I love inventive uses for SMS. A communication mechanism that is now pretty much well universal. Sure smart phones may be taking over , but the only thing in common that runs across almost every single mobile phone is SMS. It doesn't matter if you have an iPhone, Android, WP7 or any phone what so ever. SMS just works and people just know how to use it. SMS is not dead! ;-) Arguably voice also runs on every mobile. When was the last time you made a call on your mobile though? ;-)
Earlier this year The Postal service in Denmark announced that you could use SMS to purchase a stamp. Fantastic! In Copenhagen you can also use SMS to purchase klippekort, which provide you with 10 bus and train tickets. So no more strips of paper tickets, simply a SMS with your ticket details.
Transport For London have now implemented a nice use case, albeit a blindingly obvious one (although you do need the accurate data to provide the service), whereby you text the code of a bus stop to 87287 and they will send you back a text with the arrival times of the next bus to your stop. The detail on each bus stop can be seen on the above photo.
In central London this information is typically displayed on most bus stops via a dot matrix display, however when you get to the sticks few bus stops actually have the displays. SMS is the next most obvious solution to provide the service! Sure you could provide a link to use in your mobile's web browser, or create an app that will automatically detect your location and then provide bus timetable information, but then you have to develop for iPhone, Android, WP7, etc... When SMS is ubiquitous why not provide such a simple use case via it. Then it simply works everywhere for everyone. Tidy.
The response from TFL's service can be seen below
When I used the service it was absolutely spot on. A minute after receiving the above text, along came the E2. Excellent.
Cheers
m
No comments:
Post a Comment