You know how the stereotype goes. “Older people don’t use technology.” “Smartphones are too complicated for seniors.” “A flyer or a phone call is the only option.” Reality, as it turns out, begs to differ. According to an AARP survey, over 90 percent of older adults use technology to stay connected. And among those surveyed, text messaging has overtaken email as the method of choice for communication — 86% say they regularly text with friends and family. Clearly, today’s seniors are on board the technology bandwagon. The question now is, are your senior living sales counselors on board as well? SMS text messaging for senior living marketing is not new, but it’s quickly growing in prominence as more and more providers recognize its effectiveness. Text messages have open rates as high as 98%, while emails hover around 20%. If you’re not texting your prospective residents, you’re missing real opportunities to connect. But before you dive in and start sending texts left and right, take note. There are laws in place that regulate what’s allowed, and some property management businesses have already landed themselves in hot water. What’s the law on SMS text messaging for marketing? The Telephone Consumer Protection Act protects people from unwanted communications from any business. That means service providers must receive prior express written consent before cold calling or texting. And they can’t make agreeing to receive these marketing messages a condition for moving in or otherwise purchasing services. So how do you stay on the right side of the law? How do you ensure you’ve gotten permission from your senior living prospects to send them marketing texts? SMS text messaging in Yardi Senior CRM Yardi Senior CRM helps senior living providers manage their entire sales and marketing process — including...

In urban North America, we likely take it for granted that LTE and 3G services will be available for our communication convenience. But in some parts of the U.S. and the world, where fast, ubiquitous networks aren’t available, effortless wireless Internet connectivity is simply a dream. Such cities or rural areas might be in for a surprise from Cosmos, a new browser that’s currently in the works. This concept sounds pretty crazy – a way to surf the web using SMS text messages. The project is still under development, but should the idea work, its implications could be huge. The Cosmos Browser is an Android web browser that uses SMS text messages to retrieve the web content displayed in a stripped-down layout. Its creators describe how it works: “After a person inputs a URL, our app texts our Twilio number which forwards the URL as a POST request to our Node.JS backend. The backend takes the URL, gets the HTML source of the website, minifies it, gets rid of the css, JavaScript, and images, GZIP compresses it, encodes it in Base64, and sends the data as a series of SMSs. The phone receives this stream at a rate of 3 messages per second, orders them, decompresses them, and displays the content.” In other words, once the message reaches the Cosmos backend, the page is retrieved and stripped down to bare elements. Afterwards, these are sent to the user as text messages, enabling to be read with just SMS access. The compression and decompression of the messages is done by the Cosmos browser to reduce the amount of data that needs to be transmitted. Once the page is fully loaded, the SMSs are deleted, and your inbox is uncluttered. The team behind the project is...