1	0		Railway, information, just, SMS, away, SMS, rail, 139

IRCTC has launched railway information on SMS. This makes our lives way easier. There was a search option on your mobile provided by Google. That search option has the capability to search for the PNR status by sending an SMS.

This feature from IRCTC is way better. you can do a lot more things with it. You just have to remember some syntax to achieve this.

These are the services that are available via SMS :

1. PNR Enquiry
2. Fare Enquiry
3. Current Train running position
4. Accommodation availability

Not an exhaustive list of offerings but a good start. I use ngpay for finding most of this information. But, to use that I have to launch and application and navigate through few screens.

I like the way STD codes were used to find the cities. Most of the other providers will now follow. Most of the way it is done is either using the first 3 characters of the city to come up with a list and the user selects the city. This is a little tedious for both the user and the tiny mobile processor. With the STD codes this becomes easier.

This of course comes with the assumption that people remember STD codes.

This service is available on all major service providers  :

1. Airtel
2. Vodafone
3. Idea
4. Aircel
5. Tata
6. MTNL

Not yet available but soon will be on Reliance and BSNL. Go ahead and try saving these codes. You never know when these come in handy.

There are a whole bunch of mobile services coming our way and IRCTC has just joined it. It even has a mobile application but that did not work on my mobile.

Looks like there is a lot of confusion among the content providers and service providers over a common platform to deploy their applications. For a broader penetration SMS is the unanimous choice so far. This might change after the launch of 3G services by all the service providers.

IRCTC has helped the eCommerce in India with 1/3rd of India’s total revenues coming from it. I hope it does the same way to mobile commerce.