SMS Text and Politics. SMS and Politics Blog

Posted by Fox on June 25, 2007 at 4:34 PM

Justin Oberman at techpresident.com is tracking the mobile marketing and fund raising activity in the upcoming U.S. Presidential Nomination campaign.

Following a strong tradition of being the first regarding mobile technologies integration with US politics, the John Edwards campaign, as of last night, became the first US political campaign to launch a mobile fundraising initiative. But they did not go through the carriers or Paypal to do it. Instead, they harnessed a new technology developed by Mcommons (formally Rights-Group / Politxt) that converges text messaging with a PBX API to create a seamless "call to donate" process from your cell phone. The campaign was launched last night and only lasted a couple of hours

Read the complete article

Posted by Fox on June 21, 2007 at 2:04 AM

Illinois Senator Barack Obama, contender for the Democratic presidential nomination, launched a SMS campaign to organize volunteers, disseminate news of upcoming events and allow supporters to request information from the campaign. The TXT to OBAMA initiative will also offer wallpaper designs and Obama-themed ringtones. Supporters can text "Go" to OBAMA (62262) to sign up for the service.

"This campaign is about the people across the country who are taking organizing into their own hands and text messaging is a key tool that will help us reach out to people who rely on their mobile phone service for information," Joe Rospars, new media director for the Obama campaign, said in a statement.

Sen. Obama's rival for the nomination, Senator Hillary Clinton, launched a similar service last month.

Source : Wireless Week

Posted by Fox on June 20, 2007 at 4:21 PM

I'm working like at madman to finish of some major tweaks on this site. You may notice one or two pages not working at intended. I should be done in a couple of hours.

Posted by Fox on June 5, 2007 at 11:19 AM

Residents of the eastern Chinese city of Xiamen have blocked construction of a chemical plant with an SMS text message campaign, media reports say.

Opponents of the plant said they circulated nearly one million SMS Text messages to organise opposition, Xinhua news agency said.

Authorities in Xiamen have halted the construction of the plant to make paraxylene, a chemical in polyester. Protesters said the plant posed health and environmental risks.

via BBC

Posted by Fox on May 1, 2007 at 4:55 AM

Mike Masnick over at TechDirt has spotted a flaw in the Iranian Telecommunication Ministry's plan to filter immoral SMS text messages.

Do they plan to have people actually reviewing every text and video message before it gets sent?

That clearly will never work (or, will simply guarantee that the messaging becomes close to useless). Or, more likely, they'll buy some crappy filtering software to try to pick up on "naughty" words, which won't work very well and will probably just cause more problems than it solves (assuming you believe immoral messages are a problem in the first place).

Link: Read the full article

Is it just me or does everyone over 30 picture John Cleese goose stepping across a stage every time you hear the word Ministry?

Posted by Fox on April 17, 2007 at 8:29 PM

Nathan Spande posted an interesting article that raises one or two questions on the impact of SMS text on elections.

In this last election (Cambodia) there was a bit of a controversy surrounding a rule put in place by the National Electoral Commission. They ordered all mobile phone companies in the country to turn off SMS (text messaging) starting the day before the election going until the closing of the last polls. The reason given was that they were hoping to avoid SMS spam campaigns, which have been used in the past.

The problem with this is that it also interfered with the ability of the monitors to report back to their central sites the results from polling places. They were able to use voice to report in, but as we all know there is a reason that the children's game is called "telephone." That of course was compounded by problems of different languages spoken by people on each end of the phone.

Link: Read the full article