SMS to Rail Police

In India, the railway police force is just an SMS away and the same approach would work in the United States.

We have technology in the US that would allow this. This is the same as texting a question to the call center and getting response back, as implemented and used by some of the internet retailers.

The Times of India reports anyone needing help during a train journey can send a SMS to a designated number and a government railway police constable will show up at their side!

The new system also will allow passengers inside trains and at railway stations to post complaints and request police assistance.

London Borough Uses SMS to Boost Immunizations

Southwark has employed text messaging to improve the uptake of childhood immunizations and to tackle measles outbreaks in local schools within the Borough 160characters.org reports.

The campaign is in response to an increase in the number of measles cases reported in Southwark over the last few months.

Every quarter, surgeries receive a list from the central system known as Open Exeter, which indicates all the children who are due their immunizations for the combined measles, mumps and rubella jab (MMR).

By running a search on their clinical system, practices were able to send out a text message to a group of selected patients, who were due their first MMR or booster MMR jab, advising them to call the surgery to make an appointment.

Washington Turns to Text on Inauguration Day

The historic inauguration of President Barack Obama illustrates the power of text message. People in the nation’s capital wanted the latest updates on the historic day and turned to text for them.

While the one stat I have below is based on personal cell-to-cell messaging, it does indicate increased traffic during the events.

DC Verizon Wireless customers send 2.9 millon SMS messages in just four hours on inauguration day! It is just one of the record setting stats coming out of the historic day.

Mobile marketing can put the content people want in the palm of their hands. This week’s inauguration numbers are still being tallied and the data will be coming up for some time. But I ask you; look again at one carrier’s results!

According to GearLive Verizon Wireless DC customers sent and received 2.9 million SMS messages between the hours of 10:00 am and 2:00 pm during the inauguration.

That is more than three times the number of texts sent last week during the same four hour time frame. Think about sending the right content to the right people at the right time and place with text!

Silverlight 2 For Mobile

Wouldn't it be super cool if the Silverlight apps you built for the desktop could run on millions of mobile devices?If you have been building Silverlight applications and are wondering how to extend them to mobile devices, then this webcast is the one to watch.

In this webcast you will not only learn how to extend your existing Silverlight 2 applications to work on Windows Mobile, but also learn how to build rich mobile Silverlight apps that play media, handle simple gestures, have cool animations, and enable web services.

The PDC 2008 session on Silverlight 2 for Mobile is now available here: http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/PC10/

Amit has also created a post<http://blogs.msdn.com/mobiledev/archive/2008/11/03/let-s-review-the-pdc-silverlight-2-for-mobile-demos.aspx> where he walks through each of the demos from PDC.