TMTOUCH SERVICES

TMTouch is a service provided by one of Malaysia's leading telecommunication companies. It offers a number of innovative SMS services, a few of which are discussed here.

TMTouch Summons CheckPoint Service

This innovative service, which was launched on October 25, 2001, enables TMTouch service subscribers to check if they have any outstanding summons through the convenience of their own hand phones. The service, which was the first of its kind in the country, enables hand phone users to access the traffic police database to check for outstanding summonses. This service is made possible by the cooperation between three parties: TMTouch, the Royal Malaysian Police, and Telekom Applied Businesses (TAB) of Malaysia.

A subscriber checks for outstanding summonses by keying his car registration number, identity card number, or company registration number and sending the message to the TMTouch SMS number 1999. He receives a reply with detailed information regarding the summons issued, such as the type of offence, location, vehicle registration number, and warrant of arrest, if any. The payment of penalty, however, can only be made at the nearest police station or summons payment counter at shopping centers. The generic architecture of the system is shown in Figure 11:

1. A user sends a request to check for outstanding summonses by typing pdrmeng1 followed by the vehicle registration number.

2. The message is filtered by the SMSC to be routed to the appropriate channel.

3. The content aggregator, TAB, converts the message to a format that is readable by the police database at Bukit Aman.

4. A reply message (whether there are any summonses or not) is sent to TAB.

5. TAB sends the message in the appropriate format back to the SMSC.

6. The SMSC forwards the message to the user.

Figure 11: TMTouch summons checkpoint service architecture

Flight Information

The flight information from Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA) can be easily downloaded to mobile phones using SMS. TMTouch introduced this service to provide the public with the latest information regarding flight details. The information would be useful for a subscriber to plan her journey to the airport to fetch family members , friends , or business partners . It also provides the convenience of flight booking via SMS. Departure information by flight number, departure information by flight destination, arrival information by flight number, arrival information by destination, and arrival information in the 24- hour time format are among the information provided by this service. Figure 12 shows the steps required to retrieve the information of departure by flight number.

Figure 12: Departure information by flight number

Yellow Pages

Yellow Pages is an SMS service that allows users to look up the Yellow Pages to retrieve information about services and products by simply typing a short message. There are five categories of information that can be searched: the name of the company, classification, addresses and contact numbers of foreign embassies, addresses and contact numbers of government agencies, and, finally, Telekom Malaysia eight-digit telephone number conversion. Figure 13 shows the steps taken to retrieve the information on foreign embassies. Subscribers are charged 50 sen for each short message sent and another 50 sen for the incoming information.

Figure 13: Searching the Yellow Pages for an address and contact number of a foreign embassy