I’ve been having a great time working with Karina Qian over at TechY on trying to get a mass texting tool into the hands of activists in China. The great thing about working with activists in China is that that they have cell phones. The only problem is that those cell phones may be the only way they have to access information. Be that as it may, it’s clear that SMS and traditional voice will be the only way to work in the less developed world for the foreseeable future.
Karina wanted activists to be able to SMS their constituents about new developments regarding the environment. I’m a Web guy not a cellular tech dude (believe me there’s a pretty huge gap) and I didn’t really know how to start and didn’t think we’d be able to do it. Do a search on SMS gateways on Google and you’d find they’re all fairly expensive. Worse, they require Web access to use.
However, I managed to luck on to Frontline SMS somehow and latched onto the software really quickly. It allows you to use your computer and your personal cell phone to send SMS messages to your entire pool of constituents. If you have the kind of cell phone that has a USB or Bluetooth cable and if it’s the right model of phone that accepts Hayes AT commands, it will definitely work with Frontline SMS. This is the list of phones and GSM modems that work.
Alternatively, you can use a Clickatell gateway which you can sign up for, add some money to and have working within a day. The Clickatell gateway offers an HTTP gateway to SMS. All you have to do to use the gateway is construct a special URL and paste it into your browser then press return. It’s so easy I accidentally sent an SMS several times this way by hitting return a few too many times. This gateway can be used by Frontline SMS to send text messages anywhere in the world. This has the added benefit of the Frontline SMS user not necessarily being in the country where the SMS messages would be seen.
As a demonstration of this, Karina scheduled a time where I would manually send text messages through Frontline from here in Brooklyn, out to where she was in Changsha, China at the Fifth Environmental NGO Cooperation Forum of Chinese College Students. It didn’t take long to send the messages through Frontline. We had already created a group of 76 users. She typed their contact info into Skype. I then pasted them into Excel and imported them into Frontline SMS. We had a bit of a problem in testing at first as we didn’t realize that a “+86″ (China’s country code) had to be prepended to every cell phone number.
We achieved a 70% success rate. Apparently, the lower success rate was due to the fact that many of the participants were on roaming networks and sometimes, SMS never followed them around. We suspect that you’d have a higher success rate if your SMS recipients were on their home networks.
One of the problems that had to be surmounted was the use of Chinese characters in SMS messages. Apparently, there’s a way to use Unicode in SMS but it requires a Unicode to SMS conversion. It’s tricky but it works. However, because of the conversion process, a single SMS message is shortened to 60 characters. This works well for ideographic systems like Chinese but I imagine a language with liberal use of diacritical marks like Vietnamese would have a lot of problems. Vietnamese just drop diacriticals when doing SMS apparently. I bet this can lead to some funny misunderstandings though.
Still, I heartily recommend Frontline SMS for SMS-based communications in areas where Web access is spotty but cell phone access is good.Also, a new version of Frontline SMS has just been released so you should definitely look into it.
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