One of the reasons SMS has been the 'killer-app' for mobile telephony has been the ability for people to receive a message whenever and wherever they are, as long as they have their mobile phone on them. This makes it an ideal notification mechanism for many cases, e.g. when we cannot hear our phone ringing, when we cannot be disturbed, etc. There are many reasons SMS has caught on so much, but today I am considering one that does not immediately prop to mind..

SMS messages convey text, and as such, it is easier for computers to notify people of certain events, bring up reminders, etc., because a lot of our interaction with computers is already text-based. There are plenty of systems that use SMS messages for notifications. I use Google Calendar, which provides free SMS notifications of events (provided you give Google your mobile phone number, but, if you ask me, it's not like they couldn't find it out anyway, if they wanted to).

But there are also systems that use SMS to notify people of other computer-diagnosed-and-generated events, that need human attention. I already knew these are used quite extensively by system administrators, to receive notifications, (e.g. when the disk quota is approaching maximum capacity).

I recently found out that Dominos Pizza have an SMS alerting system that allows store managers to find out when their fridge/freezers have had their power cut-off. (not to be advertising them or anything, but I also wanted to point out Domino's do a lot of other mobile services as well -- maybe I'll write another blog post about these soon).

Just today I also found out via this article that the Sheraton Hotel in Belgium also sends out SMS notifications when fire or technical problems have been detected by their systems:

The software integrates with internal fire and technical systems that monitor business critical functions such as fire detectors, emergency doors and temperature sensors. When an event is detected, it is sent via a serial link (fire system) or using internal SMTP server (technical system) to the message server. The software intelligently analyses the content of the message to determine if it has been triggered by a fire or technical alarm.

Depending on the notification workflows, the software transmits the alarm via SMS to a predetermined group of users using up to four GSM modems to ensure sufficient capacity. Personnel must respond and acknowledge within a certain timeframe, otherwise the alert is escalated to the next level.

These are all examples of how the mobile is becoming (if it hasn't already become) the ideal alerting tool for people. We can be notified of anything, anywhere, anytime. Which is what we want, isn't it?