You can send free text messages to a cell phone. Note that the receiving party may incur a charge. All you need is an email account, that persons cell phone number, and the cell phone provider's SMS gateway. If you do not know their cell phone provider, you can look it up by their phone number. (may not be very accurate) or try the White Pages SMS= Short Message Service

Why do this?

• Emergency broadcasts at a school or place of business (you can do mass emailings)
• Contact employees on their cell phones if a voice call is not a convenient option
• Much easier using your computer to type an email than using your thumbs on a phone
• The person receiving the message can text you back
• Remind your kids to be home on time
• SMS is the most widely used data application on the planet
• Check out Wikipedia on text messaging- .http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_messaging
• Wikipedia business uses of text messaging

Notes:

• Limited to 160 characters (including spaces)
• May be security issues
• People may send fraudulent messages (spoofing)
• What does it mean? Look it up at: http://www.alsindependence.com/Internet_Slang.htm    or   http://www.acronymfinder.com/
• Short codes, short numbers- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_code
• What's next? MMS! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimedia_Messaging_System
• Google SMS- http://www.google.com/mobile

Note: this site at one time was free, but now charges for providing info on cell phone providers: http://csharpcomputing.com/webapps/lookup.jsp

Web Developers: If you want to get fancy, add the Web pages api to your applications.