July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

The “Father of SMS” (aka text messages) recently participated in an interview with the BBC to celebrate the communication’s 20th anniversary.

While the first text message was sent Dec. 3, 1992, Finnish engineer Matti Makkonen first conceived of the idea eight years earlier. He rarely conducts interviews, but the BBC was able to ask him questions using SMS, which made for an interesting style for an interview.

“Twenty years ago, I didn’t see SMS as separate issue – it was just a feature in the revolutionary mobile communications system. Very useful for quick business needs,” said Makkonen, adding that he’s happy that GSM networks took over the technology (thus enabling rich media messages with images and video.)

Modestly, Makkonen said he doesn’t consider himself the inventor of SMS messages due to the various engineers it took over the years to implement the new messaging communication. And while he’s not a fan of using the “Txtskp” (commonly abbreviated words and expressions), he does think it’s somewhat of an evolving language on its own.

As for the longevity of text messaging in another 20 years,  Makkonen said, “20 years is long time … I believe that reliable convenient to use text messaging will stay forever. Is not necessary what we call SMS. No more pay per message.”

The most interesting observation from the text message interview was Makkonen’s prediction about the next big step in communication technology. “Integration of mobile content display to my eyeglasses would be nice. Maybe someone is working with it?” he said.

And in fact, several big tech firms are doing just that. Google looks like it’ll be first to market with its Google Glass “smart” eyeglasses, but Microsoft just secured a patent for its own set of smart glasses.

Texting image via koya979/Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

If you’re a Google Voice user, today is not a good day to be sexting. The voice over IP calling service had a glitch this morning that associated incorrect phone numbers with outgoing text messages.

“Google Voice experienced an issue displaying the incorrect caller ID for outbound SMS. The issue should now be resolved. We apologize for any inconvenience caused.”

People using SMS messaging ran into the problem earlier this morning when text messages were being sent with random numbers, as opposed to the person’s selected Google Voice number. The issue was spotted by The Verge when a number of people began complained the switch-up on Google Voice’s forums. Some on the forums explained that the problem spanned across operating systems, but didn’t affect calls.

To add to the confusion, however, the phone numbers changed with each text message, interrupting any conversation threads.

Google says the glitch has been fixed, but you should check each message throughout the day, just to make sure. You should also check to make sure you weren’t affected earlier in the day. Many businesses use Google Voice and if you missed the text message glitch, you might want to get in touch with your contacts to make sure there wasn’t any confusion.

Funny text message image via Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

After gaining notoriety for its popular cross-platform video chat apps, Tango has decided to tackle a decidedly lower-tech challenge: text messages.

With the latest Tango update, users will be able to send and receive free text messages in a streamlined interface that also includes Tango’s video messages.

By adding text messages, Tango hopes to be the one app that you’ll use to stay in touch with friends and loved ones, CTO and co-founder Eric Setton told VentureBeat in an interview last week. Text messages also puts Tango in company with the likes of Facebook Messenger and Apple’s iMessage, though Facebook doesn’t have video chat capabilities, and iMessage doesn’t work outside of iOS.

Setton tells me Tango now has 55 million registered users, with 40 percent of them being active in the past month. The company has apps available for iOS, Android, Windows Phone, and Windows PCs. Cross-platform functionality is one of Tango’s greatest strengths: Setton demonstrated how a text and video message from an iPhone instantly appeared on an Android.

As part of the update, Tango will also be making video messages entirely free (previously the company had a complicated method of charging users for video messaging). And to spice things up a bit, you can also send Tango’s Surprises (short and fun animations) within the messaging interface as well.

Palo Alto, Calif.-based Tango has raised around $87 million in funding, most recently from a $40 million third round in April. Investors include Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Michael Birch, Andy Bechtolsheim, and Bill Hambrecht.

Photo: Devindra Hardawar/VentureBeat

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

With a keen eye for technology that could benefit users in emerging countries, Google today launched Gmail SMS, a service that will let you send and receive messages from your Gmail account via text messaging.

