The US Is Getting SMS?!?

[Carrie]

Originally posted by Biggy@Jan 2 2004, 07:25 AM
whats SMS..

i know it relates to cell phone, but what exactly is it, and the practical use..

SMS = Short Messaging Service
Practical uses are endless. You can do billing through it, which is the main appeal to the industry. A customer sends you (your gateway actually) a short text message, your gateway sends back a verification code, the customer uses that verification code to enter your site, and the gateway bills his cellphone.

It can be used for all kinds of stuff. Imagine you're at the beach with no change but you want a soda. With an SMS-enabled phone, you can send a certain text message to a particular number that you find on a soda machine. It sends back a code that you punch into the machine, and out pops a soda! Your cellphone bill gets charged the 75cents or whatever for the soda.

Single-girl sites, even mainstream sites like sport sites etc can mass-message their customers with updates, little dirty notes (okay so the sports site wouldn't do this), etc etc once the customer has sent a message to the gateway signing up for the service... all kinds of stuff.

And since the signup for whatever service/product comes directly from the phone, there's no saying "I didn't make this charge". Although I'm sure the friendly-fraud folks will find a way to get around this with excuses like "my kid did it" or something like that.