I finally had to turn off the public number for my free Weather by Text service which I’ve been running for a few years. I was fine with the minimal cost running this on Twilio, but over the last couple of months someone has been abusing the number presumably with some automated script. The challenge with Twilio SMS is there is no way to block any abusive incoming text messages. Even though the pricing is pretty cheap ($ 0.0075 per message), it adds up quickly because you’re charged for both the incoming and outgoing messages. In the end, it’s not…
I recently fixed my Weather by Text mini project to get it working again (since Yahoo shut down YQL) and to update with a few improvements. This service is a simple Twilio-based service which delivers the current weather for the location you send via text message.
From the Twilio Customer Stories page I learned about Remind101, a free service designed for teachers to keep students and parents up to date via text messaging or email. From their website you can learn more about the service, or about the team. This is a very useful service. While it was primarily designed for classrooms, it could also be used for sports teams or anywhere else you need a 1:Many text messaging system. Remind101 designed their system to be very focused for this type of communication. By keeping with a narrow focus, they’ve got a strong set of features…
Downcast is an excellent podcast app for iPhones, much better than the Apple Podcast app. Read more for a quick summary of my favorite features, and my #1 suggestion: emailing show notes after listening to each podcast episode.
With the US Elections coming in a couple weeks, I’ve started to take a closer look at mobile options for learning about the candidates and issues, and for watching the results. First up, the League of Women Voters site: Smart Voter (m.smartvoter.org) with the tagline: Unbiased Election Information. This site looks very complete, including lots of pre-election information. Not sure about election results though.