The service, which will initially be available in Ghana, Nigeria, and Kenya, lets users tap into the much more ubiquitous (and reliable) voice cellular networks, instead of relying on Internet connectivity. It’ll open up Gmail to people who only have feature phones with basic voice and texting capabilities, and for others it’ll be a useful fail-safe for dealing with shoddy network infrastructure.

The service shows that there’s still plenty of life in SMS in emerging markets, even as consumers move to data-based messaging tools like iMessage and Facebook Messenger in more developed countries. There’s little overhead with SMS, since it’s a core part of most cellular networks, and it remains essential in countries that don’t have significant mobile web coverage.

After signing up for Gmail SMS, your e-mail messages will show up as text messages automatically. You can reply to e-mails directly through texts, and you can also use commands like “MORE,” “PAUSE,” and “RESUME” to control the flow of messages.

Google is offering Gmail SMS for free, though of course you’ll have to watch out for standard texting fees.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

In its ongoing quest to kill the alphabetical contact list, Evernote is bringing its Hello app to the Android for the first time on Wednesday. The app will have a few new features not available on the iPhone, including LinkedIn integration.

Hello, previously only available on the iPhone, uses picture tiles and a bit of psychology to make remembering people easier.  The app uses contextual information — such as where you met someone, who introduced you, and what the person was wearing — to help you remember the people you meet. Its photo-heavy interface encourages you to remember faces and names together.

Now, Hello is coming to Android with a few features not seen in the iPhone version of the app. One feature that has Evernote chief executive Phil Libin excited is a LinkedIn integration.

“The LinkedIn [integration] complete changes the workflow of the app. All you need is an email address and it gets everything else automatically,” said Libin in an interview with VentureBeat. “It gives you an easy way to connect [and] reduces the time to capture the encounter to about three seconds.”

With someone’s LinkedIn login email address, you can add their name, phone number, photo, and other information to their contact in Hello. You don’t even have to be connected with them on LinkedIn to grab their information. If someone’s not keen on giving you their LinkedIn login email, you can always manually enter their information into the app.

Hello for Android is also able to connect with call and text messaging logs to easily add contacts. Libin stresses that Hello only accesses your call logs and text messages locally and won’t send data anywhere you don’t want it to go.

Just like the iPhone version, Hello for Android will find your location and language to figure out to display someone’s name, based on the cultural standard.

“Hello was made for me. I have a hard time remembering people and it gives me a lot of stress. Evernote Hello is a natural way to remember people the way your brain does,” said Libin.

Hello’s original design encouraged you to hand your phone over to the person you just met to enter their contact info. Most people felt this was too invasive, so Evernote redesigned the app to give people the option to enter contact information themselves.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Beerud Sheth, a serial entrepreneur in India, figured out the way to reach the most people was not through computers or smartphones. It was through old-fashioned text messages on aging feature cell phones.

His Mumbai, India-based company, SMS GupShup has set up social networks in India that work via text messages. Now it has become India’s largest social network with more than 50 million users and the company is announcing today it has raised $10 million in a new round of funding.

“It’s a low-tech platform,” Sheth said in an interview. “But its weakness is its strength. It is inexpensive and reaches 5 billion users around the world. With our approach, you trade off ubiquity with richness and complexity.”

The fifth round was led by Tenaya Capital and it includes existing investors Globespan Capital Partners, Helion Ventures, and Charles River Ventures. To date, the company has raised $47 million over the past four years.

Sheth said the company will use the money to move into new markets and expand its team. That’s about taking the successful model that has worked in India and replicating it around he world. The company is expanding in Asia to markets such as Singapore and the Philippines.

The SMS GupShup model works well because of the way Indian carriers charge for text messages. Sheth said that Indian carriers charge a fee to the sender, but not the receiver. In the U.S., carriers charge both the sender and the receiver for text messages. Sheth said that his company pays for bulk messages at wholesale prices in order to send messages to networks of users. The company attaches text ads from brands that want to target specific kinds of users.

