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USA. 4.1 billion SMS messages are sent daily
According to a CTIA Semi-Annual Wireless Industry Survey, over 740 billion text messages were sent over carrier networks in the US during the first half of 2009. That's 4.1 billion SMS messages being sent daily, which is also nearly twice as many as sent during the same time period last year.
[News release via Mashable]
Mobile operators killing SMS revolution
Joshua Goldstein writing for Business Daily describes how African mobile networks are costly because the price of sending an SMS is kept up by high taxes and interconnection fees.
However, there is reason for hope. Mobile companies and regulators around the developing world are recognising the “economics of abundance”— that more users at lower prices will result in more revenue.
In the Philippines, for example, according to telecom expert Steve Song, mobile providers charge less than one US cent per SMS on average. What is striking about this is that they manage to generate three times the revenue per capita from SMS traffic as compared with South Africa where the average SMS costs over nine US cents.
Also, in Uganda, for the first time in the telecom industry’s history, MTN agreed to lower the price of a premium SMS to 5 US cents for Farmers Friend, one of the newly launched Grameen and Google services, aimed at poor farmers.
Read full article. Image from Kiwanja.net.
Update: Uganda Rejects Call to Lower Mobile Phone Sales Tax
Google Voice Now Forwards SMS To Your Email
Google Voice users now have the ability to forward inbound text messages to email. And even better, you can reply from email as well. TechCrunch reports.
[via Oh Gizmo]
Can a New Mobile Phone Service in Rural India Help Promote Economic Empowerment?
An interesting article in The Wall Street Journal on how fisherman and farmers in India are being empowered by mobile phones.
With mobile phones, however, suddenly it became an information-based decision. What's more, noted Jensen (who is currently at Brown University in Rhode Island), "it's not a zero-sum trade-off." The fishermen's customers benefitted from lower prices and greater choice, and there was less waste since the fishermen could easily identify the villages that would have the greatest demand for their fish each day.
Read full article.
Related:
-- Kerala farmers adopt SMS service to know rubber prices
-- Nokia To Launch 'Live Tools' For Farmers, Students In India
-- Selling Potatoes By Phone In Remote Bangladesh
-- The Impact of Cell Phones on Grain Markets in Africa's Niger
-- Text message helpline for Indian farmers
Google's Africa Strategy: Search And Trade Via SMS
Not only does Google want to organize all the world's information, it also wants to make all that information available to everyone in the world. TechCrunch reports.
The search service works like Google SMS in North America. You text a search term, and it responds via SMS with the result. Searches can be narrowed by using specific keywords such as “local time,” “weather,” “news,” “maps,” “translation,” or “currency conversion.” For more complicated searches, the related SMS tips service offers answers in an automated Q&A format.
But the most interesting application is Google Trader, which allows people to post items for sale and jobs via SMS. Other people can search for them by texting the service with the word “BUY” preceding the search term. Google Trader connects the buyer and seller together (each listing contains the seller’s cell phone number).
Related: Real time information about farming, health and trading will be available to mobile phone users in Uganda with new technology services developed by the Grameen Foundation, Google and telecom operator MTN. [Seattle Times]
Ordering The Pill by Text Message
smsdepil.nl, a Web company in The Netherlands offers the option to order birth control pills by text message. Patients receive them by mail in the next three days. They can also sign up for SMS alerts, so as not to forget to send in their order again.
What's interesting is that the cost is billed to the patient's insurer.
[via portablegear.nl Google translate]
Google Block Infinite SMS iPhone app
According to The Industry Standard, Phone app Infinite SMS that offers free text messaging (after the 99 cent app fee) has been shut down because Google blocked access to its the free text messaging in Gmail Labs.
Infinite SMS is a third party app that has been using Google technology to provide free SMS for users, while we were paying for the cost of the text messages. While Google is supportive of third party apps, we’ve decided we can’t support this particular usage of our system at this time. SMS chat is still just an experiment in the early testing stages in Gmail Labs. We’re blocking all external XMPP clients from sending SMS; we’re not singling out Innerfence.
101 Business Uses for SMS
Clickatell's 37 page guide reviews 101 innovative ways to use text messaging in your business (You have to give your details to access the pdf document) or view directly as html:
-- Sales, Products and Marketing
-- Customer Services and Relationship Management
-- Business Process Management and Internal Administration
-- Information Technology and System Administration
-- Transport and Logistics
-- Travel and Tourism
-- Financial Services
-- Social Networking
And just for fun, check out a 2003 Year in Review on some of the more unusual ways of using text messaging.
Google Accidentally Slams Users With SMS
According to Search Engine Roundtable via Gearlog, Google accidentally slammed users with SMS messages last night.
After investigating this issue, the cause seems to be related to an error with the mobile aggregator used by many mobile providers. We've received confirmation that a fix is going out soon.
Google takes two with Gmail-SMS chat
After a hiatus of more than a month, Google has reintroduced a feature to send instant messages to phones via SMS. cnet news reports.
Google brings text-messaging to online chat
Google is expanding the instant-messaging feature built into Gmail so people can use it to send text messages to their contacts' phones, reports News.com.
Google SMS
By comedy group The Vacationeers.
