American texters have helped raise $11 million for Haitian earthquake relief, either by donating $5 or $10 to different funds specifically created to help those in need.
The Mobile Giving Fund says the figure is a record for a single cause, and that the company was seeing up to 10,000 texts per second.
Users can send $5 to to the Yele Haiti Earthquake Fund by texting the term “yele” to 501501. Other organizations, such as the American Red Cross have similar situations but users will have to look up the numbers.
The Red Cross has received $9 million, and the Yele fund about $2 million.
Carriers T-Mobile, AT&T, Sprint and Verizon have waived all texting fees if you want to donate.
Result for: texts
According to new CTIA figures, American mobile phones users send 4.1 billion texts per day, adding up to 740 billion for the first six months of 2009.
The numbers show that about 14 texts are sent everyday on average by every American mobile phone user (276 million), although many teens average in the thousands and many users do not even have texts enabled.
Yahoo Tech writer Ben Patterson gives the following example to show off the giant figure in a different light:
Or, how about this: An SMS has a maximum capacity of 160 characters, so let’s say (for the sake of example) that your average text message is about 80 characters long. And let’s assume that your average novel contains about 100,000 words, and each word has about five letters. So … assuming all that (and keeping in mind that my math is a little shaky), we here in the States are writing the equivalent of about 656,000 books—all via SMS—every 24 hours. At that rate, we could match the entire catalog of the entire New York Public Library system (which holds about 20.4 million books) in a little over a month.
2008 set the current record for a full year with one trillion total messages, and this year (given stable traffic for the rest of the year), that number should be surpassed by 50 percent or more.
Result for: texts
Two men from Pennsylvania have set the record for most text messages sent in a month, with one man sending and receiving 217,000 total. Although both men were on an unlimited text messaging plan, one man, Nick Andes recieved a bill for $26,000 USD at the end of the month.
The bill was two inches thick.
“It came in a box that cost $27.55 to send to me,” Andes said. He immediately called T-Mobile after he “panicked” over the bill and the carrier has said they have credited the account and are looking into the charges.
Andes added that he has been texting for almost a decade and wanted to become the world record holder for most in a month. The previous record was 182,000, set by Deepak Sharma of India in 2005.
The second man, Doug Klinger, and Andes, set their phones to be able to send multiple messages and found they could send up to 6000 texts per day some days.
“Most were either short phrases or one word, ‘LOL’ or ‘Hello,’ things like that, with tons and tons of repeats,” added the men.
