Mobile Innovation

3Jam and Pinger both launched multiperson SMS services at DEMO . Probably first popularized by Dodgeball, multiperson SMS is a feature 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.
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.
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.

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Posted by Mobile Innovation at 02:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Communication over GPRS and other mobile data connections is quickly becoming a popular and cheap alternative to SMS and BlackBerry's push-email service. Two companies leading the way in the fight for cheaper text and email services are Hotxt and Emblaze.

Hotxt, a company managed by Doug Richard, a former member of the Dragon's Den, lets you send and receive text messages for less than 1p. All you have to do is download a Java application to your mobile phone and subscribe to the Hotxt service for £1 a month.

It works via the Internet, through GPRS or 3G, and you read and write your messages in the Hotxt Java app. The catch is, it's only considerably cheaper if both the sender and the receiver have Hotxt installed on their phones. Plus, instead of getting a normal text notification, you get a missed call, and then you have to access the Hotxt program to read your text. All in all a lot of work, so steer clear if you're not a text maniac.

As long as the person you're sending the message to also has a Hotxt account, then you only pay for the amount of data you send or receive, which according to Hotxt is much cheaper than a normal SMS. You can also send messages that are two and a half times larger than SMS messages -- so texting your housemates at 3 a.m. about why you forgot your keys can become much more creative. If the person you're messaging doesn't have a Hotxt account then you can buy credit and use Hotxt Out, which sends messages via the Hotxt service, but as an SMS, and which the company claims is still cheaper than a normal SMS.

If texting isn't your thing and you yearn for a more refined way of chatting to your buddies, then Embalze's Emoze may tickle your fancy. It's a similar concept to Hotxt, but instead of transferring text messages this program uses the Internet to push emails straight from your email server to your mobile phone.

The Emoze push-email software is free to download, but alas only works on Windows Mobile and Symbian Series 6.0 phones. Emblaze says that it's constantly updating the number of devices and platforms supported by Emoze, but check that your phone is supported before.

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Posted by Mobile Innovation at 10:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)