Train ticket on SMS
I had heard of IRCTC offering users the facility of booking long distance train tickets on SMS, but dismissed it as a fancy concept because one of the more involved activities in buying a long distance train ticket in India is to figure out availability of seats on the trains on the specific dates required, which would at best be a usability nightmare on a mobile phone
But this is something amazing, heard about it briefly on FM radio on the way to work this morning and later at work, a colleague pointed me to the news article. The concept involves enabling commuters to book local train tickets in Mumbai using a mobile phone through SMS. As against a cumbersome process of standing in long queues to book tickets, you just have to SMS your origin & destination stations to a number (along with something called a customer id) and bham! a return SMS will give you a confirmed ticket (with a time stamp and unique transaction reference code) and the amount will be debited from a pre-paid account (which I assume is being viewed as a proxy for the ticket coupons which commuter currently buy in advance and validate before every journey)
It would be much better if the amount is charged directly to user’s mobile bill (or pre-paid balance), which would ensure greater acceptability
The thing I like about this is that, here is a potential application that offers a fantastic direct benefit to the users, saves time and is easy too use. Nations such as Japan might think of fancy chips and smart card embedded in mobiles for such transactions (Felica), but in India, a vast majority of users (of various literacy level) have figured SMS out and any potential mobile application needs to be SMS enabled to succeed (India still has a long way to go in terms of GPRS/3G penetration in networks and also handsets)
From Mid-Day.com
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