One thing that always amazes me is that in the US, you have to pay for *incoming* SMS messages. That’s just bizarre – you’ve no way of controlling what you get sent. In the UK (and I think the rest of Europe, but I’m not sure) you typically get a bundled allowance of inclusive outgoing SMS messages in your contract, say 200 / month or something, and don’t have to pay to receive. Maybe that’s one reason why SMS has been huge here for years already.

On the election stuff, I’ll be intrigued to see how much of this clever tech spreads to other countries, and how quickly. Although our politicians have been twiddling around on the fringes of social media with YouTube etc, the iPhone location-aware campaigning app sounds amazing and very clever. I think the UK in particular is fairly cynical though – when politicians here have tried to have blogs and campaign sites, they typically have been spammed and satirised fairly fast, which is a shame as it denies stronger political participation and sensible discussion.

Always great to hear from Effie, BTW!