The author, Ricky Robinett, announces the launch of the Stellar Organization's decentralized protocol for sending and receiving money in any pairs of currency, along with its own companion digital currency called stellar (STR). He then creates a simple notification system using Node.js and Twilio SMS to receive SMS notifications when friends send him stellar. The system connects to the Stellar API over Websockets, subscribes to updates from his account, and logs transactions to the console. To make it more user-friendly, he adds error handling and uses Twilio's SMS library to send an SMS message instead of outputting to the console. Finally, he runs the app continuously in the background using forever to ensure no messages are missed.