Answering Service Blog | American Inbound

Answering services often use SMS to get emergency messages to service technicians and doctors. Now, police departments have found a new use for this technological convenience. Following in Boston’s and Cincinnati’s footsteps, Louisville is encouraging people, young people in particular, to text message anonymously the police about crimes. Among the crimes that have already been reported to the police sergeant are school vandalism and illegal dumping in the forest.

 For more on this new use of SMS texting, click here.

Well, assuming you live in South Africa.   Starting April 17, residents of Johannesburg, Cape Town, the Free State, Swellendam, and Paarl can check their traffic fines with their cellphone.

Apparently it’s as easy as texting “Register” then your ID number to 34010.  You will shortly receive a response listing all of your unpaid traffic fines. 

Very nifty.  It would be nice if we could get a similar service set up over on this side of the Atlantic.

 ”This service will no doubt go a long way towards making it more accessible and convenient for motorists to check their outstanding fines,” says Wayne Minnaar, the service’s representative spokesperson. 

If you live in Oregon, you may have been sent a phony Amber Alert.

The text reads: “AMBER ALERT! Albany area-2 little girls kidnapped around noon. Suspect is driving brown jeep liberty. Plate number 43 6519 please send to everyone.”

The alert was cancelled when the mother and children were brought into custody in Wisconsin.  Officials are unclear as to why a Wisconsin alert was broadcast in Oregon, but are very concerned.  False information such as this can impact the programs effectiveness and lower the public’s confidence in the system. 

While any new bogus alerts should be reported, officials would like to stress that anyone receiving a text message with this information should not report it. 

Jaxtr just launched a free text messaging service on their website.  Anyone can sign up.  You do not need a cell phone.  Users state it only takes 5 seconds for cell phones to receive messages. 
Drawbacks include limiting messages to only 65 characters and messages may include text ads appended to them.

The initiative to create an SMS warning sytem has been approved by the FCC.  All US major cell phone companies are looking into its implementation, though it is not mandatory.  The service is also optional for individual cell users.  So if you would like to opt out of it, you will be able to.

More at:
www.teleclick.ca

technocrat.net

Federal regulators will determine this week whether or not a new cell phone alert system is instated.  This would be similar to radio or tv alerts and would be used when an emergency strikes. Cell phone users will receive text messages containing the warnings.

Impetus for this change has been attributed to Hurricane Katrina, college shootings, and the recent tornado tragedies in the southeast.  Currently all four national providers (AT&T, Verizon, Sprint Nextel, and T-Mobile) have stated they will take part.

Amazon is rolling out a new service they’ve named TextBuyIt. This is the first time I’ve heard of SMS shopping, but it’s a great idea. Users can text message “AMAZON” (262966) with a product name, author, artist name, ISBN, or UPC code. They will receive the top two Amazon search results back almost instantly. Pressing 1 or 2 will allow them to select the item for purchase, or pressing ‘m’ will fetch you more search results.

Amazon has promised to make the process smoother in the future. Right now it is fairly confusing to set up. Once TextBuyIt is running, it looks like you can do a lot of things with it. Here are a few their suggested uses.

• Pay your friends
• Split a restaurant bill
• Pay your babysitter

All from a cell phone! Very nice!

Text messaging or SMS is a topic of nearly everyone’s dinner table. 

Answernet has written up a great article detailing the history of text messaging.  It all started with the pager.  Here are some protocols used over the years.

• Telocator Alphanumeric Protocol (TAP)
• SNPP (Simple Network Paging Protocol)
• WCTP (Wireless Communications Transfer Protocol)
• SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol - Email!)

Nettel Holdings, Inc.’s (OTCBB: NTTL) has launched a new service for texters.  They allow you to send text messages to cell phones, home phones, email, and fax machines.  Even more shocking, you can set it up so that it automatically translates your messages in over 30 languages!

This all a little hard to believe, so here is the company’s demo.

Every cell phone has the ability to recieve emails.  However, many people are not aware of this.

It’s very simple to do. Let’s say the cell phone you want to email has the number of 1-555-555-5555, and their provider is Nextel. To send an email to this cell phone you would send an email to this address: 5555555555@messaging.nextel.com
They will receive your email as a regular text message!

Blog.realitors.org posted a nice table showing the hosts
that you would use for each provider.

So remember, it’s phonenumber@serviceprovider.host.

Happy emailing!