With SMS GupShup, users can sign up for interest-based groups that effectively become mini social networks. If you want to receive messages related to sports, you can sign up for them. There are now five million user-generated communities, 25,000 small businesses, and 500 regional and international brands on the service. that is why the company has quadrupled its revenues over the past year and could be profitable in the next six months to nine months.

Those communities generate 4 billion text messages a month, or 10 percent of India’s text message traffic. Overall, India has about 900 mobile phones but only around 9 million smartphones. Twitter has something like 2 million to 3 million users and Facebook has 20 million to 25 million users. There are no huge rivals in the Indian market.

“There are a billion people on the internet today and there will be two billion more in the next two years,” said Venky Ganesan, managing director of Globespan Capital, said in an interview. “They will get there via mobile devices and SMS GupShup is the best way to play that trend. This company could be the Tencent of India,” a reference to Chinese social networking leader Tencent.

The company said it has added Ravi Sundararajan as vice president of marketing and Samir Parekh as vice president of human resources. SMS GupShup was founded in 2007 and it has more than 200 employees as well as a distributed sales force of around 1,000 contractors.

As smartphones gain traction, SMS GupShup will have apps ready on those platforms. Sheth previously was co-founder of Webaroo and was founded of Elance.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Mobile marketing company Zoove has been around since 2004, but president and chief executive Joe Gillespie said this is the year the company’s brand advertising campaigns will take off.

The Palo Alto, Calif. company just announced deals with Sprint and T-Mobile. It’s already partnered with AT&T and Verizon, so it now has more than 95 percent carrier penetration in the United States, Gillespie said.

Zoove operates a registry of what it calls StarStar Vanity Numbers. These numbers take the format **BRANDNAME, and they can be used for SMS text message campaigns. The problem, Gillespie said, is that each carrier has to agree to support the registry, and without all the major carriers on-board, the campaigns weren’t very appealing to advertisers. Asking consumers to dial **LATTE to receive a coupon is a cool idea, but if you have to add, “Only works on AT&T and Verizon,” that ruins some of the magic.

This sounds like a compelling and easy way to connect advertising in other media to mobile phones. To use a hypothetical example, the studio behind the latest Shrek movie could release a poster asking people to send a message to **Shrek, and then those fans will get a link to the movie trailer. Or, to cite a campaign that Zoove has actually run, The Early Show on CBS can ask viewers to use the StarStar Vanity Numbers to vote in different polls.

(Update: The comapny says users don’t send a text initially — they make a phone call to the vanity numbers and get a text message in response.)

Advertisers should get more response from Zoove than from normal text message campaigns, because consumers don’t have to memorize a random phone number. And unlike the QR codes that smartphone owners can scan to access additional content, Zoove isn’t limited to device with QR code readers — it works on any phone that supports SMS.

Gillespie said Zoove has created a pricing plan that accommodates large and small companies. Basically, the shorter your vanity number, the easier it is to remember and the more Zoove will charge you.

Zoove’s most recent funding was a $13 million round in 2009. Investors include Cardinal Venture Capital, Highland Capital Planners, and Worldview Technology Partners.

Backed by a number of former YouTube employees, ReplyBuy lets users sign up to receive text messages for daily deals with partner merchants. ReplyBuy users can also text back to purchase the deal, after signing up and saving their payment information on the company’s site. It operates in the same space as Groupon in the sense that users have to purchase the product through ReplyBuy, rather than use the text message as a flat discount and buy from the vendor.

That’s all fine and dandy, but I’m also a fan of the (really) little guy. Today that’s Zaid Farooqui, a fellow Tar Heel over at UNC-Chapel Hill that’s been working on a text message coupon startup for a little more than a year. BlinkCoupons lets students at UNC and Chapel Hill residents sign up to receive text message alerts for coupons at local restaurants and stores. Right now BlinkCoupons is partnered with the Daily Tar Heel, the university paper for Chapel Hill. It’s also moving into other papers as well, Farooqui said.

