Supporters and chocolate bars celebrate our launch!
If you're new here, you may want to view the multimedia in the left sidebar, as well as subscribe to the RSS feed. Feel free to leave comments, take the survey and send us email. Thanks!
Last night was our launch party! Taza hosted us at their Somerville chocolate factory.
As a surprise, we presented a working demo of our text messaging service. Here’s how it works:
Taza was kind enough to wrap a batch of their premium 3 oz 70% cocoa bars with labels commemorating our launch. The back of each chocolate bar’s label has a bar code number 18675309 (like the song… but with a 1 at the beginning) and the instructions:
“Text message or email barcode number to: score@bilumi.org.”
Try it out and see what you get back. We’re collecting information on phones that it doesn’t work on. So please leave a comment with the name of your phone provider if the demo doesn’t work for you.
About 50 volunteers, kids, parents, and fans came, shared food (donated by Redbones BBQ), and got to know each other better. After the chocolate tour we started serving drinks (donated by Samuel Adams) and celebrated some of our volunteer community’s major achievements as Buy It Like You Mean It.
Want to help us celebrate? Consider making a tax deductible donation to help us take off. If it’s at least $10 then we’ll mail you a commemorative chocolate bar as a thankyou gift!
June 5th, 2008 at 8:56 am
great event! nice pix!
quick (stoopid?) question: my phone (an iphone) doesn’t seem to let me send a text to an address containing an @ sign. is there an SMS address for bilumi that doesn’t include an @? or, perhaps better, is there something i should know about my iphone that i don’t?
that said, i _was_ able to send an email, which worked in a jiffy!
June 5th, 2008 at 10:27 am
Same here… can’t figure out how to send a text to an address with a @ symbol on the iPhone…
June 5th, 2008 at 12:07 pm
[edit: visit the Cellphone User Guide for answers to Frequently Asked Questions]
w&w, X10: Sounds like the question is “Is there a difference between sending a text message (aka SMS) or an email?”
First, we apologize for the confusion. Thanks for bearing with our scrappy system.
The answer to the above question, from our point of view, is no. It does not matter how you send the email. All of these mechanisms are fine: sending an email from a smart phone; sending a SMS from a non-smart phone that does texting to emails behind the scenes; and sending an email from a computer.
Here is my guess as to what is going on. On non-smart phones, some carriers permit the sending of SMS to email because the phone or carrier does the transformation behind the scenes. The carrier, eg Verizon, has its own SMS gateway that takes the SMS and sends an email to the desired destination. In this case, the email will look like it originates from@vtext.com. When our system sends the email response to @vtext.com, the carrier’s server creates a SMS to send back to you-phone-number.
On smart phones, you can send emails directly and thus do not need a fake SMS-to-email service behind the scenes. I don’t know much about different phones or phone carriers, so your feedback here is important.
I’m still collating the log files from the event, and will give a shout out when we have statistics and improvements.
June 5th, 2008 at 3:09 pm
Thanks for the clarification, Lucy. What was confusing me is that I don’t usually think of text messages (SMS) as emails. The weird thing, for me, is that the iPhone couldn’t be “smart” enough to let me be dumb enough to send an SMS to an email address despite that I could also send an email.