[LINK] Car rego number is sms and email address

[Greg Taylor]

At 08:00 PM 24/10/01 +1000, Stephen Loosley wrote:
>With around 12 million registered cars and 8 million mobile phone users in 
>Australia, DriverSMS aims to reach a critical mass of contactable drivers 
>on the network by January 2002 at which time an annual fee may be charged 
>to new subscribers.  Until then, to continue building the network with 
>drivers you can contact, registering and receiving messages is free.
 >...

I am sceptical about how this would work in a technical sense, i.e. how on 
earth can you type an SMS message into an ordinary mobile phone and have it 
sent to a rego number?  Your phone (not to mention your mobile service 
provider) will only accept numerals in the SMS destination  field for 
starters, so they could only be talking about an extended technology, 
perhaps WAP-enabled.

I was curious enough to register some details at the site. (Can I help it 
if I made lots of typos in the various fields? ;-).

All this system is offering is *web-enabled* SMS messaging using the rego 
number as a database key to find the associated mobile number.  So when you 
spot someone you want to message you still have to have web access to send 
the message.  Unless people are using WAP or other technology phones, there 
is no way this is going to operate using a standard mobile phone to send 
the messages.

It is doomed to failure because it needs a critical mass of registrations 
to work.  And who is going to bother to register their rego number and open 
themselves up to massive phone (and probably E-mail) spam?

Greg