Thursday, July 26, 2007 Ng: SMS gateway By Wilson Ng Wired Desktop
IF your office seems to be warmer these days, it is not only the weather. It could be your computers.
Nowadays, computers are becoming more powerful because they are powered by processors that contain millions of transistors. No wonder that even with more powerful batteries, your notebook battery still lasts only two hours.
This means two things: more power and more power consumption. And with more power consumption, more heat is generated.
The cooling fans of new computers can be five to 10 times bigger than the processors themselves. They are not cooling fans but are used to remove the heat inside the computer box and blow it into room. This means that the more power your computer eats, the more you have to spend on air conditioning to cool the office.
For every additional watt your computer consumes, you also use a watt to cool it! It is not unusual that even with the same air con capacity, the same number of people and computers, your office would still be warmer than it was seven or eight years ago.
Computers these days are also electricity guzzlers.
Speaking of computers and cell phones, there are now many cell phones that are marketed as mini computers. Many cell phones can now do most of the things that you can do with your computer like checking emails an surfing the Internet.
Of course, with the advent of these things, the one thing that will probably come next is the ability to write email from your cell phone.
We have people in the office who need to access their emails soonest, but they are often out of the office. Since they always have their cell phones, it would be great if they can get email through such devices.
However, while this is becoming essential, getting smart phones is still an expensive proposition. So far, we were able to solve it with some nice software and appliance called SMS gateway.
What we did was connect this software to our mail servers. Each office personnel then has a choice whether he wants to forward portions of his email to his cell phone.
We are trying to see how effective it is, but at least we did not have to buy new and expensive cell phones.
