Google is well known for its regular bouts of spring cleaning when it kills off a number of products in one fell swoop, but it also sometimes makes quick changes in between the bigger announcements. One of those has now hit its portfolio of SMS-based products aimed at users of lower end devices: Google has quietly closed down SMS Search. → Read More
Today, our lives are spread across a growing array of digital devices, from smartphones and laptops to tablets and connected TVs. While each device tends to perform certain tasks better than others, as we use tablets to read books and shop, laptops for work-related tasks and smartphones to check the weather, stocks and email, increasingly, our devices are working together in concert and becoming… → Read More
Way back in January 2012, a service called Burn Note launched, aiming to protect your private messages by destroying them after a certain period of time. Right around the same time, the concept of ephemeral messaging caught on with mainstream users with the launch, and mini-controversy, of Snapchat. While Snapchat allows you to send photos and videos that self-destruct, something that was copied… → Read More
Uppidy, a D.C. area startup which last year launched a consumer-facing app allowing users to back up their text messages to the cloud, has just introduced a paid version of its service that now supports pictures and videos, too. The company has also closed an additional round of seed funding, bringing its total raise to date to $600,000. → Read More
On December 3rd, 1992 in the little town of Newbury, Berkshire, a UK programmer sent his best mate a few lines of greeting using a unique new technique called Short Messaging Service. The programmer, Neil Papworth, was a test engineer for the Sema Group, and sent the message via PC to the phone of Richard Jarvis, a Vodafone employee. The message was “Merry Christmas.” Vodafone intended the service… → Read More
Google Voice seems to be having some issues with sending SMS messages today, as a number of blogs reported earlier this morning. The Google Voice customer support forums are filling up with complaints about text messages being sent from different phone numbers than the ones they should originate from. For some users, these numbers change every time they send a new text message, which makes it… → Read More
Mogreet, the Los Angeles-based startup that provides brands and marketers with a distribution platform for mobile video messaging, today announced the release of its API developer portal, which allows third party-developers to easily integrate MMS, SMS, video and in-app messaging into their applications. → Read More
Today comes another step in Twilio’s march to take over how web and mobile apps communicate to their users. The company is ramping up its SMS service, which now supports languages like Arabic, Chinese and Japanese; and interconnects with over 1,000 carriers in over 150 countries. These are both big expansions for Twilio, which previously had Latin-only support for just a few dozen carriers. The… → Read More
SendHub, the messaging startup that allows businesses to communicate with customers through SMS, is expanding its service today to now include support for voice calls and voicemail. These new features put SendHub in more direct competition with Google Voice, as users will now be able to use their SendHub phone numbers to both make and receive phone calls, while keeping their personal cell numbers… → Read More
During their lengthy careers at Google in both senior technical and product management roles, Maneesh Arora and Amit Sangani were able to geek out on products like AdSense, AdWords, and the now-defunct Google Health. Arora tells us that, while his time at Google was defined by smart people and ambitious ideas like these, in development there was often a tendency to “over engineer” without thinking… → Read More
Samsung is quietly killing text messages. The company’s cross-platform messaging app launched last October on the Android Market and then came to the App Store in January. But Samsung is looking to replace text messaging on more than just Android and iOS devices. It wants to kill text messages dead and just released a web version of the messaging client that should work on most feature phones and… → Read More
Y Combinator and Start Fund-backed startup SendHub, which offers a simple SMS solution for businesses, is killing it…and it never “officially” launched. Instead, the company soft-launched a couple of months ago with zero fanfare, and already has several hundred customers, 40% of which are active monthly users, sending some 30,000 SMS text messages per month.
Although generating revenue… → Read More
Remember ChatON? The Samsung-built, cross-platform, mobile messaging app which arrived in Google’s Android Market this fall? The app, somewhat similar to BlackBerry’s BBM or Apple’s iMessage, provides users with an alternative to SMS or MMS.
At the time, Samsung was promising support for iOS would be coming “soon.” Well, “soon” has arrived. ChatON is now available for download from iTunes. → Read More
I’m not generally one to predict the death of things. I’ve rarely been known to herald a shiny new Device X as a “Device Y Killer!”, and I’m a firm believer that Facebook is doing a perfectly good job of being “the new Facebook”. Pundits love to make these crazy claims because they’re easily forgotten and rarely does anyone call them out for being wrong after a few years have passed.
With that… → Read More
January 19, 2011. It’s a day I’ll always remember. It’s the day I finally got to destroy a Horcrux that had been bringing misery into my life: AT&T.
That’s the day I finally cancelled my AT&T service after years of dropped calls, non-existant service, gross over-charges, and all around frustration. I even did it before I knew for sure that Verizon was getting the iPhone. I had had… → Read More
Don’t tell Twitter’s Dick Costolo, but it seems everyday users are completely content with the ability to SMS their friends. So says a recent Deloitte study, which found that 90 percent of smartphone users send at least one text message per day. Compare that to only 40 percent of smartphone users who “hit up” their social networks, including Twitter and Facebook, at least once per day. In… → Read More
Brands and businesses are increasingly setting up Facebook Fan pages, which acts as their social homepage on Facebook where they can interact with customers and hopefully find new ones. These Fan pages can be customized with all sorts of tabs and apps. A new app launching today called TextualAds, in the same space as Textopoly, lets marketers ask for their fans’ phone numbers and send them… → Read More
Has Twitter killed instant messaging? That’s one possible explanation for the sudden and precipitous drop in instant message traffic in the past few years. A recent study shows that Britons spent an entire 14 percent of the online-time instant messaging back in 2007. Now? That number is a paltry 5 percent. Is IM dead, dying, or merely going through growing pains? → Read More
[UK] A quick reality check. Despite the rise of social media, mobile messaging is still very much owned by the carriers in the form of the humble text message.
A new report out today from the Mobile Data Association (MDA) shows that throughout 2009, Brits sent an average of 11 million text messages (SMS) an hour or 265 million text messages per day, up 23% on the year before. Picture messaging… → Read More
Looks like the Obama Administration, which really ought to be focused on getting Americans like me affordable health care (unless doctors now accept World of Warcraft Gold as payment, lol!), has set its sights on eliminating the scourge of distracted driving once and for all. Case in point: Transportation Sec. Ray LaHood is holding a summit this week that has the ultimate goal of “finding ways… → Read More
Here’s more evidence that texting and driving is terribly dangerous. Car and Driver magazine tested to see how long it takes to hit the brake when completely unimpaired, legally drunk, reading e-mail, and sending a text message. It turns out that sending a text message adds 70 feet to your drive before you hit the break, the most out of all four scenarios. → Read More
Reuters is reporting that text messaging may have had something to do with a recent train crash in California that killed 25 and injured 135. Cell phone records show that the train’s conductor received a text message at 4:21:03 PM, followed by the crash at 4:22:23 PM. The idea is that he got the text message, looked down to read it, and missed the trackside signal. The commuter train then… → Read More
Timberland, makers of boots and outdoor wear, and GSI Commerce, the e-commerce company behind the online presence of Timberland and many other companies, might just owe you some money. After a heap of unauthorized ad-filled text messages were sent out between January 2003 and August 2008, frustrated recipients banded together for a class action lawsuit. Though the companies insist that the blame… → Read More
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