Updated
3Jam has launched a new way to texting friends in groups, and we think it’s going to do well. Multi-person texting simply isn’t possible yet, and with 80 million people with texting in the U.S. and growing, 3Jam may be hitting a sweet spot.
And texting is the technology of the future. Among college students, there’s a 75 percent usage rate. (For the uninitiated, when we say texting, we’re refering to the short messages people send on their mobile phone, known as SMS, or Short Message Service).
Texting is a little awkward. You type on a small screen, and you’re only able to message one person at a time — until now. 3Jam is solves that problem. It lets you message more than one person — in fact, as many people as you want. Now, if you are running late to that concert, you don’t have to send a message three times to your friends to notify them individually. You just send it once.
We tinkered with 3Jam over the past couple of weeks, and it works well. On our Treo, it took a while to get used to, because the Treo messaging interface is different from most phones. But 3Jam has since released a special application for Treos, which makes things a lot easier. So for Treo or regular phone, it works smoothly.
Here’s how it works. On most phones, you type in: “text (friend #1’s name) (friend #2’s name)” This creates the group. Then you type in a message, and send it to “43526,” which is 3Jam’s short-code number. It is that easy. The message goes to those friends, as well as to your own phone.
Once your friends get the message, they can hit “reply” and send a message to the group too. 3Jam assigns a random number, say 54880, to the group, so that anyone in the group can message the group at that number through the day without having to retype the names.
The Treo app makes it even easier. It requires a download. But then it saves time. Under a “To” tab, you can pull down a menu to select the contacts you want to send to, and send the message to them.
(You can also go to 3Jam.com for directions on how it all works, though the Treo App will soon be available exclusively through Andrew Carton’s blog Treonauts until DEMO. Update: Specific link to Andrew’s post is here, and download itself is here.)
We talked with Andy Jagoe, chief exec of the small start-up. The idea for 3Jam arose when he tried emailing some people for after-work drinks. He found email only worked when people were sitting at their desk. He wanted to reach them all on their phones, where they were likely to be as they rushed for the door at the end of the day. Enlai Chu is the other co-founder.
3jam began testing a private version of this last year. He has since added a few key people to his team, including Thad White, from Yahoo’s mobile product team, and Tom Purcell, who was the first business exec at Danger, and who helped that company launch with T-Mobile.
The 3Jam service will go live officially on Sept 25, when the company launches at DEMO
White brought some “aha” insights from Yahoo, Jagoe explains. About half of all Yahoo’s traffic comes from messaging, either email or instant messaging. And a full one-third of the email traffic is to more than one person or to “reply all,” Jagoe says. If you enable multi-party texting, the thinking goes, you’ve got an immediate, huge market. There are 200 million people in the U.S. with mobile phones, and 40 percent of them are texting, but none of them are able to do multi-party texting.
From 3Jam’s trials, Jagoe says users are reporting they are using their phone more. Jagoe says multi-party messaging could mean a 30 percent increase in overall text messaging.
One user sent more 656 messages in a 4-week period, and some said they’d pay for the capability, Jagoe said.
(Update: We should have mentioned how 3Jam plans to make money. 3Jam wants revenue share from telecom carriers. Regarding pricing, no matter how many people are in the group, a reply counts as only one text message on their phone bill. Meaning, that if you send a group text message to four people, you don’t pay for four text messages, you pay for only one.)
We first mentioned 3jam back in May. At the time, the Menlo Park start-up had pulled in $500,000 of what was a $1 million venture capital commitment from New Enterprise Associates.
26 Comments
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Brian McConnell said:
We’ve had this capability at Radio Handi, a group communication service, for quite a while now. With it you can create a group about any topic or peer group, and then communicate via SMS chat, and also voice. Just send the command .voice while an SMS chat is in progress and everyone is invited to jump into a free conference call. SMS is great, but it has a lot of usability issues that get in the way of real-time communication.
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Dmitry said:
and who is paying for the extra SMS?
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Wai Yip Tung said:
“texting is the technology of the future”
I can’t help but this sounds rather optimistic. It is like saying telegraph is the technology of the future.
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Brian McConnell said:
I can say from my experience with Radio Handi that SMS chat is one of those things that seems like a good idea on paper, but in reality it doesn’t work as well as you’d think.
The main problem with SMS chat is that SMS is not really a real-time medium, both because of delivery delays, but mainly because people are often busy doing other things and don’t see texts come in immediately.
When we tested our group SMS product, what we found is that conversations usually fell apart because many people saw the messages much later than other people did. It is, however, a good way to quickly blast a message out to a group, but it’s really not a very good medium for an ongoing conversation. We thought it would be, but it turned out not.
The other issue is that unless you can get the carriers to pay you for SMS traffic you generate (they very rarely do), it’s an expensive service to offer.
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Andy Jagoe said:
3jam is about extending the basic text messaging functionality to allow people to send messages to groups of friends on an ad hoc basis–but for the price of a single text message. Reply-all group text messaging, correctly conceived and implemented, generates substantially higher text message usage.
We don’t do broadcast messaging, we don’t do audio streaming, and we don’t do public discussion groups. 3jam is focused exclusively on ad hoc reply-all group text messaging for you and your friends. We welcome additional feedback and we hope you enjoy the service.
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RisingSunofNihon said:
I think this sounds like a fantastic service and am sure it will do well. I definitely have a need for this type of group messaging capability, so where do I sign up?!!
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Andy Jagoe said:
Thanks, everyone, for the comments. You can sign up for the service at http://www.3jam.com.
If you’re a Treo user, all you need is to install a free and lightweight client app. Read today’s posting on Treonauts to find out all the details. We will be launching simple clients for many other devices. Please stay tuned.
