September 27th, 2006

A look at eight multi-person SMS services

The DEMO conference is wrapping up here in San Diego and unlike when it began 16 years ago the conference wasn’t dominated by mobile launches. None the less, there were some very interesting mobile services here like ScanR and Realeyes3D image scanning by mobile photo, Flurry‘s simple email and RSS on Java phones and Grand Central (which I’ve written about at length). 3Jam and Pinger both launched multiperson SMS services at DEMO. Probably first popularized by Dodgeball, multiperson SMS is a feature (or a company – your call!) that quite a few people are coming out with all at once lately. The following are some short descriptions of eight companies offering multiperson SMS and a table displaying which services offer particular features. The List Jyngle is a web based service that has voice support, just launched and got a review over on CrunchGear today. 3Jam is funded, relatively straight forward and launched here at DEMO. Pinger lets users quickly respond to messages by voice and received $3 million from Kleiner Perkins in 2005. Swarmteams does a whole lot of things, though we weren’t able to get it to work well in testing for our original review. You might have better luck, and if so then this Irish service could well be worth using. Loopt is a location aware service funded by YCombinator and Sequoia. We reviewed it at launch. Dodgeball is old school and was acquired by Google in 2005. Twitter is for groups of friends who want varying levels of instant, automatic updates on each others’ activities. It’s a product of podcasting company Odeo. Moblabber is a mobile social network that users can receive topical messages from automatically. There are undoubtedly more companies that offer multi-person SMS, or at least there will be by the time I click publish on this post – but I hope that comparing these seven company’s by feature set will help flesh out a vision of the landscape and where we stand today. The Features → Read More

September 18th, 2006

Swarmteams: communicate like animals by SMS

Swarmteams is a service for group communication that integrates multi-recipient SMS, IM, RSS and VOIP. While there are many companies launching that focus entirely on group SMS alone, Swarmteams is the most ambitious system I’ve seen yet for rapid multi-person communication. The company says it’s tried to mirror the natural swarming behavior of animals in designing the system. Unfortunately, in the testing we did – our animal instincts were left frustrated. We felt more like a mob of donkeys than a well co-ordinated flock of soaring birds. In other words, the system doesn’t seem to work very well yet. I hope the system will improve with time because I think the company has some great ideas. → Read More

Real-Time
Crunchbase

Energy Points — Received $3M in Series A funding from Plan B Ventures
2.13.2012
Energy Points — Company added to CrunchBase
2.13.2012
Plan B Ventures — Invested in Energy Points.
2.13.2012
Cidade Internet — Acquired by Populis.
2.1.2012
Jive Software — Went public with stock symbol NASDAQ:JIVE.
2.3.2012
Cidade Internet — Acquired by Populis.
2.1.2012
2.1.2012
2.9.2012
LetsBuy.com — Acquired by Flipkart.
2.9.2012
Cocoafish — Acquired by Appcelerator.
2.9.2012
Energy Points — Received $3M in Series A funding from Plan B Ventures
2.13.2012
StopTheHacker — Received $1.1M in Series A funding from Runa Capital
2.13.2012
Marin Software — Received $30M in Unattributed funding
2.13.2012
FNZ — Received Unattributed funding from General Atlantic
2.13.2012
LipoFIT Analytic — Received $9.5M in Series B funding from KfW Bankengruppe and Bayern Kapital
2.13.2012
Plan B Ventures — Invested in Energy Points.
2.13.2012
Runa Capital — Invested in StopTheHacker.
2.13.2012
General Atlantic — Invested in FNZ.
2.13.2012
2.13.2012
Bayern Kapital — Invested in LipoFIT Analytic.
2.13.2012
Jive Software — Went public with stock symbol NASDAQ:JIVE.
2.3.2012
Energy Points — Company added to CrunchBase
2.13.2012
Aero Financial — Company added to CrunchBase
2.13.2012
StopTheHacker — Company added to CrunchBase
2.13.2012
Rusnano — Company added to CrunchBase
2.13.2012
Durham Graphene Science — Company added to CrunchBase
2.13.2012
Fit Freeway — Product added to CrunchBase
2.12.2012
2.12.2012
Metier HR - Cloud Based HR Process Automation Suite — Product added to CrunchBase
2.12.2012
TweepsMap — Product added to CrunchBase
2.12.2012
Wupbox account — Product added to CrunchBase
2.11.2012
CrunchBase