Though we imagine the Dutch to be a rather unexcitable lot, I did anyway, it turns out they have a history of getting rowdy at football games (yes, if this all happened back in the States I be calling it “soccer”). So it can’t be so much of a surprise that fans rioted again in April. What is surprising is that mobile phone companies got involved in the investigation. This AP report tells the story:

Phone companies voluntarily handed over the mobile phone numbers of people who were in or around Feyenoord’s Kuip stadium on the day of the match — traceable using broadcasting masts in the area.

So that’s what the aGPS sticker on our cellphones is about.

Via Engadget.

tags: 5-0, agps, cell phone, cellphone, crime, engadget, feyenoord, football, gps, hooliganism, location aware, location aware technology, mobile, mobile phone, mobile phone companies, mobile phone numbers, police, police investigation, riot, rioting, rioters, sms, sms message, sms messaging, soccer

My friend Will was in meetings all day Friday, and there are few better times to have SMS messaging than in meetings. Thing is, I didn’t want to type on my phone’s numeric keypad when I had my computer in front of me, so I went looking for the details of this old hint that describes how to send SMS messages with iChat (would also work with any AIM client).

But there are other solutions. Slipstick lists the email addresses for various networks’ email to SMS gateways. And, obviously, most networks have web forms to send SMSs. Here’s Verizon’s.

This leads to a few questions. In these days of number portability, how can a person identify the carrier for a particular phone number based on the number alone? Will these web and email to SMS gateways work for off-network numbers (i.e. will Nextel’s gateway send SMS to Sprint?)? Is there another network agnostic gateway besides the AIM service identified above?

About the picture: there are a number of entertaining sms-tagged photos on Flickr.

tags: aim client, aim to sms, email to sms, ichat, mobile text, send sms messages, sms, sms gateway, sms gateways, sms messaging, texting, web to sms