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JSP said:
how do they make money?
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Matt Marshall said:
Sorry folks, for not including the business model stuff. I’ve updated, but basically 3Jam wants revenue share from carriers, and prices each message as one message (so that if you message four people in a group, it only counts as one message, not four messages).
Have also updated with the exact link for the Treo download.
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Terence Pua said:
Nothing new here…Filipinos have been doing group SMS for over 3 years now. US is just catching up here.
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gustaf said:
Upoc.com started doing this in the US in 1999. SMS is soon an obsolete technology for everything but maybe P2P messaging.
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Harshal Vaidya said:
In India, we’ve been doing group SMS from a long time. Every provider is capable of handling group SMS. Since I can make a group SMS on my Sony Ericsson T610 here in NY..I’m sure providers here are also capable of that. I’m not sure how is this a great new service. Maybe americans haven’t yet figured out how to use group SMS. ;-)
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Lex said:
Thanks, Terence. We’ll keep that in mind next time we’re all in the Phillipines.
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Matt Marshall said:
Still looking into all these services being talked about. In each case, they appear different from 3Jam. Upoc, for example, provides a public Yahoo-style group, but the group/friend creation model can\’t be done on the fly.
Also, people questioning SMS should tell me what platform will take its place. Yes, there are all kinds of newer technologies/platforms out there, but they are all splintered or have yet to take off.
An example from the UK: Users of supposed 3G phones who have access to mobile IM and a richer feature-set on their phone actually SMS more than 2G users (Jagoe tells me the figure is 85 percent, compared to 75 percent, respectively). Despite having pre-loaded software on their phone, use of products like mobile IM is lagging at about six percent. Still insignificant compared with SMS, though sure, that could change some day.
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cg said:
i’ve pretty much had this capability (more or less) on my Cingular RAZR phone for about 13 months. It gives me the ability to send to multiple people in my address book, and also has a “reply all” function. However if you get one of these messages you often don’t know that there are multiple recipients, making the reply-all feature worthless.
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Anon said:
I suspect any decent phone has this feature as part of the SMS application where you can select multiple addressees. Smartphones (e.g., Nokia) even allow the creation of groups in the address book.
Ofcourse, one could argue that this is the SMS equivalent of a mailing list, but given the “short” nature of SMS messages do we really need a SMS mailing list? Moreover, these “SMS” mailing lists expire at the end of a day unlike an email mailing list.
An interesting experiment - as long as some VC is bankrolling it. :)
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P-Air said:
Matt, you may also want to check out Mozes and Msgme (fm Waterfall Mobile) for others playing in the SMS space w/related or similar applications.
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Dr_Dave said:
I have a Treo and I can select multiple recipients for a text message with the standard SMS app on my phone. But I know that replies sent back by my friends don’t go to everyone in the original message - just me.
CG, what does the reply-all function on your RAZR do? Can’t seem to find anything like that on my Treo.
This seems like such a useful app that I’m surprised nobody has come up with this before! Going to check out if Mozes and Msgme do reply to all as well.
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eyederma said:
Washington Post goes mobile
Two weeks after saying it would look for new, digital outlets for its products, The Washington Post Co. has launched mobile phone versions of three of its publications.The Post says the new content sites, which provide access to the newspaper’s online edition as well as Slate and Newsweek magazine, are designed for viewing on mobile phones and PDAs. Access will be free and not require any registration.
Earlier this month, the Post moved Newsweek editor Mark Whittaker to the new position of editor-in-chief of New Ventures at its Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive division.
Whittaker, who’d been Newsweek editor since 1998, is now responsible developing wireless and multimedia ventures, as the Post (NYSE: WPO) looks for ways to offset its declining circulation and stagnating print advertising.
The Post’s digital sales have been rising steadily, with online publishing revenue up 36 percent last quarter.
The new sites are at http://www.twp.com, mobile.slate.com and mobile.newsweek.com. Content will also include access to archives for both the Post and Newsweek.
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Paul said:
A few years ago, here in Peru we used to have a service called Blah! a kind of mobile chat that used with nicknames instead of phone numbers, and allowed to send group messages too, but only to registered users and to certain mobile carriers. It worked mostly in Latin America, some US carriers joined later. The service is long gone now, so 3jam is an interesting new alternative.
I’ve been using 3jam for a couple of days with my friends and it seems much better than what we’ve used before. It is cheaper, easier and the most important thing: it allows us to send inter-carrier group messages paying for a single one. (Group messages using the Group feature available in mobile phones are priced as multiple texts here).
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Nick said:
I’ve tried all these different services, including 3jam. I found most of them too complicated to use and not enough features.
I use Peekamo.com, their solution is easy and keeps my phone number private. The archiving is a bonus, since I don’t like to keep all my messages on my phone.
Check it out, http://peekamo.com
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4 Trackbacks
4:18 am
The Relentless News Cycle « Screenwerk said:
[...] On the heels of the Loopt post, 3Jam launches one to many SMS. VentureBeat has more. [...]
10:58 am
3Jam: Stop copy-pasting your text message – 21talks said:
[...] 3Jam is a new one-to-many SMS service that will be launching at the DEMO conference. In essence, the service clones the email forwarding principle. Users set a contact list, send one message to a dedicated short-code number to make the service copy-paste the text message to their community. [...]
11:35 pm
VentureBeat » Yahoo launches Mixd for group texting, for going out said:
[...] See our post on 3Jam, where there are plenty of other services mentioned, including Radio Handi. Various forms of group texting have existed on carriers in other countries. Yahoo came up as an example of a service with “public” groups. This latest service gives you a way to create private groups to text with. (Techcrunch did a post on this earlier) [...]
11:41 pm
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