Last week I went to the Washington Capitals game, and was surprised to see an SMS voting campaign run through the Jumbotron.

It was simple enough – text some unintuitive text to a 5 digit shortcode to vote for the next song you want played. From the gross way the percentages were adjusting, you could tell that the sample set was pretty small, and I couldn’t help but think it was due to how cumbersome the process was.

Text campaigns work – asynchronously at least. In situations where you have time to fiddle with the shortcode and text, it’s a solid way of conveying intent. But for ad-hoc, immediate, rapid-fire type situations like voting on the next song in a crowded, crazy arena, it’s suboptimal.

We need contextual interfaces.

Remember BlueCasting? They were all the rage in 2005, but it seems like they dropped out of scope in the US. Does anyone have some insight into how they’re doing in Europe? I think they’d be a perfect fit here – although instead of bluecasting media to devices, they need to bluecast lightweight apps.

Sure, the tech isn’t there now – it would be wildly insecure. But there has to be a way to create a protected sandbox where a small applet could be sent to a handset with a branded, contextual voting screen. Once you overcome the bootstrapping problem and it’s present on a majority of handsets, so many possibilities pop up. Museums, concerts, school lectures… These places have people that are synchronous with the events happening, and SMS is too asynchronous to work well.

There must be someone trying to do this. It’s just too obvious.