Text yourself a reminder using your mobile phone

One of our goals when we started KeepUp was to make it very easy to enter reminders no matter where you are. In todays day and age just about everyone has a mobile phone that is capable of sending text messages using SMS. Most people don't know what SMS is, but when I say "You know, how you voted for your American Idol Favorites" they get it right away.

As of last week we rolled out our inbound text service where you can now text yourself a reminder. Here is how it works:

1.) Make sure your mobile number is filled out properly in your KeepUp Profile.

2.) Add the KeepUp number to your cellphone and save it in your contacts, the number is : 571-232-7456.

3.) Text reminder message to the KeepUp number & hit send.

So for example: "Get Wife Flowers" will create a reminder due today to get your wife some flowers.

Pretty easy, now for the advanced users, we built a pretty flexible parsing engine that will turn your message into a reminder using the following rules.

- Look for a date first, if we find a date (in almost any form) that's the due date.
- Look for a category next, if we find a category such as Auto, Home, People, Pet or Event, then that becomes the category.
- If we find a category, look for a corresponding Person, Home, Pet, Car, etc.
- Take what's left and make it the title.

- You can separate these text items using colons (:), commas(,) or spaces ( )

So for example, I keep forgetting to cancel my gym membership, ugh, every month I pay another $30 and  I never go anymore. I always remember while out and about, so I texted: "cancel gym membership,personal,joel" and it created a reminder in the Personal category assigned to me.

Another example, I always miss those Costco sales where they have super specials a given week, and this week they have shavers on sale, so sent "9/4/07:get costco shaver:personal:joel" and it gave me a task with a due date of Sept 4th.

If you are out and forget what to do, you can always text "help" or "?" to the KeepUp number, it will return the format of the text message to send.

Please try this out and let us know what you think, we recommend sending yourself a test text reminder to make sure everything is set up properly. Happy texting!