TALK OF THE BROADBAND ECONOMY

Irish rock band U2's frontman Bono is working to eradicate poverty and slow the spread of AIDS in Africa, one text message at a time.

In recognition of his international humanitarian efforts, Bono won an inaugural TED Prize at the annual Technology, Entertainment and Design Conference held in California in February. As his reward, he was granted three wishes, one of which he is using to enlist the technology community's help to build a social movement of more than 1 million American activists and supporters for his nonprofit One Campaign to make poverty history.

Sun Microsystems lent a hand in granting Bono's wish by designing and managing a text-messaging system that the band is using to enlist attendees of the band's latest concert tour to sign a petition urging the U.S. government to pledge 1% of its budget to the cause. At a certain point in every show, fans are urged to sign the petition by texting their names from a mobile phone or other Java-powered device to a short code spelling “unite.” The next day, participants get a response directing them to the movement's Web site (www.one.org) for further action. A lucky few even get their names displayed from a large Jumbotron-like screen above the stage during the performance. So far, 600,000 names have been gathered.

The service-oriented architecture is based on software patterns and uses a combination of Java technology and java.com site participation. Dan Malks, Sun project engineer, devised the system in just four weeks in order to have it live for the band's West Coast tour leg. He first had to convince six Tier 1 wireless carriers to come on board, though, with the last one signing on mere hours before the first performance.

“The way that it works is that people text message in during the performance, and it goes to each of the carriers, then to a single aggregation service and then to our data center in the Bay area, where we receive the message and do multiple types of validation on it,” Malks said. The names and messages are all checked using a complicated semantic and syntax verification system in a computer at the data center. Then they're sent to a machine at the concert for visual display during the show.

“We relied on the same solutions to do this that work for our enterprise customers,” Malks said. “I call this a RSOA — a rock star-oriented architecture — instead of an SOA.”

“This solution was designed to create a link between the fans and the One Campaign and to be able to harness the energy and the momentum that happens when these people are feeling passionate about it,” said Mary Smaragdis, Sun marketing director. “[Bono's] very inspiring and moving when he calls you to action.”