Submitted by Mike Grenville on Fri, 02 Feb 2007 13:01

European Commission VIPs and spokespeople are to receive breaking headline news alerts by SMS.

The European Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC) has selected Clickatell, to run its EMM (European Media Monitoring) SMS alert service.

The JRC is a source of independent scientific and technical reference for policy-makers, serving the European Commission, the European Parliament, the Council and the EU Member States. The real-time service informs Commission Spokespersons and nominated EC VIPs, of important breaking news detected by the EMM. It monitors some 15 news agencies, more than 900 online media and all daily press reviews from the 27 capitals of the EU and beyond.

In the event of a global emergency, the relevant EU commissioner would be one of the first to be alerted to the news. The news would be identified by EMM from the point of origin, translated into Unicode and subsequently delivered by SMS to the relevant commissioner in their respective language. The advanced technical platform for the SMS service, developed by Clickatell, ensures the commissioner is ready to take action and address the issue almost immediately.

"While SMS is being used successfully as a low-cost, instant and pervasive communications tool in the private sector," said Clive Best, Project Leader European News Monitor at the EC, "its value cannot be overlooked in facilitating effective e-government. News reports are monitored in 25 languages and the ability to translate these reports into SMS alerts underlines this value".

Deon van Heerden, managing director of Clickatell UK said, "We are seeing an increase in the adoption of SMS and multimodal messaging as a critical communication tool, not only in government but in businesses large and small as organisations reach out to their customers and constituencies. In today's connected world, 1 in 3 people have access to a mobile phone.