SMS Beer Alert: You are in danger of running out…
More and more often one hears about government and emergency services using SMS notifications to communicate quickly with all the necessary departments involved in a crisis situation. This has gotten me thinking that there are many potential emergency situations happening around us all the time – depending very much on what we classify as an emergency.
Not to belittle the genuine crisis experienced by people during a bush fire or aeroplane crash but for me, I need a beer shelf scale that triggers an emergency SMS notification when the quantity of beer in the fridge is below a certain allowed weight. My cat would be happy if I could rig up a text notification system to inform me when she is so hungry she is about to start eating the furniture and that it is time for me to go home and feed her. And I am convinced that if only I could rig up a web cam with a motion detector in my house connected to an MMS SMS alert, I would have proof that my housemate is sneaking those precious beers out of the fridge.
Clickatell’s API’s (Application Programming Interfaces); can and are being used all over the world for emergency SMS notification services and the logic behind them is quite simple. All you need is a pre-defined event (no more beer in the fridge), address book with the vital collection of contact numbers, names and groups of contacts depending on what type of emergency it is; a collection of templates with each one matching to an event/event-value trigger; a message generator which will do the hard work of compiling messages by using the address book and templates and the Clickatell API connector. This is the vital element which will send the compiled messages off to the Clickatell SMS Gateway and then onto the necessary recipient – which in this case would be me.
How it would work is that if the beer scale in the fridge registered less than 5kg of beer left, it would select a template saying something like this: “Oh dear, you only have #VALUE#kg of beer left in the fridge. This is #DESIRED VALUE-VALUE#kg under the recommended stock supply. Please buy some before you come home.” The SMS notification that I would receive would be, “Oh dear, you only have 1kg of beer left in the fridge. This is 4kg under the recommended stock supply. Please buy some before you come home.” Now isn’t that civilised!
The message compiler takes the template, combines it with the data from the trigger and then calls the Clickatell API connector for each contact number from the address book that it needs to notify. Before I can start rigging up my new hyper-organised SMS-enabled house, the phone goes – it is my student advisor and she has just received a SMS notification that I was absent from classes. Seems there is no limit to the potential of mobile messaging…
Links:
- Application Programming Interfaces http://www.clickatell.co.za/developers.php
- Absenteeism Alert: https://www.clickatell.com/solutions/industry/school_universities_education.php
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Tags: API’s, application programming interfaces, Clickatell South Africa, Emergency SMS notifications, mobile messaging, SMS, SMS alert, SMS gateway, SMS notification, SMS-enabled house, text message
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