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Ahead of President Barack Obama’s June 2009 address to the Muslim world from Cairo, the US Department of State worked with global mobile messaging provider Clickatell to let people outside the United States enrol online to receive live highlights of the speech by SMS in multiple languages, and to send text comments back to the State Department in response. Billed as a ‘mobile town hall without borders’, the service aimed to extend the reach of the historic speech across the Middle East and beyond, in a world where, Clickatell noted, more than 4 billion mobile phones were already in use.