Over the last year and a half, prices for text ads related to women's fashion have quadrupled, say apparel retailers.
At first most of them focused on agricultural goods: Dialog Tradenet in Sri Lanka lets farmers check market prices and text in offers, helping them to time their harvest to maximise income.
The Telecom Development Co. of Afghanistan, which operates under the name Roshan, is trying out a program in Parwan Province that sends commodity prices through text messages, the company's chief operating officer, Altaf Ladak, said in an interview.
He was curious about the doubling of prices for text messages charged by the major American carriers from 2005 to 2008, during a time when the industry consolidated from six major companies to four.
Today several billion transistors can fit on a single chip, and the resulting era of microelectronics has transformed the world, touching virtually every aspect of human existence — from African subsistence farmers who can now get market prices via text message to supercomputers that can simulate nuclear explosions and predict climate change.
Their ability to hike prices on text messages certainly can't be explained by the companies' costs.
To extract from tweets data that can be assimilated to market prices, their text has to be preprocessed using semantic analysis techniques.
Kenyan startups have developed a host of mobile services -- from delivering agricultural information like crop prices via text messages to providing financial information -- to help rural residents make farming a viable business.
Phone companies have doubled the price for text messages, to 20 cents each, in recent years, even though they cost almost nothing to deliver.
Vonage will also enter the mobile-messaging business, including offering a better price on text messages than the larcenous rates common (for customers who don't opt for discount packages) among wireless carriers.
The search was based on a set of key words (MeSH terms and/or text words): reference pricing OR reference price OR reference prices OR reference based pricing OR reference adj2 pric$.
