The portal allows SparkBase's customers to deliver electronic coupon codes, special offers and rewards messages directly to their customers, which SparkBase puts at over 2 million cardholders.
According to Scott Dettling, founder and President of Inspiron, SparkBase chose Inspiron's SMS engine because Inspiron's system was "battle-tested" through its WENS experience.
"It's one thing if you're sending out 200,000 messages to let everyone know that this team beat this football team," Dettling said. "And if you have a certain failure rate, well, I guess that's not too serious. But when people's lives are at stake, there's no room for lack of speed or delivery."
Dettling believes Inspiron's SMS solution has that. "We intentionally reengineered WENS to have so few moving parts," Dettling said. "It was all predicated on the experience that we've learned in the wireless notification end where it has to be able to notify hundreds of thousands of people in extremely short periods of time.
"And getting that level of throughput and reliability just made us an ideal solution for large business applications like SparkBase."
SparkBase said the SMS service tied to prepaid stored value cards delivers a competitive advantage for ISOs and merchant level salespeople in boarding and retaining merchants.
"This is going to push the reward aspect of our merchants' business," said Doug Hardman, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of SparkBase. "The texting for a balance is pretty simple, but we wanted to offer something special.
When a merchant wants to reach out to 1,000 cardholders instantly with a last-minute promotion ... they can do it in a matter of seconds."
SparkBase
216-867-0877
www.sparkbase.com
Inspiron Logistics Corp.
866-998-WENS
www.inspironlogistics.com
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