SMS
Often referred to as the ‘biggest brand on the planet’, SMS — or texting — is still the biggest success story in the industry. In this section we cover innovation, best practice and discussion around the next steps for the medium.
Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant. I love reading about these kinds of applications.
Dialogue, the mobile solutions specialist, has launched a dedicated text number for Northumbria Police non-emergencies. The number is 0778 6200 815.
The Police Control room receives the text messages — and critically — it can REPLY as well. Often [...]
You can get a loan in Sweden via your mobile phone in seconds. It’s quite a neat service, from a mobile industry perspective. If you’re short of a few hundred quid (for example), you can text, text, text and woosh, get an unsecured credit line. Perfect for funding that hugely unnecessary iPhone [...]
Continue ReadingEsendex aren’t sitting on their arses. There’s a lot of mobile companies that are. I like to see innovation. Innovation in spades, that’s the way ahead. And Esendex are really pushing the envelope, conceiving and implementing useful SMS related applications.
Only recently they launched an SMS-to-blog service and today they’ve gone live [...]
Ed over at Technology Evangelist was giving a presentation recently and decided to demand interaction from his audience by text message. Here’s what he did…
As an experiment, I set the first slide of the presentation to say, “Text Me:” followed by my cell phone number and explained that anyone in the audience could send [...]
According to the Gulf Times, the newest version of Qtel’s Mozaic mobile chat service has been a stunning success:
THE newly launched Mozaic SMS Chat - an interactive text-based service from Qtel - has been a massive success across the country with over 11mn messages sent to and from users in the first week, Qtel said [...]
The “more bars in more places” mobile network operator has summarily increased the cost of text messaging from $0.15 to $0.20 for out of bundle text messages.
Why? Because they can. Nobody cares. Americans don’t care. Individual Americans — some who have been emailing this site — certainly care, but [...]
I picked up this story from TVNZ that states Vodafone NZ doesn’t bother archiving text messages transmitted by its customers — and that Telecom NZ is planning to do the same by the end of this year. The storing of text messages is an additional headache for operators. Let’s be clear, it’s certainly [...]
Continue ReadingRegular reader Keith knocked me over this question:
Quick question … do you know how I would be able to have SMS text messages sent to me go directly to email or better yet to a MYSQL database so I can start a database of SMS phone numbers?
Well, this is eminently easy. What say, you, [...]
Continue ReadingIt’s Fine Day today — the UK regulator, PhonepayPlus published details of the companies that it has fined for breach of its regulations last month. Most of the fines are 5,000 or 10,000… small beer, really, especially compared to last month’s 175,000 pound whopper fine for SMS.ac.
2Ergo is banished to the naughty step as [...]
The market is hotting up in the American question and answer text service marketplace with the arrival of ASKbyText. I had a note in from CEO Steve Smale with the details this morning.
If you recall, I tried out rival incumbent, Johnny27 regularly while I was in San Francisco (did you know that skiing [...]
Avanquest, the global software developer and company behind text service, ‘Text Message Server’ (perhaps a rather unimaginative name — still, does-what-it-says-on-the-tin), have announced that Oxfordshire County Council has launched a text alert service for flood information.
Floods in Oxford are a bit of an issue. Here’s a BBC story from July last year [...]
BeamMe.Info is a cool new service for web publishers that places a small link next to content, so that users can quickly and easily send the info to their handset via SMS. There is a ‘Beam Generator’ that will generate the code, which you merely paste into your website, wherever you want the function to [...]
Continue ReadingAQA can help…
Continue ReadingJeff Jarvis, writing in today’s Media Guardian, makes some interesting points about Twitter and the medium of microblogging (or, picoblogging, I think that’s a better term — Microblogging conjures up images of sentences, whereas a picoblog is, to me, just one sentence).
Given that Twitter first started via text — and that a large amount of [...]
Oh dear. According to Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald, graduates are using text-speak when they’re writing applications, with the problem particularly widespread among those who have studied technical courses, like engineering.
Shirley Alexander, a deputy vice-chancellor at the University of Technology, Sydney, said recent years had seen an increase in students writing assignments in leetspeak - [...]
1-800-FREE-411, from Jingle Networks, has announced a new partnership with Dial Directions that will allow their users to simply call in, give their current address and the destination, and receive an SMS with directions to their destination. The service is, as you might have guessed, free of charge, and will launch on March 1st in [...]
Continue ReadingThe Office of Fair Trading has embarked on a somewhat confusing campaign to warn young people of the dangers of scam text messaging, in an effort to stop those aged between 18 and 24 losing money to SMS rip off merchants.
The OFT has sent out “thousands” of text messages to the yoof which read ‘Urgent! [...]
More and more, the use of texting is going to seriously impact results. I’m sure of it. We just haven’t seen any concrete examples as yet. This story from ABC alludes to the possibility of a direct effect from texting to ‘get out the vote’.
Link: ABC News: Did Texting Contribute to [...]
Russians can sign-up to receive text message updates relating to their country’s upcoming Presidential Election. Neat. I’d like to see this sort of service made available in a lot more countries. I’d like to know the news ‘now’ — that is — immediately it’s available from the various electoral authorities, and not [...]
Continue ReadingAlyster is hunting for some assistance in Taiwan:
Link: SMS Text News » Archives » Worldwide premium rate shortcode service required
Hi, can anyone recommend to me aggregator whom provide premium sms short code for taiwan urgently…thanks
Any suggestions?
Continue ReadingHeathrow isn’t a joyous airport to use at the best of times. Massively overcrowded, far too much focus on flogging-you-stuff rather than making it easy to get on the plane. Constantly harassed staff. No, it’s not fun at all.
However, the possibility of a third runway for the airport might help make the [...]
Director of new sci-fi movie, Jumper, Doug Liman, didn’t bother phoning Hollywood kitten, Rachel Bilson, when he wanted to hire her. No. Instead he sent her a text. Right on.
The Times of India reports the following:
She says, ‘I was at my cousin’s wedding in Tennessee and I got a text [...]
Very efficient use of the medium….
Link:
The Hindu : National : Now book LPG through Internet, SMS and voice response system
In an attempt to eliminate middlemen and make the booking system customer-friendly, Indian Oil Corporation (IOC) on Monday announced the launch of booking for Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) through internet, SMS and Interactive Voice Response [...]
Continue ReadingHanwell Instruments has put together a new product called AlarmWatch, which uses GSM modems to shoot off SMS messages when the alarm is triggered. The service features 4 contact inputs and can store up to 8 telephone numbers. AlarmWatch is best used for things such as a tank level alarm or system failures. Once the [...]
Continue ReadingA bit of news from Iran on the subject of text messaging. This story, published by Taliya News and rather sparse on detail, reports that:
20 percent of consumers said [SMS] ‘.. is the most significant service used as they demand for it more’
(That quote’s from the Public Relations department at the Telecommunications Company of [...]
Krystal on 