So here we have a tale of two startups. One startup is launching today that is backed by prominent investors. One startup is run by a young student still in school. The generational divide there is pretty telling: texting is still as popular and has as much potential as it has always had. It’s particularly popular in a time-robbed generation filled with early adopters and tech-savvy folks looking for the latest deal (like myself).

Granted, smartphone sales are crashing the mobile phone party at an alarmingly increasing rate. The smartphone market grew 95 percent last quarter when compared to the same quarter a year earlier, when 80.9 million new smartphones shipped. And there are plenty of new options outside of text messaging for smartphones — like Kik, a personal favorite of mine. But amidst the multitude of ways to communicate on smartphones, texting remains the one standard that  every phone, no matter how dumb or smart, can support.

The logical extension of that is to bring e-commerce into the equation. I know I used my fair share of BlinkCoupons while I was a student at UNC-Chapel Hill. I’ve been craving a service like that for some time now in San Francisco. I can only hope that this is a sign to come with startups like BlinkCoupons and ReplyBuy making their moves across the country.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Kik, the new chat application for smartphones that is faster and more social than standard text messages, continues to report astounding growth in traffic after exclusively revealing the launch of its service to VentureBeat.

The company tells me it registered 250,000 new users in 24 hours yesterday, pushing it over 900,000 total registrations. It’s on track to blow past a million users today, just two weeks after launch. That growth would be unprecedented for any service. [Update: Just an hour after I posted this, the company says it broke 1.1 million users.]

“And it’s still accelerating,” chief executive Ted Livingston tells me. See chart below.

Kik’s charm is its speed. For now it’s also dead simple: It doesn’t let you send attachments, such as photos.

Despite that, Kik has some impressive technology behind the scenes created by Livingston, a former strategist for RIM’s BlackBerry Messenger unit.

And it appears amazingly viral. By targeting smartphone users, it appeals to a subset of all mobile users. But as Livingston explains, those smartphone users are more likely to be connected to each other — and that helps with viral growth. Right now, Kik’s users are clustered in North America.

Once you download Kik (which runs on iPhone, Android or BlackBerry devices), it checks your phone’s address book and recommends contacts you know who have already have downloaded Kik. This part, I’ve since realized, is its secret sauce: For me, it pulled contacts aggressively, including some names I didn’t recognize — but it’s also really effective, because it let me start chatting with my friends immediately.

Kik only takes the final step of adding names to your Kik address book if you message them. You can delete contacts with a finger swipe.

Kik competes with apps like WhatsApp and PingChat. (In a sign of the ecosystem sprouting up around RIM’s headquarters, Kik’s offices sits across the hall from PingChat’s office in the same incubator center in Waterloo, Canada.)

WhatsApp arguably has more features. It lets you send multimedia, such as photos, video and audio files. That may be why WhatsApp gets higher ratings in the app stores.

Like some IM services, Kik lets you see messages instantly. You can even see when the other person is typing. As a result, it feels more immediate than standard text messages and competing chat apps. It labels each message as either “sent,” “delivered” or “read,” letting you know in real time when the user gets and reads it on the other end. The only other service that does this is BlackBerry Messenger. But Livingston says Kik’s service is even faster than BBM. And Kik’s service is free for smartphone users, most of whom are already paying for data plans but may have to pay extra for SMS text messages — which are a notorious ripoff in terms of price per kilobyte of data.

Some commenters on my original Kik post said they don’t think the service’s improvements are good enough to make them switch from SMS. It’s yet another app to download, and why do that when everyone already has SMS? However, others said it worked so smoothly and speedily that they think it has a very good chance to catch on. One user said it it is “perfect” enough that it beats out similar services, just liked Skype beat out other voice-over-Internet services.

Right now, at least, Kik is seeing some crazy growth. The service even hit some traffic limits on RIM yesterday after Kik sent 10 million messages via RIM phones, but Livingston said RIM is increasing the limits.

So what do you think? Is Kik going to kill SMS, or is it just a passing fad?

The chart below shows usage going up significantly from when I last wrote about the service early Wednesday. Kik drew 12,000 users every half-hour at Thursday’s peak, up from 12,000 users every hour on Wednesday.