There truly is an app for anything - even life-saving food vouchers.The United Nations World Food Programme this week announced a pilot project in which Iraqi refugee families in Syria will receive food vouchers via text message. About 1,000 families in Damascus will receive one voucher worth about $22 per family member every two months. The...Read more...
Wait a second, a wireless operator advocating against texting and driving? Is 2012 upon us already? In a move that can only be seen as a ploy to generate some positive PR, Verizon Wireless has just launched a Don't Text And Drive ad campaign, despite that fact that the sending and receiving of text messages is incredibly lucrative for carriers...Read more...
We've seen report after report asserting that children, teens and even adults text like there's no tomorrow. According to Nielsen Mobile research, the average teenager with a cellphone sends and receives a grand total of 2272 text messages per month, or about eleventy billion per second of every day. All joking aside...Read more...
Ever wonder what would happen if you texted some incomprehensible message to "911?" If you're a resident of Black Hawk Co. in Iowa, you'll probably get some attention--pronto! This week, an emergency call center in the basement of the county jail in Waterloo, Iowa became the first call center in the United States to...Read more...
In a development that's almost too silly to be true, a New York City teenage girl evidently fell down an open manhole as she walked down the street, distracted because she was...texting. MyFOX NY reports Alexa Longueira was strolling down a Staten Island sidewalk and was fiddling with her phone, preparing to send a text, when she disappeared...Read more...
Finally, your Twitter skills might come in handy.Teimlo, a British mobile phone content provider, wants to hire a marketer. But here's the catch: Job applications are being accepted only via text message (OK, so that's 160 characters instead of Twitter's 140, but think how much more verbose you can be with those extra 20 characters). Text...Read more...
For all the parents out there who can't stand to see their kids text during meals, during family reunions and during study sessions, here's a note: that obsession could land them $50,000 and fifteen solid minutes of fame. Just eight months after getting her first cell phone, Iowa's own Kate Moore managed to out-text 20 other finalists from...Read more...
The Android based G1 (or Google) phone sold exclusively in the states by T-Mobile apparently executes typed text entered in any text entry box including on a web page or in the address book. Handsets running Android release 1.0 TC4-RC29 or earlier are affected by this flaw. What makes matters worse is the fact that the commands are executed...Read more...
As anyone with a teenager knows, text messaging is quite popular among those in that age range. And a recent Nielsen Mobile survey has concluded that not only has text messaging become the most popular form of communication using a cell phone, the group that texts the mosts (go figure) is in the 13 - 17 year range.The study determined...Read more...
The word on the street is that anonymous tips can play a critical role in police solving crimes. Often the anonymous tips actually alert the police to the existence of crimes in the first place. But how do the cops get those tips? The days of paid informants like Huggy Bear meeting Starsky & Hutch in the back of dark alleys is over, and...Read more...
Gasoline costs four bucks, but a gallon of it will get you twenty or thirty miles farther away from your mother-in-law, so it's worth it. Printer ink is famously expensive, going for upwards of $8000 a gallon, but at least you can use it to print a letter to the editor of your newspaper complaining about high gasoline prices. Lots of things...Read more...
Fortunately Amazon.com launched this service on 4/2, or we might have wondered ...In less than a minute and using only text messages, Amazon.com customers can find the product they are looking for and complete a purchase using TextBuyIt. Simply send a text message to "AMAZON" (262966) with the name of the product, search term or a UPC or ISBN...Read more...
2007 is shaping up to be the first year when spending on cellphone services surpasses the cost of land line phones, according to a study by the US government and backed up by industry information. Anybody with a teenage girl at home has known this was coming for quite some time. "What we're finding is there's a huge move of people giving...Read more...
Western Digital is a big fan of text files, and assumes you are too. It has disabled the ability of its 1TB network-ready drive to share MP3, AVI, MPEGs... well, pretty much any audio or video file you could name. The "My Book World Edition" drive assumes the world is full of typists, I guess.Access to multimedia files is allowed only...Read more...
As any readers of the comic strip Zits knows, text messages are the bane of parents of teenagers. However, it's also increased the amount of repetitive stress injuries people get (in their thumbs anyway), created new (and lame) ways of firing people, and even contributed to fatal accidents. At any rate, the SMS or text message celebrated its...Read more...
Recently, after the deaths of four cheerleaders in a automobile accident, it was discovered that one of them, apparently the driver, had been text messaging in the car. Some legislators wondered if there should be an effort to ban both emailing and text messaging while driving. A Harris Interactive survey commissioned by mobile messaging...Read more...