mChat

Chat has been one of the killer applications on the Internet.The nearest the cellphone reached to Internet chat was with SMS, where two people can send short text messages to each other. However, the one-to-many feature of Internet chat was not available to the cellphone user.

mChat steps into this space and makes one-to-many chat possible over SMS. However, you cannot use mChat directly. Your cellphone service provider has to subscribe to it and provide you with the service. Once you are mChat-enabled, you can use any SMS-enabled cellphone to engage in one-to-many chatting. You don’t need WAP for this, and a separate WAP version is currently in the works. Currently, the service is active in Pune and Mumbai. Your cellphone number or your actual name is not available to the others in teh chat room. You can aslo send private messages to people in a room.

You can enter available chat rooms, or create your own chat room and invite your buddies to chat. To set up your profile and to create buddy lists, you need to log on to a website, the URL of which will be provided by your cellphone service provider. The profile will give you a global chat alias. But you coud use temporary ones also. You can also access chat without setting up your profile, though.

The commands you use on the system will vary with the service provider. The service works as follows-an SMS message sent by anyone in a chat room to the chat service is sent to all others in the same room, and they can respond to it. The service provider will provide some readymade chat topics, and you could add your own. A chat room can take ten people and when an eleventh person comes in, a new chat room with the same topic is started. However, unlike with the net, you can’t participate in multiple chat rooms simultaneously. You can also create private, password protected chat rooms that won’t show up when others ask for a list of available chat rooms. You could use such rooms, for example, to discuss professional matters with colleagues on the move.

At the end of a chat session, you could email the session you an email address.

Contact: iSolve, 13, Electronic Estate, Pune-Satara Road, Pune - 411 009, Tel: 20-4222437,

E-mail:info@isolv.co.in

Krishna Kumar in Pune