For the last few years we’ve been tracking the growth of a service called Textfree, offered by San Jose-based startup Pinger. As the name implies, Textfree has a very attractive value proposition: you sign up, it gives you a free, real, telephone number, and you can send text messages and make phone calls with it free of charge — the service makes most of its money by displaying ads alongside… → Read More
Pinger’s disruptive Textfree service is heading to Europe, and it’s doing it with the help of hottest buzzword around: gamification.
Pinger has managed to build a huge userbase in the United States by offering free text messaging without any major catches: users are given their own, real phone numbers, and they can send and receive text messages with any phone. And, most important — the app… → Read More
Pinger’s Textfree, the app that lets users send and receive free text messages and phone calls using real phone numbers, has a new best friend: the big green Android robot.
We’ve been tracking Textfree’s staggering growth for some time now — CEO Greg Woock says that Textfree users now exchange 1.5 billion messages and 45 million voice minutes each month, making it one of the top 10 carriers… → Read More
Pinger’s free texting and phone application Textfree is continuing to see booming growth. The app, which has been downloaded over 14 million times for iOS and Android devices, uses an ad-supported model to provide free SMS and voice calls to users and now ranks among the top mobile carriers by volume of messages exchanged. And it’s hitting some impressive milestones.
For those that haven’t used… → Read More
Last fall at TechCrunch Disrupt, Pinger, the company behind hugely popular texting application Textfree, announced that it was adding voice support to its application — a big deal, given that it adds voice calling to the iPod Touch and it allows iPhone users to make calls without burning their AT&T minutes.
The feature was in beta for around two and a half months (during which it was… → Read More
The votes have been tallied. The judges have weighed in. A battlefield of twenty-seven startups was whittled down to a final, elite group of seven. And now the winner has been chosen: Qwiki has taken the top prize at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco.
In addition to a $50,000 grand prize, the company has just been handed the Disrupt Cup, taking over possession from Disrupt NYC winner Soluto. Upon… → Read More
Earlier this month we took a look at Pinger, the company behind Textfree, a massively popular application for the iPhone and iPod Touch that gives users free, unlimited text messaging. Since launching in March 2009, users have sent over 4 billion text messages with the app, which has been downloaded 8 million times (these numbers effectively put Pinger in the top ten US carriers, volume-wise). And… → Read More
It’s a promise sounds too good to be true: free, unlimited texting to and from your iPhone. And even if a service did manage to offer it, it certainly couldn’t be sustainable, could it? Pinger, a startup that launched back in 2006 as a voicemail service but has since pivoted in a big way, would beg to differ: the company has managed to become immensely popular on the iPhone by offering free text… → Read More
Pinger has flown relatively under the radar for an app developer that has launched 14 apps that have all reached the top 100 iPhone apps in the App store. The startup’s Textfree app has surpassed more than 1 Billion text messages sent in less than 9 months. The app allows owners to send free text messages to any US mobile phone, including replies. The app has a free version which allows users 15… → Read More
Voicemail is dead. Please tell everyone so they’ll stop using it. When I first started out in the real world in the mid-nineties voicemail was an important productivity tool. I remember people talking about the pros and cons of various enterprise voicemail systems – which had the best forwarding and group messaging, which allowed for archiving, and how many messages could be stored and… → Read More
Voice messaging service Pinger no longer requires recipients to be pinger members in order to listen to messages on their mobile phones. Instead, upon receiving messages from Pinger users, recipients will be prompted by a text message to click and call a local number to hear the message. Previously non-members were emailed Pinger messages. Sending messages out and managing contact lists will still… → Read More
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… → Read More
I met with Pinger founders Greg Woock and Joe Sipher last week to see a demo of their new mobile product launching later this year. This is a serious company with a dead simple, viral product in the mobile voice messaging space. Pinger, which was called Project Edgar at the time, raised $3 million from Kleiner Perkins in November 2005, and Kleiner partner Randy Komisar joined the board of… → Read More
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