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In a world of smartphones, text messaging might seem humdrum. But SMS could be used to bring internet-based services to users with basic handsets.
Umesh Chandra of the Nokia Research Center in Palo Alto, California, is building a network protocol that will enable basic cellphones to connect via SMS with internet servers. He thinks it will be particularly useful in countries like India, where lots of people have cellphones but few can afford advanced models.
One Facebook-like app lets people text to find friends who are in the area. The system would use location information based on the nearest cellphone base stations to send a response.
It would also be able to send details of any nearby active vendors on sites such as Craigslist. This is an improvement on previous location-based SMS systems, which could only provide static information, such as the position of the nearest library.
The character limit for text messages restricts how much information can be exchanged. "You have to be very frugal with what you put into the message," Chandra says. His new system gets round this by developing a concise syntax to encapsulate the information the user wants.