Submitted by Mike Grenville on Tue, 21 Dec 2004 14:12

Concerned about the Health and Safety dangers of snowballs? Now you can now send snowballs by mobile phone and actually benefit kids charity NSPCC at the same time.

A vast virtual mobile snowball fight is being waged courtesy of SnowBallWars.com - a wacky winter idea from Andrew J Scott, entrepreneur and Founder of playtxt.net mobile social network.

"The largest snowball fight according to the Guinness Book of World records, involved 2,473 participants and took place at Triel, Switzerland in 2003 - But we have already splattered them into oblivion" explained Andrew, "although admittedly, no real snow is involved yet".

SnowBallWars.com allows users to send SMS text or animated MMS "snowballs" at friends and family. The unsuspecting target receives the text or picture message on their mobile phone, but does not know who threw it until they login on SnowBallWars.com to read the private message from the thrower.

Users can throw upto 5 free SMS snowballs or 1 free MMS snowball; if they throw more they are charged 10p or 50p to their mobile phone. The profits from paid-for snowballs will go to the NSPCC" [National Association for Prevention of Cruelty to Children]

Over 100,000 SMS and MMS snowballs have so far been throw - that is 40 times as many as Triel in 2003, but as Andrew admitted "The people at Guinness were not convinced when I suggested we could claim the title - they kept saying something about snowballs needing to be made of snow, to qualify".

www.nspcc.org.uk

www.SnowBallWars.com