It’s kinda strange and nice at the same time to see a developing nation like Indonesia going well beyond many developed nations, in terms of using mobile technology. That said I was pleasantly surprised to learn that Indonesia will broadcast the information of 2009 general elections, scheduled on April 9th, via SMS to around 155 million mobile phone users nationwide.
According to Indonesian Communication and Information Ministry’s spokesman, Gatot S. Dewabrata, a 162 million phone numbers will receive election messages via SMS — 135 million of those are mobile phone numbers and 27 million are wireless fixed phone numbers.
Even better – this isn’t the first time the government of Indonesia is using text messaging on a massive scale. In 2005, the country’s health ministry launched a hotline to let the public report disease outbreaks and lodge complaints about health care using SMS. Impressive, don’t you think?
[Via: textually.org]