Chipping away at the SMS literacy barrier
With all the excitement surrounding Monday’s launch of FrontlineForms, we almost forgot the other improvements we’ve made to the FrontlineSMS software. As well as support for IntelliSMS – another Clickatell-style online aggregator – we finally got round to adding Unicode support which, to the non-technical, means you can now send and receive messages in foreign scripts, i.e. non-Latin or non-Roman character sets. Projects in India and the Middle East have been asking for this, and it’s exciting to see it finally delivered (thanks Alex!).
Although there are still very real literacy issues for SMS-based social mobile projects, at least allowing messages to be sent and received in the local language – assuming handset support is available – removes at least one more barrier. We’re excited to see how much this ends up being used, and what further opportunities it opens up for FrontlineSMS users around the world.
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6 comments
->@kiwanja: Chipping away at the SMS literacy barrier http://tinyurl.com/bz7aum
Text messages now available in a language near you. @frontlinesms meets Unicode. Post and pic at http://tinyurl.com/bz7aum
Text messages now available in a language near you. @frontlinesms meets Unicode. Post and pic at http://tinyurl.com/bz7aum
@frontlinesms now adds ability to send and receive messages in foreign scripts lowering the literacy barrier http://tinyurl.com/bz7aum
@frontlinesms now adds ability to send and receive messages in foreign scripts lowering the literacy barrier http://tinyurl.com/bz7aum
RT @kiwanja: Text messages now available in a language near you. @frontlinesms meets Unicode. Post and pic at http://tinyurl.com/bz7aum
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