Posts Tagged ‘Texting’

Arise Queen Hilton (Paris has been texting Wills)

Monday, October 20th, 2008

Time for a bit of non-Industry wheezing.

Paris Hilton and William Windsor in a tree, T E X T I N G.

Each other, so reports The Daily Mirror.

What celebrity’s mobile phone (is Prince William a celebrity or a non-celebrity famous person?) would you really like to find in the back of a cab to have a nose through their text messages?

As for Prince William with a Blackberry? I hope it’s a Bold — and I hope he’s got Google Maps working on it as he’s just started a motorbike tour of Africa with his brother.

The things you learn when you’re sat on the Eurostar reading the paper and fuming about your own Blackberry not working…

IT Professor rubbishes texting as an emergency alert system

Wednesday, September 17th, 2008

Now this is an interesting one. A very interesting one. You know how I’m all in favour of text systems for emergency or company/organisation-wide alerts?

Well, that’s based on the system actually working as expected. The ability to be able to send a message to all 5,000 staff immediately (e.g. “Hello, come and empty your desk please, Mr & Mrs Lehman Brothers”) can only be a good thing, surely?

But as we’ve reported before, some systems haven’t entirely worked when they’ve been tested. Witness, if you will, the Louisiana State University text system screwing up during a test.

There are obvious implications here for the companies that have grown up specialising in emergency text services for colleges, universities and organisations.

The research by this Computer Science Professor is pretty direct. And it’s not the service providers to blame per se — it’s the actual operator infrastructure that is, typically, simply not built to send 10,000 messages through one or two cellular masts in one location, immediately.

The research conducted for the paper indicates that there are serious limitations in third party Emergency Alert Systems (EAS). In particular, because of the general architecture of CDMA, TDMA and GSM cellular networks, such systems will not be able to deliver a high volume of emergency messages in a short period of time. Through discussion, modeling and simulation, Traynor demonstrated in the paper that current systems not only cannot widely disseminate such messages quickly, but also that the additional traffic created by third party EAS solutions may disrupt other traffic such as voice communications, including that of emergency responders or the public to 9-1-1 services.

Cellular News has the full story.

Did you ever have a penfriend when you were younger?

Thursday, August 28th, 2008

I came across this post on a forum this morning. We’ve got countless, countless alerts, feeds and whatnot — all around texting, SMS and mobile. Tia’s forum post popped up:

Would you like to be email or text friends?
Hello! my name is Tia, im not new to Christianity but im trying now to find my own way in my faith. I am 16 and love to talk lol so id hope you would to! Just looking for someone to text and talk to about God and life. Girl or guy it dosent matter please post or pm me if your instersted

It got me thinking about penfriends.

I once had a penfriend… for about a week, when I was young. A chap in Russia. This was back when letters took weeks to arrive because they were all being read by the various authorities.

People at school I knew used to have tons of penfriends. They used to write to each other every week.

Where are we today? What do young-folk-do when it comes to penfriends? We’ll ask Samantha and Issah.

Meanwhile… Is there such a thing as textfriends? Does that ‘work’? Surely a textfriend is … well… just a person you text, as apposed to a penfriend?

“Is there any way to turn the SMS feature off?”

Wednesday, August 27th, 2008

So asks Tim Worstall on his blog:

So, all mobile phones have SMS or texting on them.

Is there any way to turn that feature off?

Specifically, a way to turn it off so that anyone who tries to text you knows that it didn’t go through? And that it won’t?

As much as it might wind me up, I can see that some people would really like this feature on their handset/mobile account.

(Thanks for sending me the link Andy)

Texting whilst walking is dangerous. Very dangerous.

Tuesday, August 26th, 2008

America’s fastest growing network morning newscast, CBS News, is reporting that texting whilst walking isn’t good.

It’s bad.

So bad in fact that it could get you killed.

In other news, I’d like to point out that if you stick a knife into your heart, you could very well kill yourself.

Also: And, I don’t blame you if you didn’t already know this, but if you cut off your head with your penknife, you are in serious, serious danger of killing yourself.

Cutting your hedge with a hedge trimmer could be very, very dangerous too.

Swimming could be really dangerous as well. Especially if you open your mouth and breathe continually. I’m just saying.

You take care now.

US DMA: Texting gets best response

Tuesday, August 26th, 2008

This news, reported by Jack Loechner at MediaPost, might well get the attention of the mainstream advertising and marketing communities.

According to the Direct Marketing Association, 24 percent of mobile phone users surveyed online have responded to mobile marketing. The DMA quantitative mobile marketing research found that 70 percent of consumers who have responded to a mobile marketing offer say they’ve responded to a marketing text message, compared with 42 percent who’ve responded to a survey and 30 percent to email offers.

i2SMS powering Scion’s Minnesota State Fair text campaign

Monday, August 25th, 2008

Giff Gfroerer if your go-to-guy if you’re doing 2-way text services throughout North America. Giff, President of i2SMS, dropped me a note to tell me about the latest campaign they’ve been working on. He’s been a long time reader of Mobile Industry Review and he knows that I absolutely eat-up news about mobile companies doing smart things for their clients. There are far too many mobile companies navel gazing and not out there telling folk about what they’re doing.

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!

Results Day and my Mobile Phone!

Wednesday, August 20th, 2008

Tomorrow, it’s GCSE results day. This means two things – feeling extremely sick, and using my mobile phone a lot!

I haven’t really thought about the communications side of tomorrow much, seeing as I’m more worried about everything else. However, as Ewan pointed out to me tomorrow morning I will spending more time than I have in a long time, using my mobile phone.

From what I’ve seen from previous year groups (we’ve been shown videos into scaring us to work hard), everyone is using their mobile; so how will I be using mine tomorrow?

Firstly, there are my plans to Twitter everything. It’s more of a plan to keep me sane whilst walking into School than anything else. Then again it’s also partially so that anyone who is interested enough to care, can follow what’s happening on my Facebook and Twitter profile.

Then, there are the “after reading the results” communications. Obviously, whether good or bad (that sends shivers down my spine), my family will want to know.

That’ll mean making a phone-call to my Mum, and trying to tell her everything whilst everyone else in my year group is at the same time. My School is also built in such a way that gaining a signal is near impossible, so I’ll have to hunt around for a good spot, preferably away from my teary-eyed and excited peers.

I don’t doubt for a single second that the hundred and eighty strong year group will not be making dozens of calls and texts. With everyone owning a mobile phone, and eager parents, I expect everyone will have fully prepared and topped up mobiles.

The rest of my family, namely my Grandparents have asked me to send them a text or “drop call” them. I can only imagine that even if I text them the results, they’ll be phoning me up, probably with speakerphone on, so that they can all hear.

And finally, another Twitter update.

Isn’t it odd to think that five years of work will be summed up by 180 characters on the internet? Hmm, whatever the outcome, I don’t want think about it now.

What’s even weirder to think about is that there will be around three hundred thousand students receiving their results tomorrow, and probably doing the exact same thing. Maybe not the Twittering though, because I don’t know of anyone in my friend groups, or year group who micro-blog; but I can guarantee that a number of texts and phone calls will be made.

With any luck whatever I will be texting and saying on my phone tomorrow, it’ll be good – although I don’t have high hopes for Music. But even so, at least I can phone up a reassuring voice in the event of anything drastically horrible.

And that is why I love my mobile phone.

Best of wishes to anyone else who are also receiving any results tomorrow!


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