(keitai-l) SIM-based applications?

Anybody know details about how SIM-based applications work,
suggestions for how to develop them, or methods for deploying them?

Nathan Eagle (of EPROM http://web.mit.edu/eprom/ and
http://web.media.mit.edu/~nathan/) just posted the following a few
days back:

  SIM Apps: A single application that will run on all 2+billion phones??
  http://blogs.forum.nokia.com/view_entry.html?id=331

  excerpt: Here’s the problem: I live in a country (Kenya) where
  millions of people have extremely low-end phones (most phones
  don’t even have WAP browser, not to mention Java-support).  I
  need another way to develop applications for these millions (1+
  billion globally) phones besides building standard SMS-based
  applications that depend on the user remembering the relevant
  phone number and keywords to text...

  After talking with Ken Banks and others at the W3C Symposium on
  the Mobile Web for the Developing World in Bangalore, we
  stumbled upon another option which I know very little about:
  SIM-based applications.

He has a few questions:

  1. How do these SIM applications work? 
     When I send a request for traffic information, does that simply
     send a SMS to the service provider with the relevant keywords?...

  2. How do we develop our own SIM applications?...

  3. What methods can we use to deploy these applications across
     Kenya?...

His posting is open for comments (URL above). Or if you reply
here, I can try collate some responses and post them over there.

Thanks,

  --Mike

-- 
Michael(tm) Smith
xmpp:smith@sideshowbarker.net