Ad-hoc SMS Voting

Apr 2008

Ad Hoc SMS Voting is an attempt to build an application to help and ease the process of SMS voting through the use of a Symbian Series 60 Smartphone, Bluetooth connectivity using Symbian OS's API’s and a complete J2SE based server application for final parsing and manipulation of the SMSes as per requirement.

SMS Voting Desktop Screenshot

Today, many surveys, opinion polls and researches use SMS voting to collect the data for their respective purpose. This software provides the surveyors and poll creators with a set of applications to first accept the SMSes in a cell phone, transmit the message to a server automatically via Bluetooth connection and finally parse and manipulate the data in the server for maintaining the record of the voting with full real time updating and viewing of the data collected so far.

The software focuses on making the voting process as easy as possible to setup and operate. Though specialized equipments are available for this purpose, the software tries to utilize the already available equipments, i.e. a Symbian Series 60 Bluetooth enabled cell phone and a PC for cheap and simplified implementation of SMS voting. This equips the user with an ad hoc system for setup of SMS voting with minimal hardware and easy to use software.

Cell Phone Screenshots

The most important feature of this software is that the cell phone being used to receive the SMS need not be a dedicated one, i.e., any Bluetooth enabled cell phone powered by Symbian Series 60 OS can be used. The intriguing aspect of the software is that the same cell phone can be used for personal purposes too.

This software was done with Shishir Jha as Minor Project. This software also won the first prize at Locus 2007 - Open Software Competition.

Locus 2007

Downloads