Oracle Responsys PushIO is the WORST Push SDK

I have covered many SDKs on Push, and none is as bad as Oracle's.

I'm sure PushIO was a pretty good product, run by a few entrepreneurs, until they were acquired by Oracle.

Oracle turned PushIO into an enterprise product, and it became the worst thing ever.

How bad?

No sample code
Confusing UI/UX
Enterprise level support, meaning clueless support (they know nuts about a developer tool)
Enterprise level documentation, meaning very poor

If you are reading this post, learn these 2 things:

1. Don't use Oracle's Responsys's PushIO
2. Don't turn your product into "enterprise product"

Polljoy - customer feedback sdk

Polljoy is another customer feedback for mobile.

I have covered others such as Helpshift, Neemware and Apptentive.

They look pretty simple to use.

You can try it out for free with 1000 responses/month.

The Dirty Secret Behind Salesforce $1M Hackathon

Read The Dirty Secret Behind Salesforce $1M Hackathon by Alicia Liu.

I am not surprised if an enterprise player like Salesforce resort to such.

Parse New Pricing (2014) is so much cheaper

OMG. Parse is already my favourite BaaS, now it is even more.

Parse announced a new pricing - cheaper and simpler.

They used to have 1 million free push messages in a month. Now, it is 1 million unique devices!

That means if you send lots of push, but have less than 1 million active users a month, then you don't have to pay a dime!

Integrate Google Authenticator for your own website

If you have not activated Google Authenticator, you very well should.

Not only can the 2FA be used for Google services, it can also be used for third party websites.

You might have seen it being used in Wordpress or Evernote.

It is actually pretty simple. Try out a demo of how it works from dendory.net. The demo site uses ga4php. Better code using Python. Or use Node lib.

Read about the API on the URI key.

Ultimate Guide to Understanding SMS API

There are many SMS API available, and they all seems to do the same thing.

Tell me the number and message to send, and I will send to the phone.

A simple I/O operation it seems, but the truth is not.

Nexmo provided a guide to SMS deliverability. An excellent guide for new API users.

I also learnt a few new things.

• If you know the MCC/MNC your recipient is on (you can if you have a mobile app), then you can use Nexmo API with "network-code". This will avoid number portability problem.
• REST can scale as well as SMPP 
• Refer to their country specific guide

AWS now has mobile push notifications API

You can now send push notifications (Apple APNS or Google GCM) via AWS!

This feature comes under SNS (Simple Notification Service), which includes sending to email and SMS too.

The pricing is amazingly cheap too. Mobile push notifications will cost $1 or less for 1 million pushes! As a comparison, Parse charges $70 per 1 million pushes.