I&#39;m already talking to it nicely with minicom with an RS232/USB cable on ubuntu 10.04...even spits out &#39;RING&#39; on-screen repeatedly when someone calls me...too bad I can&#39;t pick it up unless I have an analog telephone head around :)<div>

<br></div><div>@Claire: The objective is rather simple: It&#39;s pretty easy to automate receiving cash via mpesa on your line and parsing the received text to do stuff like topping up a customer account automatically etc. This assumes you&#39;ve connected the said line to a server thru a phone or other GSM modem and have some software to read mpesa texts as they come in on the modem. The problem here is that there&#39;s no other way to get the money out of that line except:</div>

<div><ol><li>You periodically go to that phone hooked up to the server and manually navigate the mpesa menu and send Kshs X to yourself, your employees/bank/kplc/landlord etc</li><li>You have an arrangement (<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">other than Paybill) with safaricom to move that cash somewhere periodically as it comes in which for the life of me I cannot fathom. I am also separately working on getting a Paybill account as I tend to hit the limit quite a bit on the first days of the month...just got my CR12 form...but that&#39;s a story for another day.</li>

</ol><div>What I&#39;m attempting is to automate navigation of the mpesa menu while the modem is hooked up to a linux box and send money to the bank or to a particular set of numbers with a web frontend i.e. automating sending cash via mpesa. This is via the so-called AT commands, of which the modem I imported has a very extensive command set - even commands dealing with sim applications. As I do this I do not see why safcom should be offended since I&#39;m not hacking their oh-so-precious code on the sim. At the same time, I don&#39;t pay safcom a dime above the normal mpesa charges :)</div>

</div><div><br></div><div>The beauty of this is you are free to do all kinds of things e.g. set your app to send money at particular time intervals, when it reaches a particular balance, notify you via sms/email when the cash is above/below a certain level...send you the mpesa transaction details in daily reports...you get the drift. Very useful for guys like me who have a love/hate relationship with phone calls from clients sending you cash  at ungodly hours to top up accounts and so on.</div>