Prepare for SMS Notifications

During my recent visits to the User Group meetings, we mentioned Route64 seminar in Bangalore. Everyone was quiet. No one knew about the same. I remember getting mails from variuos newsletters about Route64. Why didn't people know? More than doing a post-mortem of why didn't people know, I set out to find how could people know?
I have seen something very interesting in seminars world over. People refrain from taking calls while the delegate is presenting but would look at their SMSs and punch in the reply. Very non-intrusive way of communicating with someone breathing down your neck.
It hit me that SMSs were the most effective of notification mechanisms. You carry the mobile phone everywhere (even when you are not checking your emails!!).. you can check the SMS whenever you want to.. and the retention of SMSs seems to be more than emails (given the sheer nos of emails that you receive). The solution i think would work is SMS notifications.
Currently, MS doesn't have an SMS gateway that i can utilize. The other way is to send the notification via my hand held device. Is there an application that can send a blast of SMSs to 60 people at a time? they exist.......... for charge..... and I can't buy them..
Will have to write one on my own.... Here i come Mobile Application Development :)
Will post on my experiences with SMS Notifier Application soon...

Comments

Abhishek Kant said…
agree.. a lot of group SMS options exist.. the caveat being all addresses should either reside in your phone address book or the SIM..
the purpose of the application is to accept a XML file containing all the nos and the messages and send them as a blast (some might call it a spam as well :)) this is meant to send bulk SMSs like 300 or 3000 (this is no of members BDOTNET has) nos..
try that with Group SMS :)
Anonymous said…
The easiest way to accomplish this would be to use "Microsoft SMS Sender" with appropriate command line parameters called from your favourite scripting language.

You may have to keep in mind that it takes a good 5 to 8 seconds to send an SMS. So the average number of SMS you can transmit from a cell phone or GSM Modem is around 400 to 500 SMS per hour. So set aside 6 hours for 3000 members.

There are a number of free sms gateways available on the net, but don't expect reliable delivery, not even on the provider specified e-mail to sms gateways.

- Jayakrishnan K.

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