ZapitSMS Blog

We do have a twitter account, honest. We just tend to use twitter for personal reasons instead of spamming adverts about how awesome our product is.

SMS is twitter’s older sibling that has left home for university and is hearing rumors about how well its doing in high school. At the outset, and still in some countries, Twitter inc. has maintained relationships with mobile carriers to deliver tweets to mobile via SMS. Unfortunately this has been disabled in countries other than Canada, India and the USA. It didn’t work out here in Australia. Pity.

Our honest question to you - if we could work out a cost effective way of giving sms broadcasting to your tweets, would you use it? 

Applications like slandr and the m.twitter site have meant that SMS isn’t really needed to check up on your tweets. There is still a large number of people using phones with little to no web access - would they like the service back? 

How would you like SMS/twitter functionality to work?

What level of service would you need before you considered paying for it? 

We’re going to go hunting for statistics and other somewhat boring business numbers but in the meantime, we’d like to hear the verdict from those actually using both SMS and twitter regularly.

While we have been outsourcing the writing of this blog, we’ve decided to bring it back in house to keep things a little more genuine.

We have a few things in the planning and development phases for ZapitSMS that we can’t mention just yet. I know, I know, you hate it when that happens but you have to admit that surprises can be fun.

Most recently we have added a ‘Tell a friend’ feature to the administration site where you can refer ZapitSMS to others. Feel free to use it, especially given that the more people that use the software the more you’re going to get out of it. 

We are also putting together a system for ZapitSMS resellers to use which will be launched in the near future. We’ve been putting a lot of effort into this one and hope it can help users get more out of the system. It’d be nice for our users to be making money, not just spending it. 

We’ve had a pretty big week here at Race River, though you could probably read about that elsewhere. Things are still moving along nicely despite the bumps and, well, community feedback is what really improves our work. 

Keep an eye out each Sunday for our new SMS Horoscope, a humerous view of the week ahead of you, divined by reading the entrails of dead mobile phones. Long live the PC.

There have been plans for years now to implement early warning systems for bushfire prone areas using SMS. Unfortunately, until the tragic fires that recently swept through Victoria, these plans have suffocated and died under a blanket of red tape. 

We provide a service that would fit this role well, especially in small to medium scale situations such as rural communities or school/university campuses. That’s our opinion anyway. 

Do you agree? Is an SMS warning system a good idea? 

Apparently there’s been a strongly positive response to these SMS warnings, even if the initial attempts had some people spooked. 

Victoria’s Emergency Services Commissioner, Bruce Esplin, says response to the text messages has been mostly positive. - ABC news

Especially in rural areas, the time cost of manually alerting hundreds or thousands of people is enormous. An auto-dialler would also be a consideration but when every second counts, being able to quickly punch out a warning requires the quickest mode of communication possible. An auto-dialler would also require a voice message to be recorded - far less efficient than typing a 160 character message through a web interface and remarkably less portable. 

Radio and Television warnings are both crucial, and I’m yet to see someone argue that they should be replaced by SMS. Indeed, after the Black Saturday fires it’s hard to imagine that there could ever be too much warning when some towns were engulfed in mere minutes. 

Obviously there are questions about how, when and to whom the messages would be sent. Early attempts have been effective but the tool is still a blunt one. We’re ready to hone and fine tune for this kind of application. It’s an important application regardless of our commercial interests. 

How would you use a PC based SMS service like ZapitSMS for emergencies?

Is there anything specific you can think of we should look into doing or changing for that use?

While we’re aware that there are other companies out there offering similar products to ZapitSMS, we get this niggling feeling that the concept is just not being stretched far enough.

We’re not particularly keen on treating ZapitSMS like a throw-away product. PC based SMS tends to be treated a little bit like a commodity project these days and we’d like to have a go at making ZapitSMS special amongst a fairly dull crowd.

Where do we start?

Some of the ideas we’ve had, and in some cases already implemented, are offering an API, PC to PC SMS and integration with services like Twitter.  

How do you use PC based SMS, in particular ZapitSMS? 

How would you like to use ZapitSMS?

SMS is such a widely used service and is quite well represented in the market - which aspects of SMS have been taken for granted? 

We acknowledge that there’s only so much we can do with finite resources, still, we’re eager for more feedback. 

Our challenge to you

Click over and get involved in the free trial, have a bash with ZapitSMS and tell us what your first impressions are. 

This challenge will, hopefully, remain a consistent theme on this blog. We’re interested to see how it goes and where it will lead us.