I have an idea that I would like to try and develop, I am wondering if anyone has tried this before or something similar.

I want to plug a PAYG sim card into a wireless modem / router. There will only be a small number of people who are given this mobile number to send text messages to.

I want to write an application that will periodically poll the modem / router to interrogate the sim card from a PC. The most recent text message received from a known number will be displayed on either a form or HTML page.

So what is the point - I have a team of people who work for me out of central location, they travel all over the place. At the moment I have a whiteboard where they are required to record their planned locations and time of return. When plans change they phone someone at the office to update their details, who then needs to update the detail on the whiteboard.

If I can make this work, my plan would be to have them send a short text message, will will display and update on their location on an electronic version of the whiteboard which I can display on a large monitor or plasma screen for everyone in the office to view.

I dont believe their is any commercially available software that will do this cheaply or easily. I have some software development experience in my background, but I don't know anything at all about how messages are stored on sim cards or mobile devices.

Any advice or technical input would be most appreciated.

 

Could you not utilise some of the location check-in applications that are out there in some way? What about https://www.google.com/latitude

 

if you still wanted to go down the bespoke solution route, you would be better getting an old phone and hooking it up via the data cable. There is an open source .NET solution for connecting to a phone and doing things via SMS.

I created an app years back that polled an auction and when it went up, it sent me a text via an old Sony Ericsson phone I had hooked up lol

 

You need to look closely at what Exchange 2010 and unified messaging can do.
Basically, you can ring it up handsfree from your car and tell it to make an appointment, exchange will then email all the attendees of the meeting and inform them the time and location. It will also put it in a shared calander which can then be displayed on a screen or OHP. You can even phone again to change the appointment and exchange will inform all intendees of the change.

You can also ring it up and compose an email all by voice.

I appreciate it may not be the cheapest option but its certainly available

 

Shouldn't be too hard to do, using a SMS gateway over the internet, just display a webpage on your screen that updates every 5 minutes or so...

 

My contract T-Mobile dongle has a SIM card in it and it accepts SMS - though I almost exclusively use it for data access. These SMS can be displayed on a small app that comes preloaded on the dongle and installs itself to the PC.

So if I send a text to the SIM number these are displayed on PC (it's refreshes regularly). Suppose it only needs the PC to be hooked up to a plasma and you could display these on a large screen.

Not sure what a mobile dongle costs these days, but seems a simple solution.

 

I did something similar years ago.. If I remember correctly I had the phone connected to the phone by data cable (nokia 7110) and I could interrogate the phone and get the texts by sending modem AT commands over a serial connection...

 

Check out NowSMS (google it) - if you need help then please let me know. I ran a telecoms company for a while and we specialised in SMS gateways etc so can either get it done for you or provide some more help

You're better off using an existing API such as the one above although personally I'd look at one of the mobile phone tracking solutions - they can be had relatively cheap (£5/month/per user for so many 'pings' per month?

I did know of an old contact who could send a specially constructed text message via the networks and it would return the network the phone was on and/or the HLR location - it'd give you a general idea as to where the phone was (although not as accurate as the other two solutiosn I mentioned)

Hope that helps