it’s unix, not eunuchs

Apparently Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire won an award called the NHS Live Award  for coming up with a system to help Bipolar patients manage their own conditions.  The system sends messages to the patients asking them how they’re feeling and the patients respond with pre-arranged answers.  It’s a pretty cool use of text messaging.

I’m not really sure why text messaging isn’t being used for more things, like:

• Letting you know when your table is ready at a restaurant
• Remind forgetful patients to take their medicine or dress their wounds
• Notifying you that Wal-mart is done changing your oil
• Playing cards with other users

Here’s the article about the British Mental Health Texting system.

It was only 5 years ago when me and several of my friends at Sprint started playing with some new handsets we’d been given.  Of course we loaded them up with goofy ringers(this is before anyone was selling them, you just found them and downloaded them or made them with your own tools) and then we started making thumbnails of our co-workers and putting them in the phone memory.  So when the phone rang you’d see the picture of your bosses face and the Imperial March would begin to drone.  It was a good time, but it only took about 30 minutes before one of us piped up and said, “Why don’t we have the option to play video when the phone rings?”

Sure, it’s helpful to see the bosses face when he calls at 3AM because you’re on-call and you missed a phone call.  It sort of helps jolt you to attention.  But wouldn’t it be a lot more fun to have a video playing of them making goofy faces?  Or superimpose their image with a mushroom cloud, then godzilla, and then dollar signs?

Anyhow, I’m sure you all get the point.  It’s a real shame that it took an outsider to the phone industry, Apple, to bring this feature to the forefront. I’ve also been seeing a little bit more on the SMS ringers feature occasionally, so it’s nice to see American mobile carriers finally start selling some new phone features.  I’m not sure that they’ll sell more phones, but as the networks themselves continue to become less and less relevant, carrying the right feature set on your phones could be the thing that lures new people to your carrier and away from your competitors.  That and of course, the ever necessary, treat your customers well and they’ll make you money.

Well, I haven’t texted any of my friends in my sleep yet. But I have woken up and silenced alarms on my phone when I wasn’t on-call. I have to change my ringers when I’m on-call just to make sure those sorts of things don’t happen to me.

But I was surprised today to find out that some people are now texting in their sleep. I remember way back in the day when I’d be in chat rooms and almost falling asleep on the keyboard. Or one time when I helped a friend move their business overnight I stopped being able to speak very intelligbly, so I told her I had to nap and got back at it in a few hours.

And I shouldn’t be surprised that Marketing Campaign Managers are now coming with the capability to send voicemails and text messages. Soundbite just announced their intent to launch their Intelligent Communications Platform in 3Q 2008 and it is supposed to help Fortune 1000 companies market to their customers via email, voicemail and text messages. I am a little interested in how the product is planning on plugging into the SMS channels of various Voice Networks. The only reliable way would be to come in as partner through a firewall and plug directly into the systems. They could attempt to work it via SMTP but the system would rapidly be shut down by anti-spam systems.

And finally, who could be surprised that eventually someone sued Mobile Carriers for not providing an option to opt out of text messaging and then charging customers if they still get texts even if they’re unwanted.

You know, it’s taken Sprint 2 years to put qchat into production and in that time the cost of talk minutes have dropped enormously and text messaging uptake has grown significantly. Frankly, I haven’t heard the annoying chirp of the PTT feature in over 18 months except for the two dweebs I used to live next to. They were city workers who drive big trucks, go poaching, and basically were kids playing CB with one another. That’s not really something to dump a large amount of capital into, IMHO.

Tag onto that the fact that the construction industry is absolutely annihilated by the sub-prime market and what you have here is a product looking for a market, 2 years too late. Anyhow, Sprint recently announced the phones that will support this service and phonescoop covered it here.

Phone Scoop covers this here a little bit.   The smack talking in the messages are actually a bit more funny than the post.

New 6.1 features:

Zoom out(useful, possibly, I need hands on to know)

Threaded text conversations(THIS IS A BIG DEAL.  If you’ve never used a threaded text messenger you have no idea how useful this is and network vendors love it because it really drives up text messaging usage.)

A better review with screencaps of the new features can be found here.