News and announcements

Text message powered campaigns are getting even more practical. At the Drupal Meet-up in DC last Thursday we ran up a nice $280 bar tab running our first field test of an SMS gateway module/API and a couple last-minute modules we put together to have a website (Drupal powered) talk to cell phones. As folks joined our meetup group at Busboys and Poets, they signed up on the website with their name, mobile number, and email. When they submitted their information, they received an SMS message from the website telling them to speak to the waiter with long hair to get a drink on Development Seed. Too bad Delirium Tremens was on tap – that was the cause of the larger than expected tab.

If we weren’t literally finishing the code on the module while people were ordering their beers, we could have had each person select what they wanted to drink from a menu, and then have the system send us an alert when we hit a price cap.

There are some bars that sell their beer like it’s on the stock market – when a beer is popular its price increases and you can see a live digital chart above the bar for the current price of your beer. With the SMS gateway you could use a Drupal site to send out beer stock prices to sippers in a crowded bar so when Delerium drops back down to something they can afford, they can hit buy…or you could send out real stock prices.

I'm happy to announce that as of today, there will be two new core committers:

Please join me in thanking Gerhard and Neil for taking on these roles.

This brings the number of core committers to four: Gerhard Killesreiter (killes), Neil Drumm (drumm), Steven Wittens (steven) and myself. Gerhard and Neil will operate under different terms than Steven and myself. Read on to learn more about this.