The New York Times ran a story over the weekend over a different usage of text messaging related to the Haitian earthquake. The mobile donations story is important in so many ways, but so is this:

From his makeshift workstation, Ryan Bank spends hours sifting through thousands of electronic cries for help from Haitian earthquake victims, many detailing the horrors of dead family members, hunger and homelessness.

“I’m hungry and I have no one,” says one text message from a Haitian man living in a tent city with thousands of others whose homes were destroyed in the quake. “People are unable to breathe due to the smell of the dead,” says another.

Mr. Bank, a Coast Guard volunteer who runs his own technology company in Chicago, said he had received more than 18,000 messages. “Most of them are utterly heartbreaking,” he said while staring at a list of messages sent to him through a new emergency relief effort that relies on text messages and social networking Web sites to help coordinate humanitarian aid in Haiti.

Read more @ the New York Times.

At this weeks Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, Google CEO Eric Schmidt laid out what he thinks the future will look like:

Google is now shipping 60,000 Android phones per day, Mr. Schmidt said. He said cloud computing was going to be key Google’s future.

Mr. Schmidt also announced that Google is working on new technology to improve security and enhance authentication to better protect data. He concluded his session by saying, “Mobile is pretty much the answer on everything,” announcing a major shift in strategy.

Read more at Mobile Marketer.

Mobile Marketer just released their Mobile Outlook for 2010, and while we're still reading through it, one article has already stood out - Giselle Tsirulnik's Nothing compares to ubiquity of SMS marketing:

SMS is becoming more recognized and accepted, as evidenced by increased brand adoption and budgets.

...

Some industry experts argue that SMS will become irrelevant with the growth of the mobile Web, which is expected to reach nearly 100 million unique users per month in 2010, according to Millennial Media.

But nothing will beat the ubiquity and reach of SMS.

Discount retailer Target taps SMS on an ongoing basis to connect with consumers. Target has used text messaging in select advertising and marketing campaigns to be fresh and innovative, connecting with consumers to reflect their wants and needs.

“Text messaging is layered into a campaign if we believe it aligns with our overall strategy or adds an element of interest or surprise for our guests,” said Sara Boehle, spokeswoman at Target, Minneapolis."

Read the entire article (page 40) and download the entire report (PDF)