To text or not to text is a question more and more organisations are having to ask themselves. Text messaging is fast becoming a mainstream means of communication. The Institute of Chartered Accountants recently sent out a set of exam results as text messages. They were also available online but more than half the students opted to receive them in an SMS format. Who can blame them? It sounds a lot less painful than having to look with everyone else at a very public noticeboard.
The messages also included a helpline number for students who didn't make the grade. The technical delivery of this new service was handled by MindMatics, a mobile marketing company, which believes that other educational bodies could soon follow suit.
"Students can receive the messages anywhere," says Daniel Payne, business development manager for MindMatics. But is there a risk you might be sent wrong ones?
Payne says the chances of that happening are minimal. "They were fully checked at both the institute's end and at our end. One particular message can only be sent to one number."
Text messaging is also sweeping into other areas of our lives. Anticipating the smoothness of a train or road journey is difficult at the best of times, but text messaging promises to put us more in control and less at the mercy of traffic jams and other frustrating obstacles such as leaves on the railway line.
Orange ) has a journey minder service that it runs in conjunction with the RAC. You go on to the operator's website to register your route and ask for it to be monitored. You can then specify that you want to be alerted to delays of longer than, for example, 15 minutes. As you are driving, you receive a message with a number to ring that will provide you with a summary of the trouble so you can make other arrangements.
"It gives people the information to make the decisions. It does not give you the alternative routes. That is something we are looking at," explains Errol McGlothan, Orange's UK travel manager.
And if you are still prepared to put up with Wap services, Orange has launched a new mobile service that delivers real time train arrival information using a special Wap interface ( http://rtti.kizoom. co.uk/ ) that links up with more than 275 major railway stations across the UK.
Airlines are also planning text messaging services. Flightstore, which creates interactive shopping portals for airlines that are linked to retailers by satellite, is in talks with Virgin, Singapore Airlines and Swissair.
"It is possible to send a text message down to the ground using a handset. The SMS system is not in an aircraft now. But we anticipate launching in the second quarter of this year," says Charles Vine, sales and marketing director for Flightstore. "It will have a practical use as well. You might want to text your favourite curry house and make sure something is ready when you get home."
Flightstore provides interactive shopping portals for Lauda Air, an Austrian-based airline. Orders for CDs or other goods and services are beamed by satellite to retailers via Flightstore's servers. Orders are confirmed either by email or telephone messages. And eventually, text messages could fulfil that role as well. An effort is being made to link goods and services to existing in-flight entertainment. So if the in-flight movie is Moulin Rouge, there's a good chance you'll be able to buy the soundtrack through the satellite-based service.
Steve Wunker, director of the UK Mobile Marketing Association, expects there to be a proliferation of new text messaging services this year. "A text message can reach people any time, any place with a high degree of reliability. Email is not necessarily as predictable in reaching people when you want to."
Many teenagers receive about 30 text messages a day, according to the MMA, and Wunker believes the market is a long way off saturation, . as, by their nature, text messages have to be brief and to the point. So be prepared for more SMS messages coming soon to a phone near you.
