This weekend Golan Levin is hosting the “Mobile Art && Code” symposium at CMU. We will be there presenting on SMS for indie developers. Without going into too much detail (or giving away the presentation for free) really quickly I’d like to touch on why I am totally prepared to spend 3 hours on Friday and Sunday talking about this.
We started off as a mapping company. We didn’t set out to do mobile tech, or bus times, or a chalkbot, or anything like that. We thought it would be cool, but no one thought back then that it would become what it has. From basic “what can i do tonight and where am i?” kind of SMS apps that we ran off of my hacked Motorola V188 attached to a linux box that someone painted orange several years ago we got a feel for how hard it is to present useful information in 140 characters or less. Everyone knows how to do this now thanks to Twitter, but at the time (and even now) its very hard to express something coherent without paging – even links are tough. Deeplocal delivers information via text with RouteShout, Pickupalooza, Allen Hahn’s alternate reality games, and T. Foley’s ringtones. Delivering small chunks of information directly to your pocket or purse is what we’re good at.
Since those days of a hacked Motorola, we’ve gone legit. I know more about how SMS messages work than I ever thought possible. The complexity is impressive/overwhelming/confusing for such a short burst of text. As such I’ve been asked to lead a workshop at Mobile Art && Code to help people get up and running with actual short-code SMS. We’ve got Gumband API that allows really anyone with an idea a way to get to people’s handsets, and if you come you’ll get to not only listen to my monotonous drone for 3 hours, but also learn to use PHP and Processing to send and receive SMS messages. (To be fair, it will be more like 1.5 hours of code tutorials followed by 1.5 hours of me recounting how strange the world of cell-phone carriers is under the surface.)
So come on out if you are a programmer with an app that you’d like to make a little more personal, if you’re interested in the workings of the cell-phone industry, or if you are just a fan of people who have cartoonish voices!