After finding it too difficult to procure good contractors for large cleaning companies, Danial Ahchow developed an eBay-like services portal where people can submit a job request and choose respondent suppliers based on previous feedback.

Service Central was developed on Linux with the MySQL database and PHP scripting language, and comprises five different systems - from the consumer system to see who has responded to job requests, to a CRM system for service providers to see which jobs they have been offered.There is also a response team for managing all the jobs.

Ahchow said because of the mobile nature of tradespeople, use of the Web would often slow them down so he looked into two-way SMS as a communications medium.

"Consumers didn't like using the Internet so we set up a call center which logs details into the Web site; overnight the increase in jobs logged was 10-fold," Ahchow said. "It went from 10 to 20 over the Internet and we now do 350 a week."

Service Central bridged the Web-SMS divide by writing a Web service application in PHP which interfaces with SMS service provider Messagemedia's online gateway.