Sixteen30 News

Sixteen30 now has an easy method to get pictures you take on your phone directly to a Facebook page.  This is a great new tool for brands, advertisers and media companies.  If you want to allow your consumers or clients to send pictures with your brand directly to your Facebook page, Sixteen30 has an easy method to do this.

Even better, when a consumer sends in their picture, we’ll let them know, via SMS, that we’ve received their picture.  And, when it gets posted, we’ll send another SMS to let them know it’s on your Facebook page.

Just to make sure you don’t get any pictures posted you wouldn’t want up, we’ve got a MODERATION PANEL for you to review and either accept or reject an image.  This panel is an internal tool for the administrator of the Facebook page to make sure what’s posted is in keeping with what you want.

Here’s how it works:

1.  In your promotion materials (in-store, on premises, media, on-pak, outdoor, etc.) you tell consumers to take a picture and send it to a short code (one of Sixteen30’s codes).

2.  The image comes into Sixteen30 and we reply with a confirming SMS that we got the image.

3.  The image is automatically passed to the moderation panel where it waits to be manually accepted or rejected.  If the image is accepted, it is automatically posted to your Facebook page and a SMS is sent to the sender that it is posted.  If the image is rejected, a SMS goes out and lets the consumer know.

4. That’s it.

We’ve already got some agencies signed up.

Good times….

May 2nd, 2011
Categories: News . Author: Brian Gratch . Comments: No Comments

Deep in the lab of a major UK university, a refrigerator stopped working putting years of work by a group of leading researchers at risk. If the temperature dropped below a certain point, the different solutions, samples and experiments would be ruined.

Fortunately, the research lab had attached a sensor to the refrigerator, as well as sensors to a number or other pieces of equipment. When the sensors detected the refrigerator stopped working, a secure connection was made to Alertcaster which instantly notified 10 research associates via SMS text message, a voice call and email. Within an hour, one of the researchers was at the lab shifting the contents of the broken refrigerator to a spare.

Alertcaster is a new platform service that provides an easy and affordable way to connect M2M (machine-to-machine) solutions for remote management and monitoring of devices.

In labs across the globe, machines of all types have to be monitored to make sure they are working properly. If something goes wrong, years of investment, research and money is lost.

By being able to let a group of people know immediately that something isn’t right becomes critical. However, up to now, automatically alerting many or just one key person has been difficult to coordinate and it’s been expensive.

By the numbers, a typical University hosts more than 100 individual labs. According to the Association of American Colleges and Universities, there are more than 2,400 accredited universities and colleges in the United States. This means that the number of locations that benefit by connecting their equipment with a state-of-the-art alert system is well over 240,000. With a typical lab using 5 to 10 pieces of critical equipment that should be monitored, an alert system would need to be able to monitor over 2.4 million connections at once in the USA alone. Adding in leading universities in Europe and Asia and the number grows even larger.

With budgets shrinking and resources tighter, finding an easy and affordable system to coordinate all types of alerts becomes a real challenge. Further, when people are spread across a city or a country or in different parts of the world, having one alert service handle it all is really important.

For alerts to work well, they need to let a person know what has happened in a way that stands out. If someone is unfamiliar with cell phones, then sending a SMS text alert doesn’t make sense. In this case, that person might want to receive a voice call and/or an email instead. A solid alert system has to accommodate many personal preferences. Also, the alerts need to be customized so the person receiving the alert knows what the alert is about. For example an alert could say, “the refrigerator holding the blood samples is failing.”

With the Cambridge University laboratory, some research assistants wanted SMS text alerts only, while the Professor herself wanted only a phone call to let her know what had happened. “We found the right service to connect our equipment and it really saved us”, said one of the research assistants. “We can’t afford the risk of ruined work which would set us back years and maybe cause us loose our funding.”

Though Alertcaster is only recently publically launched, many laboratories around the globe have been using the service for quite some time. Already, systems in the United States, France and England are integrating Alertcaster into their monitoring systems.

We’re not yet at the point of your refrigerator letting you know it is getting sick, but we’re getting close.

December 2nd, 2010
Categories: News . Author: Brian Gratch . Comments: No Comments

For Immediate Release

Sixteen30 keeps the learning happening after school hours and over the summer by delivering math and reading to student’s cell phones while the teacher measures success.

