In the weeks following the January 12 earthquake, the relief effort in Haiti relied in part on crowdsourcing: an army of volunteers in the United States and elsewhere helped sift through emergency text messages, translated them and send them on to first responders on the scene.
In the weeks following the January 12 earthquake, the relief effort in Haiti relied in part on crowdsourcing: an army of volunteers in the United States and elsewhere helped sift through emergency text messages, translated them and send them on to first responders on the scene.
According to Rob Munro, a graduate fellow at Stanford who works with the nonprofit Energy for Opportunity, about 40,000 useful text messages came through the system in the first six weeks, meaning that thousands of Haitians received timely requests for food, water or medical help.
But the high-tech Haiti volunteer response also depended in large part on personal connections, and the mobilization of the Haitian diaspora in North America, for it to work. Now development agencies, relief workers and even the U.S. government are looking at ways to reproduce the experiment in the next emergency. 
Read full article in Wired. Image from CNN via Techilobang.
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Preparing for the Next Haiti, with Maps, Texts and Tweets
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Texting and Driving Cartoon
BulkSMS , a leading wireless application service provider offering bulk text messaging solutions, has published insight on how text messaging is being used commercially — Promotional campaigns using text messaging aim at providing an immediate and interactive experience with a brand via a consumer’s mobile phone. Contests, voting line, customer satisfaction research, or in-store campaign is used to attract customers’ attention
BulkSMS, a leading wireless application service provider offering bulk text messaging solutions, has published insight on how text messaging is being used commercially
– Promotional campaigns using text messaging aim at providing an immediate and interactive experience with a brand via a consumer’s mobile phone. Contests, voting line, customer satisfaction research, or in-store campaign is used to attract customers’ attention.
– Scheduling appointments – Text messaging is increasingly becoming the standard way of confirming appointments and sending out appointment reminders a day ahead of a scheduled appointment.
– Promoting properties – Estate agents use text messaging as a convenient way to communicate with prospective buyers by sending them information about a new property on the market.
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Recent Trends in Commercial Text Messaging
