We are looking forward to presenting vozmob at N2Y4 in a few days.We hope to enlist support for our project, especially from MMS-savvy hackers and mobile carriers. In a nutshell, we have been working with immigrants in Los Angeles to build an open-source platform for them to tell stories directly from their cell phones. They take pictures or videos, record sound clips, add a few words, and send that to the vozmob site via MMS. For people who do not have computer access, we're working on sending stories back to phones through MMS, as well as letting users register and subscribe to story feeds directly from their phone. We've picked MMS as a way to send multimedia content because it works on cheap cameraphones with pre-paid plans, and doesn't cost much ($0.02 per message when you purchase a pre-paid messaging bundle for $5). We hope to develop a system that can be used by many community organizations.

Our prototype is working reasonably well, but we have run into a lot of frustrations working with MMS. At N2Y4, we're really hoping to connect with MMS-savvy hackers and friendly mobile carriers we can help us move to the next stage. Two things would be particularly useful:

• Surprisingly, it has proven really difficult to set up handsets with pre-paid plans so they can send and receive MMS, even though that is advertised as a standard feature. We've wasted hours on the phone with mobile carriers' support, talking to service reps who haven't been properly trained to debug this. We would welcome help from carriers willing to put us in touch with competent tech people who can help us set up our users' phones. We currently have a bunch of donated GSM phones, so AT&T or T-Mobile would be ideal. But we also want to make our system universal and we'll be thankful for help from any carrier.

• We currently use the carriers' MMS-to-email gateways to exchange content between phones and our Drupal CMS. This comes with a number of limitations and we would love to find a better way. We suspect we need to run an MMSC server, but we currently don't have the expertise to do this. Any help you can provide would be terrific.

We could of course use assistance on a number of other fronts (drupal hacking and theming, secure hosting, etc.). For a full list of our current needs, see http://vozmob.net/support. Thanks for any help you can give us!