[via Neatorama]
Warning over EU roaming charges
The European Union's telecoms chief has threatened to introduce measures slashing the costs of cross-border text-messaging if operators do not lower prices voluntarily by July 1. The Press Association reports.
"EU Telecoms Commissioner Viviane Reding insisted the costs of SMS and data roaming were too high and opaque and must come down because consumers are being ripped off.
Costs people pay for making mobile phone calls outside their home countries have dropped by up to 60% since the European Commission capped fees last September.
But the price cap does not cover mobile internet or some 200 billion text messages that are sent a year in western Europe."
Loans by text message send young Swedes spiralling into debt
According to the AFP, the simplicity of obtaining SMS loans in Sweden is increasingly luring youths into debt.
"The first (SMS) loan was given in the middle of March 2006," said Janne Aakerlund, a spokesman for Sweden's debt recovery agency Kronofogden, adding that the first bill collectors were sent out just three months later.
Since then, the number of un-repaid text message loans has soared: in 2007, Kronofogden was tasked with collecting debts from 20,000 such loans, 35.9 percent of which were granted to people aged 18 to 25.
"There is reason to be seriously concerned about this development," head of the Swedish Consumer Agency, Gunnar Larsson, told AFP."
Related:
-- $300 Loans by Simply sending a Text Message
-- SMS loans could be ruining your Christmas season
Text messages used as tool of hate in Kenya
"If your neighbor is a Kikuyu, just kick him or her out of that house. No one is going to ask you anything,"the hate message read on 27-year old Kenyan Joyce Mandela's mobile phone.
"You don't know who is sending them, you don't know how they got your number," said Mandela.
Since December's disputed elections, ethnic clashes involving the Kikuyu, Luo, Luhya and Kalenjin tribes -- among others -- have rocked Kenya, claiming about 1,000 lives and displacing another 300,000 people.
... The Kenya National Commission on Human Rights charged that text messages were among the means used to encourage Kenyans to participate in tribal attacks, along with inflammatory statements and songs broadcast on radio stations and at party rallies, leaflets and even bribes.
The Kenyan government recently said it was working with leading mobile operators to monitor voice and text messages on mobile phones - and potentially catch offenders.
Many in Mathare Chief Camp, huddled in tents with wool blankets, said they have been too afraid to pass on any of the SMS messages."
[via AFP]
Pope Benedict XVI provides moral support via SMS during Lent
Pope Benedict XVI is providing moral support to Austrian Catholics during Lent with an encouraging SMS on their mobile phones.
Faithful who sign up for the new SMS service, launched Wednesday by the Roman Catholic Church in Austria, will receive daily quotes from the Church leader during the 40 days of Lent to help them survive the traditional fasting period leading up to Easter.
The quotes, in German, range from the inspirational -- "The further development and dignity of a society depends on those people who do more than their duty" -- to the more obscure: "Resignation in the face of truth is, I am convinced, at the core of the crisis in the West and in Europe."
[via AFP]
Egyptian woman in legal test of SMS divorce
An Egyptian woman is seeking clarification from a court on whether her husband's declaration of divorce by text message is legally valid, a state-run newpsaper reported on Thursday. The AFP reports.
"After missing a call from her husband on her mobile phone, Iqbal Abul Nasr received a text message from him saying "I divorce you because you didn't answer your husband," Al-Akhbar said.
It was the third time Abul Nasr, an engineer from Cairo, received a divorce text message from her husband, prompting her to seek a legal decision from the a family court on the status of her marriage.
If the court declares the couple divorced, it would be the first reported case of divorce by SMS in Egypt.
The subject of divorce by SMS has been highly debated across the Muslim world and some Islamic countries like Malaysia have banned the practice."
Google Launches Mobile Phone SMS Search In China
Google has formally released a new localized product: mobile phone short message search in China.
This is the 25th localization product that Google has launched in China this year.
[via China Tech News]
Matching entries from ringtonia.com
YouNeverCall offers $100 for the first Crazy Frog ring call from the moon
File under fun.
YouNeverCall, the popular online cell phone superstore, today announced a $10,000 prize award for the first cell phone call placed from the moon.
This announcement follows on the coattails of Google's announcement of $20M in prize money for landing a craft on the moon by Dec. 31, 2014.
... In order to claim the $10,000 prize a cell phone call must be placed by a device or person present on the Moon's surface. This call must pass through a commercially available cellular phone to YouNeverCall's corporate headquarters in Los Angeles, CA.
Furthermore, the company is offering a $100 bounty to the first party who receives a cell phone call on the Moon that rings using the infamous Crazy Frog Ringtone.
[Press release via SMS Text News]
Matching entries from textually.org
YouNeverCall offers $10k for the first mobile call from the moon
File under fun.
YouNeverCall, the popular online cell phone superstore, today announced a $10,000 prize award for the first cell phone call placed from the moon.
This announcement follows on the coattails of Google's announcement of $20M in prize money for landing a craft on the moon by Dec. 31, 2014.
... In order to claim the $10,000 prize a cell phone call must be placed by a device or person present on the Moon's surface. This call must pass through a commercially available cellular phone to YouNeverCall's corporate headquarters in Los Angeles, CA.
Furthermore, the company is offering a $100 bounty to the first party who receives a cell phone call on the Moon that rings using the infamous Crazy Frog Ringtone.
[Press release via SMS Text News]
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