Disruptive Technologies, Education and Some Social Issues » FastAlerts

FastAlerts SMS Widget For Bloggers Open to Public

Kenney Jacob — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 04:57:58 +0000

The SMS widget we were testing for the last 2 weeks is now open to public for free signup and usage. Prema received more emails than she could handle in past days. Now you need not mail prema, instead you can goto

http://www.widget.fastalerts.in/

and register there.

Also you can customise the widget to match your blogs theme. Bloggers, please share this link with fellow bloggers also.Similar Posts:

FastAlerts SMS Widget is Getting Popular

Kenney Jacob — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 06:36:59 +0000

The SMS widget is becoming very popular and Im getting many messages and also queries about the same. Ill make some clarifications about the same now.

The Widget is completly free to use and we do intend to keep it free forver. This is our gift to the blogging community, which has helped us a lot, sharing their knowledge and experience.

The widget is completely safe to use and your mobile number will never be revealed to the sender.

Bloggers, please promote the widget by blogging about it.

Here are some messages that I got within 24 hrs of installation of the widget.

Hi : Lucky

Is this widget free for all time or introductory offer ? Can I blog about this in crankup.net, Shoban : 9895******

Testing … is this what you want as a wordpress plugin ???? : Tony

Chummsss…..wrk chyuvoo nokuvaaa:) : Prema

Hello Its me : Jillmon

This wideget is brought to you by www.fastalerts.inSimilar Posts:

FastAlerts Widget For Bloggers and Publishers

Kenney Jacob — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 12:48:24 +0000

Fellow bloggers and readers,

Check out the widget on the right side of this post. You can SMS me directly from that widget. Type in your comments there and Ill get them on my mobile instantly.

We are now giving away free widgets to bloggers and publishers. If you need a similr widget on your blog or website send a mail to prema@mobme.in with your mobile number and bog address. She will send you a customised widget for you.

This free service is brought to you by www.fastalerts.in – Indias most popular online bulk SMS application.Similar Posts:

What I Learned From FOSS.in 2007

Kenney Jacob — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 04:27:57 +0000

The event got over today, but the fun continues.

The first thing I learned is that India can be the heaven of Free and Open Source Software. There are too many developers wanting to contribute. And they will if someone shows them how to get started. Then again Evangelisation…

Javascript is going to become the language that dominates light weight application development. XML is here to stay, and is going to be seen in various usage scenarios. I decided to brush up my scripting knowledge.

Got inspired by the mozilla talks and decided to do a do a mozilla application for FastAlerts and Mobshare. This will help the users navigate the user interface better. Also it will help increase the usage.

Wireless Mesh Networks are evolving into a much more reliable and secure technology. In India the adoption rate is very low for community networks (are indians afraid of sharing). Bangalore will soon see its first mesh setup and I am going to be a part of the team.

Many FOSS developers are now focusing on embedded and mobile development. It gives them more freedom and satisfaction. Mobiles are a better playground cos its largely unexplored and it offers much technology freedom than a normal computer. Openmoko, Openembedded, Android, Qtopia etc are going to dominate this.

The future will see more of software than of hardware. GNURadio project aims to make all communication infrastructure to consist of a standard hardware and different software for different applications. Its like you have a device and you can load various softwares to make it act like an FM radio, tv receiver, GSM phone etc. I didnt understand more…. I wish I had taken that Ham License while in college.

And on the final day met up with Rasmus Lerdorf, the guy who created PHP. I had a strange feeling when I met him, felt like I was talking to some film star. He maintains the php.net website and all its subdomains with around 1200 CVS users actively contributing to the project.

Then had chance to see and use the 100$ laptop. Amazing stuff, cleverly designed for kids. Only kids can use it cos its too small for a normal person to use. Also had a discussion about FOSS and education. FOSS fits into my Technology Evangelisation strategy. To tell you the truth, Im technology neutral.Similar Posts:

Voice SMS – Old Wine in New Bottle

Kenney Jacob — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 14:12:59 +0000

Voice SMS seems like Old wine in New bottle. Voice SMS Services launched by various companies are almost similar to voice mail, just that the packaging if different.

The voice message from the user is recorded via the normal calling handling mechanism, and an alert is provided to the recipient. The recipient is gets a playback of the message when he responds to the alert. Sounds very similar to voice mail.

Some providers use IVR to handle the user interface for voice SMS. Some use USSD infra to handle the user interface. SMS also can be used. BSNL calcutta is using IVR. Most of the other providers are using USSD.

Voice SMS is useful when sending voice alerts to a group of people. Almost like a bulk call facility on your mobile. Check out our bulk call service at www.fastalerts.inSimilar Posts:

My Experiments With SMS

Kenney Jacob — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 16:26:31 +0000

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.Similar Posts:

FastAlerts – The Ultimate Online Communication Tool

Kenney Jacob — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 03:25:08 +0000

FastAlerts is an online communication tool that joins the powers of SMS, email and voice call to help you be in touch with your staff, friends and family with just the click of a button. The interface used by fastalerts is the most advanced and its a complete web 2.0 application. The user experience of the website is really good. Take a look at it by visiting www.fastalerts.in

Using the application you can

Create and maintain a list of members online
Add them to different groups in a tree structure and maintain hierarchy
Select individual users or groups and send them SMS/email/voice call

The usage costs are the lowest in the industry. For a preview you will get a limited free account also here. So what are you waiting for, Register now.