Chicago, January 5, 2009 - One-third of all students entering high school do not graduate. Neither do more than 80% of at-risk students entering college. Yet, nearly all of these young people - more than 85% - send and receive text messages, at a whopping rate of some 30 billion per month.

In a move to help address this situation, Sixteen30 is able to leverage mobile technology to improve educational success and consistently reach more students. “Literacy and math retention, especially when the child is not at school, are key to our efforts”, says Brian Gratch, Sixteen30 CEO, “and we measure a student’s progress all along the way.”

The Sixteen30 ZeerEd™ platform is able to aggregate all types of educational materials from differing curriculum and deliver them to the cell phone in a fun and engaging way for students. For example, once a student signs up with a school approved program, Sixteen30 is able to deliver math problems to a student via text. The student then replies to the text message with an answer and, depending on the result, gets a hint to try again, or is moved onto the next problem. Each student is tracked so their teacher can measure the progress being made. The capability can both support instruction and differentiate instruction, based upon the needs of the student.

Similarly, a student could access the educational content through a specially created mobile Internet site; or, via a voice call through an IVR (interactive voice response) system.

“We want to be able to support individual student learning and track their progress”, says Gratch. “The mobile phone is always with them, always on, and almost always the best way to connect with them.”

A study in 2006 by the Consortium on Chicago School Research reported that of every 100 freshmen entering a Chicago public high school, only about six will earn a bachelor’s degree by the time they’re in their mid-20s. The prospects are even worse for African-American and Latino male freshmen, who only have about a 3 percent chance of obtaining a bachelor’s degree by the time they’re 25.

To help grow excitement in the program, students can build points towards prizes as they move through a math or reading program. Because of the strength of the Sixteen30 database capability, keeping track of success, awarding points and offering prizes such as meals at restaurants, movie tickets, games, etc, is all within the platform’s capabilities.

Key Facts:

· Students, aged13-17, make an average of 231 calls per month versus. 1,742 texts per month. For students 18-24, 265 calls versus 790 texts per month.

· More than 85% of these students send more than 30 billion text messages per month.

· 85%+ of all 13-24 year olds have a cell phone.

· 84% of all English speaking Hispanics have cell phones, 74% of all white Americans have cell phones and 71% of all African Americans have cell phones.

· Source: CTIA

Set-Up is Easy for Students and Teachers

A special web page is provided teachers where student’s cell phone numbers are added. A confirmation text message is sent to the cell phone to assure the correct number has been entered.

Teachers then choose the appropriate curriculum or reading/math level for each student; and, the frequency for questions to be sent out (daily/weekly/day of week). At this point, the ZeerEd™ system takes over and sends out the appropriate reading or math support questions to each student signed up. In real time, the teacher can see which kids are participating, when they are participating (time of day), their progress, etc.

Some 1.2 million public high school students drop out every year. The societal costs of this failure are staggering. Marc Cohn, in his 1998 book, The Monetary Value of Saving a High Risk Youth estimated the cost to society of each high school dropout to be $243,000 to $388,000 over their lifetimes, or at current dropout rates, $291 billion annually.

Sixteen30 is already in discussions with several social service agencies and foundations to test and measure the effectiveness of leveraging the mobile phone to help improve student success. With 270+ million cell phones in use across the United States, we want to start making an impact now.

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About Sixteen30: Sixteen30 delivers integrated mobile programs and services that connect businesses and brands with their customers. A technology leader in delivering compelling programs that touch people’s lives, Sixteen30 has supported many of the world’s leading brands, advertisers, media companies, healthcare, advocacy and foundations with our proven mobile technology platforms. The powerful Zeer™ and WhislteMe™ platforms, built upon a powerful database backbone, allow Sixteen30 to produce mobile programs via text messaging (SMS), mobile Internet, voice, email, Rich Media (ringers/wallpaper/video) and iPhone/Android operating systems. Sixteen30 manages and executes programs in multiple languages, across multiple countries – reaching our client’s customers worldwide. Sixteen30 has offices in Chicago, Illinois and London, UK. More information can be found at Sixteen30.

For email contact: info@sixteen30.com: To contact Brian Gratch directly, 847.864.2038.

January 5th, 2009
Categories: News . Author: admin . Comments: No Comments