According to this New Zealand Herald story, most of the Kenyan population is too far from an Internet cafe for a Kenyan monster.com to work. So a clever startup is using SMS (text messaging) to distribute job ads to subscribers. This reminds me of Code Amber, which is a free service that sends you an SMS whenever a new Amber Alert is issued, and MessageCast which does opt-in SMS, IM, etc. alerts for new items in RSS feeds. I’m seeing a lot of systems spring up that offer more instantaneous notification than email, but the Kenyan job system is interesting because it’s using SMS because it’s the only network the average citizen has, rather than for the always-on nature of the cellphone.
