Fact 1: In 2008, an estimated 1.9 million citizens did not vote simply because they didn’t know where to go Fact 2: 93% of Americans have a mobile phone Fact 3: A text message reminder on Election Day increases likelihood of voting by 4-5% Mobile Commons is pleased to announce our new Mobile Polling Place [...]

We’re all familiar with getting form letters and emails that are addressed to us personally. For example, “Dear Benjamin, we have a special offer for you.” But did you know you can do that with your text messages too? When composing outgoing text message in Mobile Commons, you can add special characters to the message [...]

With only 160 characters, it’s sometimes tough to fit those long URLs into your messages. Popular services like bit.ly and tinyurl.com can help shorten your long web links for you, but did you know that Mobile Commons can do it too? Mobile Commons takes link shortening to the next level: every phone gets their own [...]

A couple years ago, Starbucks rolled out a popular SMS application. Users could text their zip code to MYSBUX and they would get back the closest Starbucks location. Google has an SMS service that lets you text in to GOOGLE and get back weather, directions, sports scores and more. Mobile Commons has a similar application [...]

Over the past few months, we’ve slowly been incorporating location information to all parts of the Mobile Commons application. Every phone & profile in our database is now associated with a geographical location and location is added for all new users. (Note: we aren’t tracking users in real-time; just their address). Locations can be as [...]

We’ve had so much positive feedback on the release of our open source legislative lookup application that I’d like to announce a few more projects that we’ve open sourced this week: Mobile Giving Client for Ruby: Mobile Commons software enables non-profits to collect charitable donations over SMS. We partner with an organization called the Mobile [...]