The growth and usage of SMS on mobiles worldwide is phenomenal; over 40% of the world’s people have an SMS capable  phone. Almost a trillion SMS messages were sent in 2006 and the expected revenue from SMS in 2012 is $67 billion Interestingly, even among the 85% of Indian users who are prepaid – with average monthly mobile bills of only $3 (151R) – users on average sent 21 SMSs per month.  (source: Portio Research, TRAI Report through Sept 2006).  

Additionally, we have witnessed a growing number of interesting SMS-based services. In our own ‘Warana Unwired’ project, Microsoft Research India (MSR India) worked with a 70,000 person sugarcane cooperative to enable their farmers to buy fertilizer, check their payment history, register their land, etc. via SMS and with significant costs savings versus their existing PC kiosk based system. In our work with technology in schools, we saw a consistent need from school administrators to easily and simply send out bulk SMS messages (e.g. SMS all parents “School is cancelled today”) – a need that is likely shared by soccer clubs, friends and businesses everywhere.  Additionally, there are many exciting SMS services in enabling informational lookups, e.g. weather and stock look-ups and job bulletin boards in Africa. Finally, as we discussed these scenarios with others, many companies came forward with their own ideas for SMS applications such as directory look-ups where any employee could lookup information on other employees or customer records via SMS.

Thus, given the ubiquity of SMS and rising demand for SMS applications, we at MSRIndia have been researching ways to enable organizations of all kinds to connect their interesting PC and Internet applications to SMS capable phones and create new useful SMS based apps. Towards that end, we are very pleased to announce the general availability of our SMS Toolkit, enabling anyone with a PC and a Windows Mobile Phone to run their own SMS server.

Our goal with this release is to enable technology “tinkerers” everywhere easily create and prototype SMS solutions that can be deployed anywhere in the world using local numbers using and widely available, off the shelf components. We believe it is important that these developers can create SMS applications without asking for the permission of any telephone company, buying specialized hardware such as a GSM modem or paying thousands of dollars in setup fees to an SMS-aggregator. Simply, users of the SMS toolkit pay for the SMSs sent and received on their PC-attached mobile phone just as they normally do today on their personal phones. Additionally, we’ve tried to make our programming model as simple as possible too – so simple that for basic scenarios such as bulk message sending and simple information look-up applications, users need only modify an excel file to “build” an application.

It’s our hope that this toolkit spurs many different types of SMS applications and greater experimentation.  Anyone can download the toolkit and samples at no cost at www.codeplex.com/smstoolkit and we would love to hear your feedback.

The MSRIndia Advanced Development and Prototyping Team

http://research.microsoft.com/india/msrlectures/Warana+SMS_Toolkit_at_Etel.ppt