Text messaging technology helped link people and information during and in the aftermath of the tsunami disaster, and texting may become part of a warning system for the Indian Ocean:

Sanjaya Senanayake works for Sri Lankan television. The blogging world, though, might know him better by his online name, Morquendi.

He was one of the first on the scene after the tsunami destroyed much of the Sri Lankan coast. Cell phone signals were weak. Land lines were unreliable.

So Mr Senanayake started sending out text messages. The messages were not just the latest news they were also an on-the-ground assessment of "who needs what and where".

Blogging friends in India took Mr Senanayake's text messages and posted them on a weblog called Dogs without Borders.

....Mr Senanayake started to wonder if SMS might be put to more practical use.

"SMS networks can handle so much more traffic than the standard mobile phone call or the land line call," he says.

"In every rural community, there's at least one person who has access to a mobile phone, or has a mobile phone, and can receive messages."

Half a world away, in the Caribbean nation of Trinidad and Tobago, Taran Rampersad read Morquendi's messages.

....He wondered if there might be a way to automatically centralise text messages, and then redistribute them to agencies and people who might be able to help.

Mr Rampersad said: "Imagine if an aid worker in the field spotted a need for water purification tablets, and had a central place to send a text message to that effect.

"He can message the server, so the server can send out an e-mail message and human or machine moderators can e-mail aid agencies and get it out in the field."

He added: "Or, send it at the same time to other people who are using SMS in the region, and they might have an excess of it, and be able to shift supplies to the right places."

....Last week, he sent out e-mail messages asking for help in creating such a system for Asia.

...In only 72 hours, he found Dan Lane, a text message guru living in Britain.

The pair, along with a group of dedicated techies, are creating what they call the Alert Retrieval Cache.

page 1 | 2