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Content Tagged with SMS + free

It’s another beautiful day in the San Francisco Bay area, though unfortunately it’s going to be spent indoors, in meetings, as we plan for our Structure 08 conference. Almost everyone in the company except Stacey is going to be in the office, and that means a hectic and challenging day. Thankfully there is no SF Giants game today, so we won’t have any crazy onlookers walking past our digs. Anyway, here are some interesting links that might be worth checking out:

• The Wall Street Journal reports that AT&T wants DISH to pay back $500 million in convertible notes, a move that indicates the partners might be on the verge of breaking up. Of course, it also indicates that AT&T has no interest in buying DISH anymore. WSJ points out that DirecTV has leveraged the HDTV trend better than DISH. The growth in the satellite industry has almost halved. AT&T’s move shouldn’t come as a surprise — they have to grow their IPTV business, and fast.
• France is going to ban illegal Internet downloaders, according to Times UK Online. So much for the great, technology-friendly President Sarkozy. He’s joined the likes of Universal’s CEO, in my book — people who don’t quite understand the real issues around the Internet and believe in strongarming.
• Apparently the guys at PPLive have no such problems. Meet the Asian Joost, which is cranking out some big numbers and is on the prowl to buy its way into the U.S. market.

 

• Amidst all its misery, Motorola has something to celebrate. Its GPON division has found two new buyers, even if they are microscopic in size.
• Are you a Wi-Fi thief? The answer is yes. Seriously, I’m not joking about that.
• More Free SMS for you…and I mean FREE. You know how much I love free SMS services. Today, the folks at 3Jam have introduced a new service that would allow you to send and receive free SMS messages. It’s also context-aware. It’s still in beta, and the first 100 GigaOM readers can try it. I think this one could catch on. Watch how it works on YouTube.
• By the way, did you know that men like the mobile web and constitute 88.1 percent of total web users? Or so claims Opera. I think that would be that 88.1 percent of Opera users are men. Nearly 14.7 million used their Opera Mini to browse the web. Great, though not as much fun as iPhone browsing. I use it for checking out WAP.MLB.COM — all the time!
• There is a growing army of people who, like me, stumble into becoming web workers, which isn’t as easy as it seems.
• And if all that seems frivolous, then it is frivolous. Check out this report on Earth2Tech, which points out that our planet’s climate change problems are worse than previously thought. This comes from a group of highly respected, Nobel Prize-winning scientists.

Before I sign off, I just wanted to get your feedback on this “interesting” post — if you like it or not, should I carry on or not, or perhaps how best to improve it. I have embedded a little poll for a spot test.

Earlier this morning I met with Sarik Weber, co-founder of Hamburg, Germany-based mobile callback service, Cellity. He brought me up to speed on his company, but he also mentioned that they had launched a Facebook application that allows you to send free SMS messages to anyone worldwide.

I signed up for the app but also looked at the competitive landscape and found that there are around three dozen (free) SMS-related apps, but they have little or no usage. Even the best ones get about 500 users a day, though most have fewer than 50 daily users. (Related story: 5 Ways to SMS for free.)

The state of these SMS apps is no different from many social voice applications (voice widgets). The only difference being that the VoIP widgets have high incidence of installs but comparatively low daily usage.

These two examples make me question the viability of Facebook as a communications hub. Our columnist Daniel Berninger has eloquently made an argument for a social directory that uses Facebook and other social networks to break away from the current paradigm of numeric phone numbers.

He is part of a group that believes social networks could be used to authenticate our “communication” relationships. I don’t necessarily disagree with Daniel, but the usage metrics of SMS and voice apps makes me wonder if Facebookers really want to do anything more than throw Vampire Bites, Scrabble and pretend to have a lot of friends.