Text message powered campaigns are getting even more practical. At the Drupal Meet-up in DC last Thursday we ran up a nice $280 bar tab running our first field test of an SMS gateway module/API and a couple last-minute modules we put together to have a website (Drupal powered) talk to cell phones. As folks joined our meetup group at Busboys and Poets, they signed up on the website with their name, mobile number, and email. When they submitted their information, they received an SMS message from the website telling them to speak to the waiter with long hair to get a drink on Development Seed. Too bad Delirium Tremens was on tap – that was the cause of the larger than expected tab.
If we weren’t literally finishing the code on the module while people were ordering their beers, we could have had each person select what they wanted to drink from a menu, and then have the system send us an alert when we hit a price cap.
There are some bars that sell their beer like it’s on the stock market – when a beer is popular its price increases and you can see a live digital chart above the bar for the current price of your beer. With the SMS gateway you could use a Drupal site to send out beer stock prices to sippers in a crowded bar so when Delerium drops back down to something they can afford, they can hit buy…or you could send out real stock prices.
At around 8 pm we used a module to blast out a personalized message to all the attendees saying thanks for coming to the meetup.
Technical notes:
We used the SMS gateway API that was developed by David Hamilton to talk to the Clickatell gateway and access their API. We also used some of the mail.module by Nedjo to quickly adapt something to work the SMS Gateway API
With the Clickatell API you can send and receive SMS messages to and from your Drupal site, provided you have a module to do what you want to do.
Comments
We are also looking into how
We are also looking into how to integrate a desktop sms app that will not need an aggregator but can just plug into a GSM modem or cell phone and be charged based on however much cash is on the sim card. This could be especially useful for some of our work in developing countries and smaller sites and is a lot more inexpensive and quicker to set up – just buy a prepaid phone when you get off the plane or rent the use of someone else's if you're coming from out-of-country, or in-country, just recharge your pre-paid phone. Obviously this is designed for communicating with smaller audiences and maybe on a more personal-use level. As soon as large scale sms blasting is needed we would have to use an aggregator.
Right now we have not made any reusable code for this – just hacking. But as this transforms more from proof of concept into really working we will be actively contributing back to the community. We would love to talk with anyone working on similar projects to reduce duplicating code. Again, a big thank you to David Hamilton!
Tools like frontline sms [frontlinesms.com/] look very appealing along with further integration with CiviCRM. Does anyone have other desktop apps that they recommend?
Teleflip
Just so people know, there is a great free service from teleflip.com. Just send an email to the person's 10-digit-number@teleflip.com and the person receives a text message.
The only downside is that teleflip puts their name at the end of the message.
can u tell us more on the free sms service
hi
wld be eager to know how to use this or any other free email service..
i have a need for members to send sms to others using the website..how can we do this ..thanks :)
I never used the website. I
I never used the website. I sent an email to the address and the person receives the SMS message.
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http://eUploads.com
pls explain to newbies
cld u pls explain how u used this in Drupal..and how many countries it works for..
how did u manage to integrate the email ids into the sending process...
thanks
Implementing it in drupal
Implementing it in drupal was easy because all you need to know is how to send an email message. If you need more information on module development, check out the handbook pages.
Currently, it only works for cell phones in North America. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleflip
Michael
Yes, but can you really trust…
…code written by such a motley crew in a drunken stupor? ;-)
Finally, a REAL use for all this technology
I'm not sure, but I think that you can judge the maturity and usefulness of a technological endeavour by determining how well it helps you to find and consume beer. Who needs Web Two? Let's hear it for "Web Brew"! :-)
Doug
Failure notification
Just a suggestion, My previous employer used to have a GSM mobile connected to an error monitoring server via USB. This was used to send Emergency text message notification if one of the production servers went down.
This might be a useful feature for administrators.
Keep up the good work!