Naveen's Blog

I always wondered what those two letters added to the sender name of a bulk/junk SMS refers to, like TA-ICICIBANK, BA-FORTUNE, etc. These days, the junk SMS has become a pain and I get unsolicited spam SMSes from Vastu consultant, Astrologer, Real Estate agents, LIC agents, which I have not opted to receive. Today, an article in Times of India says that these junk SMSes have reached an astounding number of 100 million a day sent throughout the country. As the SMS cost has become so cheap, it has become a low-cost marketing trick to reach the targeted customers.

As per TRAI, every bulk SMS must have 2 letters as initials: the 1st letter stands for the service provider sending SMS and the 2nd for location eg, TA is Tata Andhra, BA is BSNL Andhra, etc.

This is the complete chart:

Service Provider	Code
Aircel	D
Airtel	A
BSNL	B
BPL Mobile	L
Loop Telecom	L
Idea Cellular	I
MTNL	M
Reliance Comm	R
Reliance Telecom	E
Spice Comm	P
Tata Teleservices	T
Vodafone	V

So, now you can find out the origination of bulk SMS using the above chart. If you are getting huge number of bulk SMS daily, register for National Do Not Call Registry and see if it can be of help.

\\ tags: Bulk SMS, sms, SMS Location, SMS Provider

Google SMS Channels is a new product out from the Google India Labs available to only Indians.  It lets you create SMS-based communities for free.  SMS Channels allows you to create your own channel(s) to publish content that other users can subscribe to. You can also create groups over SMS to communicate with your friends, family, and co-workers.

It is a free service and you can create closed communities to enable messaging between only family members or a group of employees.  You can publish your Blogspot blog posts, Google Groups messages, or any RSS/Atom enabled site posts to the channel and allow the visitors to subscribe to it to receive the new posts via SMS.  You can also create a channel just for you to receive the Google News over SMS related to a keyword provided by you.

I see endless ideas with this feature.  For examples, creating a closed invitation only channel for employees for communicating important messages.  Creating channel with only family members to share birthday reminders and wishes, festival wishes, etc.  What you say?

Website/blog owners can now offer SMS alerts via this channels. Whenever you post new content, alert will be sent through SMS to the subscribers.

There are already lot of channels pouring in.  Subscribe to one of them to see how it works.  You may be interested in subscribing to joke channels.

Read the help pages to better understand the options. Give it a try and explore what you can do with Google SMS Channels.

\\ tags: Google, sms