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The first time I send an SMS was long back, when they introduced mobile phones in Palai. I was a still a school kid and my cousin had a mobile, a big one and I send an SMS from it. It was a nice experience, but at that time SMS cost something like 5Rs per message.
Then while in college I saw an article in Elektor about a GSM module which can be used to send and receive SMS without a mobile phone. Did some googling about it but couldnt find much information about it.
Then again another article in Elektor about a project to control electrical appliances by sending an SMS. This happened in S3, and I found that a friend and a senior of mine named Robin was planning to do this as his project. I followed the project with him and learned a lot from it.
Now It was time for us to do a project. We decided we will do something with SMS and mobile phones. The team mates were Me, Sanil, Robin, …………… The project was to create an application that will fetch the phone number of every student in our class if we send in his roll number. If you send 26 (My roll number) to a particular number (984724972. Haris number used for testing) you will get 04829243366 (My home number) as a return message.
Learning to use serial ports, AT commands, solving timing issues, the project took almost 6 months to complete. We did the project in C++. That was the first real successful experiment with SMS. After that we did the same stuff in java, found out some easy to use serial APIs and SMS engines.
Then after one year the SMS thing came up again, but this time it was for our juniors, It was time for them to do a project and we thought we could make some money helping them to do their project. We helped a team, develop a SMS spamming application in Java. That was selected as the best project for that year. One of the team members Jinson, is still with me.
Now we all were in the final semester and it was time for us to do our final year project. We were planning to do a driver in linux for mobile phones that supported the standard AT command set. We couldnt find anyone to help us with a driver, so we dropped that project and did a software router for our final year project.
After college we joined for a course in programming handhelds and the company was trying to develop SMS applications for the railways. Our knowledge and experience paid off and we successfully developed an SMS alerting application for Indian Railways using a GSM modem. During that period we played with GSM modems a lot and developed many SMS applications for data fetching, alerting etc. We even did a game that can be played by sending SMS. (Credits for coding goes to Lakshmi).
It was during this period that we came to know about SMS gateways and short codes. I tried to get hold of one, but didnt succeed. Exactly at that point we found out some guys who had access to all the resources that we were looking for, the rest is history.
Products began to roll out. FastAlerts desktop version, Short Code backend, www.go3636.com , SMS CRM tool, Campaign Manager, FastAlerts Web Version, and some minor J2me applications and customized SMS tools for some clients.
Recent additions to the SMS basket are a multilingual online keyboard which can be used to send SMS in almost every language in the world, Application specific SMS from J2me, and GSM modem based SMSC for testing purposes.
The future plans are the setup an our own SMSC and expand FastAlerts to all countries.
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Review on — January 29, 2008, 8:11 pm