Our SMS Toolkit is Live!

Fri, 02 Mar 2007 01:08:02 GMT

We are very excited to annouce the availability of our SMS toolkit, enabling anyone with a windows mobile phone and a PC to build an SMS server! Get the SDK here.

http://research.microsoft.com/research/downloads/details/9190f48f-6e3d-4ee8-b4a9-b346db76be1d/details.aspx

If you'd like more info, samples and join the discussion on the toolkit, go here:

http://www.codeplex.com/smstoolkit

Here's the long version:

The growth and usage of SMS on mobiles worldwide is phenomenal; over 40% of the world’s people have an SMS capable phone. Almost a trillion SMS messages were sent in 2006 and the expected revenue from SMS in 2012 is $67 billion Interestingly, even among the 85% of Indian users who are prepaid – with average monthly mobile bills of only $3 (151R) – users on average sent 21 SMSs per month. (source: Portio Research, TRAI Report through Sept 2006).

Additionally, we have witnessed a growing number of interesting SMS-based services. In our own Warana Unwired project, MSRIndia worked with a 70,000 person sugarcane cooperative to enable their farmers to buy fertilizer, check their payment history, register their land, etc. via SMS and with significant costs savings versus their existing PC kiosk based system. In our work with technology in schools, we saw a consistent need from school administrators to easily and simply send out bulk SMS messages (e.g. SMS all parents “School is cancelled today”) – a need that is likely shared by soccer clubs, friends and businesses everywhere. Additionally, there are many exciting SMS services in enabling informational lookups, e.g. weather and stock look-ups and job bulletin boards in Africa. Finally, as we discussed these scenarios with others, many companies came forward with their own ideas for SMS applications such as directory look-ups where any employee could lookup information on other employees or customer records via SMS.

Thus, given the ubiquity of SMS and rising demand for SMS applications, we at MSRIndia have been researching ways to enable organizations of all kinds to connect their interesting PC and Internet applications to SMS capable phones and create new useful SMS based apps. Towards that end, we are very pleased to announce the general availability of our SMS Toolkit SDK, enabling anyone with a PC and a Windows Mobile Phone to run their own SMS server.

Our goal with this release is to enable technology “tinkerers” everywhere easily create and prototype SMS solutions that can be deployed anywhere in the world using local numbers using and widely available, off the shelf components. Additionally, we believe it is important that these developers can create SMS applications without asking for the permission of any telephone company, buying specialized hardware such as a GSM modem or paying thousands of dollars and ongoing monthly fees to an SMS-aggregator. Additionally, we’ve tried to make our programming model as simple as possible – so simple that for basic applications such as bulk message sending and simple information look-up applications, the user need only modify an excel file to “build” an application.

It’s our hope that this toolkit spurs many different types of SMS applications and greater experimentation. Anyone can download the toolkit and samples at no cost at www.codeplex.com/smstoolkit and we would love to hear your feedback.

The MSRIndia Advanced Development and Prototyping Team

Kentaro's WWMX is mentioned in PCMagazine

Mon, 21 Nov 2005 07:35:10 GMT

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1887065,00.asp

“…When you get back to your computer, you can match your log with your photos. The simplest way to do this is with the free Location Stamper utility from Microsoft, part of its ambitious WWMX (World-Wide Media Exchange) research project (wwmx.org)…”

Times of India article about our new Rigorous Software Engineering group

Wed, 22 Jun 2005 12:23:28 GMT

Here's a nice write up on Sriram's new group here at MSRIndia:

http://www.itworld.com/AppDev/050613msresearch/pfindex.html

To view our official homepage

Mon, 18 Apr 2005 14:16:00 GMT

visit http://research.microsoft.com/india

Photo Album: Pictures of us

Sun, 06 Nov 2005 15:55:02 GMT

Pictures of us

Outside our new building

About half of us the day we moved in

Our pretty view

Some boring offices

We call the "talent area" - it always has someone in it

Anandan adding to our lab painting

Custom List: Our major events

Sun, 06 Nov 2005 15:51:50 GMT

Our major events

January 15th, 2005
MSRIndia is inaugurated in Bangalore
December 1st, 2004
MSRIndia is annouced by P. Anandan
June 22nd, 2005
Our blog goes live
Oct 15, 2005
We finally get a home and move into Scientia