By Emmanuel Narokobi - 22nd October 2006

7.20pm: Okay so we’re on again with SMS Polling for Ice Discovered 2006. Last week was a slow start with only 127 votes coming in so as I write this tonight waiting for 7.30pm to come around for the secound round of votes to come through, I’m hoping that we’ll get more votes tonight.

We have seen up to 1,995 votes in one night last year, so I would hope that this year will see an increase in these figures. The success of an SMS campaign relies heavily on marketing the campaign but at times last year and even last week we noticed that some of our test SMS messages never came through.

With all this talk of Digicel and another mobile phone operator coming in to PNG we definately would like to see an improvement in our mobile phone services. SMS is obviously secondary to voice services but it would be nice to see it be an instantaneous and reliable service as well.

7.40pm: Our two Ice Discovered contestants tonight are Vasiti and Pennie and right now Vasiti is in the lead with 22 votes and Pennie at 9.

Problem though is that we have had about 15 calls to the mobile number when people should be texting not calling. Note sure if EMTV has instructed viewers effectively that the number is for texting.

7.44pm: Vasiti on 32 votes and Pennie on 15.

We have been toying with the idea of texting back a thank you message so that people know that their SMS has been recieved, but with our current setup which is outside Cellnet it would mean we would have to be paying for sending out messages. The ideal situation would be for us to setup within Cellnet’s system so that we can add a markup on the SMS message so that we can be paid for our service by the users.

Some ideas for the future using TV and SMS could be for example people texting Chef Golonzo on the EMTV Haus and Home show to receive his recipies. Once we can find a sponsor for this it may be a reality in 2007.

8.00pm: Vasiti on 80 votes and Pennie on 50.

Just looking at the messages coming in, most people just text the name of the people they want to vote for, but some go to the trouble of writing their full name and the province they’re from. That’s quite encouraging because then we can tell where the votes are coming from because we can’t differentiate the mobile numbers like landline numbers.

You also get funny messages like ‘Vasiti is HOT’, ‘I want Vasiti’ and this one ‘Vasisti is so hot, is she married?’ ..LOL..

8.30pm: Vasiti on 118 and Pennie on 113.

Obviously some people do vote more than once, but that’s allowed in this voting, we have not included misspelled names though and right now we have about 26 misspelled names.

9.00pm: Vasiti on 139 and Pennie 133.

10.00pm: Vasiti 184 and Pennie on 178.

11.00pm: Vasiti 194 and Pennie 184. Voting will end at 12.00 midnight.

12.00pm: And so we end this nights voting with Vasiti on 198 votes and Pennie with 192. All up we had 469 SMS votes with 79 not being recognised answers (i.e. they had spelling mistakes or they forgot to put in the contestants name in to their SMS vote) . Well on that note I better go get some sleep…