He saw my post late last week asking if anyone would be interested in helping me out by buying an iPad and shipping it over to me.

He dropped me a note explaining that he lived nearby one of the Apple Stores in Atlanta and said he’d pick one up on Saturday morning.

I could have hugged him — if he wasn’t 3,000 miles away.

Saturday rolled by and sure enough, Giff popped by the Apple Store and picked up the iPad, phoned UPS, handed it over and woosh, it arrived yesterday morning.

Giff, thank you very much indeed for going out of your way to do so.

Giff is President, North America, of i2SMS, one of America’s leading providers of customised 2-way SMS text message solutions. The key phrase there, by the way, is ’2-way’. There’s a ton of companies who will sell you one-way messaging services, but still — even today — a dearth of companies that specialise in return-path messaging. It’s absolutely critical for any decent messaging application I can think of. So it’s no surprise that i2SMS work with all sorts of organisations that need to deploy reliable 2-way messaging — airports, financial institutions, real estate companies, marketing agencies and IT companies.

i2SMS have a rock-solid network, they’re connected into 500+ operators across 180+ countries. So if you’re looking for messaging services, please talk to Giff and tell him I sent you. If you’d like an introduction, mail me and I’ll sort it out.

i2SMS are working with Encompass Advertising and Marketing — a full service national marketing agency who, in turn, are working for the car markers Scion. Scion are one of their vehicles on site at the Minnesota State Fair. It’ll be filled full with Scion-branded skulls and if you guess the number of skulls, you can win a new Garmin nuvi GPS device for each day of the 10-day Fair. Nice!

If you haven’t come across Scion, check out their site here. It’s rather smart.

There’s a million or so folk due to attend the fair and around 60% of them are in Scion’s target demographic. I think they’ll be dead impressed at how the medium of text performs. It’s already a fantastic method of engaging folk with a view to arranging test drives here in the UK.

I’m told that Scion personnel are ecstatic about the early response of the campaign. I’m not surprised. Here’s a quote from a chap from Scion:

“Thursday night’s winner was standing at a booth right next to ours when he received his message announcing he was the winner of the Garmin,” said Toyota Chicago Region’s Scion Field Manager Kendall Griffin. “All of a sudden, we could hear him cheer and shout that he was a winner.” Griffin continued, “We loved it.”

Excellent, excellent, excellent!