Wish you could get reminders for things wherever you are at a later day and time? Have no fear– just check out Oh, Don’t Forget.  It’s a simple idea, just stick in your cell phone number, a date and time in any format (“today 4:30pm”,” 2/10/09 11:30 am”, etc..) and a message. It’s really that easy and it’s free!

The creators also have a Dashboard widget available for Mac OS users and an API for the developer in you.

It supports pretty much every mobile carriers:

• Weblink Wireless
• Arch Wireless
• Western Wireless
• Southwestern Bell
• United States Cellular
• Fido Solutions
• Alltel
• Centurytel Wireless
• Nextel
• Sprint PCS
• AT&T Wireless
• Cellular One
• Dobson Cellular
• Cingular
• Telus Mobility
• Boost Mobilbe
• Cricket
• Metro PCS
• Metrocall
• Southern Communications
• T-Mobile
• Suncom Wireless
• Verizon
• Rogers Wireless
• Bell Mobility
• Edge Wireless
• Qwest
• Swisscom
• Virgin Mobile
• Orange
• O2

CTIA, the Cellular Telephone Industry Association, as of June, 2008 reports that there are

262,720,165 mobile phone users in the US

Of all these users, there are

240,000,000 phones that can send text messages.

We’re going to take our first leap of faith here and assume that each phone belongs to a different individual. This probably is not the case all the time, but multiple-phone ownership isn’t terribly common yet.

So we’ve got 240 million people who CAN send text messages and as of June, 2008, over 75 billion (that’s right, with a ‘b’) text messages are sent in the US every month

Leap of faith #2: Number of text messages sent per day:

(75,000,000,000 messages/month) / (30 days/month) = 2,500,000,000 messages sent per day = 28,935 messages per second.

Leap of faith #3: Number of people sending messages per day:

(2500000000 messages/day) / (240,000,000 potential users) = 10.416 messages per user per month. Let’s round down for the sake of trying to make up for our estimations.

Maximum amount of data in one text message = 160 bytes

Amount of data sent between 12:00:00 and 12:01:00 = 60 seconds

160 bytes/message * 28,395 messages/second * 60 seconds = 1703700 bytes = 259.96 = 260 megabytes

Now let’s assume that not everyone sent a text message exactly between midnight and 12:01, and I’m sure some people sent the messages just a minute or so before midnight as well.

160 bytes/message * 28,395 messages/second * 60 seconds * 8 minutes = 2 079.71 mb = 2.07 gigabytes of data sent in 8 minutes in the whole US

The last part is important here. Our wireless infrastructure isn’t that amazing yet. We still have to connect by Wifi to get large iPhone apps. Imagine what happens if instead of the whole country sending 2 gigs of data, we have just one quarter of the country sending just as much or more data? You know what happens, because you probably experienced the phenomenon of waiting 20+ minutes to send “Happy 2009!” to your friends.

We didn’t even take into account sending multiple messages, as I and I’m sure many of you did, so the amount of traffic can probably be multiplied by at least 3-5 times to get a semi-kind-of-more-reasnoable estimate.

You probably knew most of this. Sorry for wasting your time.