Obama has got his own shortcode

More on the US elections and text messaging. I picked up the juicy fact that Obama has his own US shortcode, thanks to this piece in the Straits Times.

Link: Straits Times

Ms Julie Ask, an analyst at Jupiter Research, said that Mr Obama appeared to have an early edge in using mobile technology, with a snappier code – 62262 spells Obama, for example – and with mobile content and ‘wallpaper” for phones.

She said that candidates should not assume that only young voters would be moved by text.

‘I would remind (candidates) that the percentage of cellphone users aged 55 and over using text messaging doubled last year,” she said.

I’m frankly surprised that no other candidate has their own shortcode. This can’t be true! I’ll need to have a look and see. Perhaps the author of this meant that Obama is the only candidate to have a shortcode spelling his name? I wonder what HILARY would be dialed out on the keypad. 445279… too many digits for a shortcode. They’d need to do something like HILRY… don’t think US networks will allow shortcodes starting with 4 though. So I’d recommend they just got a memorable series of numbers.