SMS, or text messaging, is constantly evolving. There is a wide array of SMS services available, ranging from transferring funds, utility payments, sending love notes, receiving your daily horoscope, and a lot more. Text messaging is proving to be very lucrative and this resulted to stiff competition among the telecom companies. This free market competition benefited most of us since it rewarded us with more widespread SMS text messaging platforms and applications.

But have you tried sending bulk SMS thru your cellphone? If you were the coach of a basketball team, and you need to announce the next practice schedule, you will first create a group list in your cellphone, then retrieve each player's mobile number from the phonebook and store it into the newly created group. Of course, this is manageable for 12 players. No sweat here.

Let us take another scenario. You are the Club President for a dog training club in your city and you have 50 members. All of their numbers are recorded in your phonebook. If you need to invite them to attend a dog show, you just create a group list, retrieve each member's number from the phonebook and store it into the newly created group. Sending bulk SMS to 50 members will take a little bit of time. This task, though not extremely difficult, takes a bit of effort to complete.

Let us take our example to a grander scale. You are the owner of a Montessori School and you need to send bulk SMS to the parents and teachers of an impending storm scheduled to hit the land by the next morning. If there were 350 parents and teachers, it will take you some time to do that. If on another occasion, you only need to send to the 230 parents excluding the teachers, you will create another group and extract the relevant numbers again. Sending bulk SMS thru the cellphone is proving too burdensome as the number of mobile phones increases.

Text messages do not always have to be sent from mobile phones. A variety of options are available to the sender. Yahoo Messenger and AOL Instant Messenger have options to send messages to cell phones, all for free. There are also web-based applications, like Google Send to Phone, which allow you to send SMS messages to mobile phones in the U.S., but these are not designed to send bulk SMS. Again, most of these sites provide free SMS services.

If you have a need to send bulk sms to a group of people regularly, then your only option is to go for web-based bulk sms providers. Aside from being cheaper than sending messages from the cell phone, SMS transmissions are extremely fast and reliable. Add into it the facility to import mobile phone numbers from a text file and its scheduling function, subscribers get maximum flexibility and ease of use. Since the computer keyboard is definitely faster than the cellphone keypad, you get to accomplish tasks quicker, simpler and easier.

Technology is constantly evolving, that is for sure, especially in the field of SMS technology. Next time, when you need to send bulk SMS to your friends to play team sports, think about how simple it would be to use a web-based system to do the job faster and cheaper. To get a free trial of ClearSMS bulk messaging, sign-up at http://www.clearsms.net/clearsms/signup.cfm.