Why a paper ticket if an SMS will do? | InfoWorld | News | 2006-01-18 | By John Blau, IDG News Service

Why a paper ticket if an SMS will do? | InfoWorld | News | 2006-01-18 | By John Blau, IDG News Service:

Smartmachine and its technology partner Skidata have developed a mobile ticketing system that allows customers to have a ticket sent to their mobile phone via SMS (Short Message Service) in the form of a 2D (two-dimensional) bar code. At the gate, they slide their mobile phone display showing the bar code by a bar code reader.

My pleasure at a useful project is marred by the unfortunate fact of SMS: there is no reliability guaranteed! It may even be in the specification that, if a message cannot be reasonably delivered, that the message is dropped.

Am I the only one seeing a lot of potential problems when both I and my provider consider the word 'reasonable' with respect to the service they need to provide to me in exchange for my non-negotiable monthly fee? Yeah.

But hey, if you want to risk the loss of $20 movie tickets to a system that, some days, just plain sucks, then be my guest. I hope like hell that the least-worst carrier I use will be coerced to improve reliability in light of more uses for its SMS service.