1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to the interactions between mobile handset and it's a server within a network, and more specifically to the ability to create and send interactive advertisements to a mobile handset and receive user responses.
2. Related Art
Electronic devices, such as mobile phones and personal digital assistants (PDA's), often contain small screens with very limited viewing area. They are constrained in terms of how much information can be displayed, and in terms of user interaction capabilities. The keyboards on cell phones, for example, are not conducive for user data entry, and only brief user inputs can be solicited from a user without annoying the user.
In a PC based access to a website, often Internet advertisements and presented to a user. For example, an image and accompanying text for an advertisement is displayed with a link to a web page or to some additional product information. If a user clicks the advertisement, those links are exercised and the webpages are displayed. Unfortunately, these webpages are annoying to some users and websites block such advertisements. Often users block them in their browsers, especially those that are popup-ads. However, such Internet websites and popup ads are not useful or convenient or appropriate for mobile advertisements, wherein a mobile user with a mobile phone is not likely to either receive or conveniently review such Internet based advertisement. Therefore, creating appropriate mobile advertisements for mobile phones is not easy. Internet webpages that provide advertisements are usually not appropriate for mobile phone users for several reasons.
In addition, some mobile advertisements prompt user to purchase a product and take them to a shopping cart for sales. The shopping carts and associated webpages prompt users for shipping address, billing address, credit card information etc. These webpages with shopping carts are neither appropriate for mobile phones nor convenient for a user who might want to purchase the advertised product. The whole process of prompting necessary information from a user using a mobile phone is inconvenient due to the inability of the user to enter a large amount of text conveniently using the small keys of a mobile phone, and due to small screens on such devices. Internet advertisement based sales completion process provided by websites to a typical user are not convenient, and often incompatible with small form factor devices such as mobile phones and PDAs. The user can neither conveniently read, browse through the advertisements presented nor provide detailed shipping, billing and other information needed to compete sales via the user's mobile phone.
Information access from typical Internet based websites using mobile devices are quite often unsatisfactory and not useful due to several factors, not least of which is the multi-media and graphics rich format in which most Internet websites are designed. In addition, Internet websites tend to be and made available with a lot of graphics and prone towards needless verbosity of text. A mobile phone with a small screen is not a good candidate for viewing such complicated and graphics rich (with graphics, flash screens, video components, etc.) content—imagine a webpage being presented to a user that has a music component, a whole a page of text (over 3 KB of text) and three large diagrams, and a table of information, all on the same webpage. Such a multi-media webpage is very typical, and is obviously unsuitable for access using a mobile device, such as a small cell phone.
User interaction in real time, such as those provided for a user using a PC on the Internet, are often not possible for a user using a cell phone. For example, the amount of textual information presented to a user cannot be a full page of textual information that is typically made available o a PC. Graphical information also cannot be large and too many graphical images should not be on the same webpage. A typical website provides a rich multi-media experience that has several graphical images, large amounts of text, tables, etc. The same website, when accessed from a cell phone, would not only be unreadable, due to its large amount of text, graphics and even video, but also frustrating due to the nature of web sites—the design of websites often being multi-media based (predominantly providing large multi-media web pages full of text, graphics, flash-based and even containing videos). Often webpages on the Internet provide detailed information to a user while soliciting inputs from a user. Thus, there is a problem in presenting a mobile user with information in order to solicit user input when the user is using a cell phone. Soliciting user input from a user when the user is using a cell phone, rather than a PC, is a big problem.
Mobile devices such as a cell phone are therefore devices for which traditional websites are ill prepared to provide information. In addition, surveys or questionnaires that are created for Internet based access via a PC are not appropriate for cell phone access. Asking one or more detailed questions with information on how to answer them is possible on a web page that is accessed from a PC. However, the same web page would be unsuitable, unmanageable and difficult to browse and navigate on a cell phone with a small LCD screen and small keyboard for user input.
There is often a need to present a user with a list of items and be able to determine which of those items interest the user. For example, the list of items could be a list of camcorders or a list of houses for sale. There are no easy ways to do this if the user is using a mobile device. In fact, if an MMS email is sent to the user with all the items (each item may include graphics, text, etc.), the user has to in the first place, subscribe to the expensive MMS service. Secondly, he has to be able to receive MMS service on his device. Thirdly, after receiving an email with all those items, the user has to browse them, and send an email back from the device to show which items he is interested in. The email response would require the user to include the entire MMS message (or significant portions thereof) with his comments incorporated in order to provide the context for the response showing selective interest. This inclusion of received multi-media text would make the email response quite large (unnecessarily large). On the other hand, if the user were to not include significant portions of the received mail in his response, his responses may be read out of context or be associated with the wrong context. Thus, information solicited from a user via a email response is cumbersome, despite being expensive and email response from mobile being a painful experience, and inadequate.
Surveys cannot currently be sent to mobile devices easily, as responding to surveys on a mobile device is not easy due to the large amounts of text accompanying each question and the limitations of a small screen that are not appropriate to review large amounts of text. Also, most surveys require some text entry, something very inconvenient for most people who use mobile phones.
Further limitations and disadvantages of conventional and traditional approaches will become apparent to one of ordinary skill in the art through comparison of such systems with the present invention as set forth in the remainder of the present application with reference to the drawings.