We’re excited to launch our new 3jam TextMe widget.It lets your visitors to your page send you a mobile text message without revealing your phone number. And the best part is you can reply to the original text message and the conversation continues as long as you want.Try it out on your MySpace or any other page and let us know what you think.
We just announced an exciting partnership with Virgin Mobile here in the US.We?re working together with Virgin to offer 3jam enhanced text messaging services to 4.8 million subscribers.Here?s a pretty cool post on the launch by Oliver Starr.And here?s the press release with more info.
As always, the 3jam text messaging service still works on any carrier, not just Virgin Mobile.In fact, people are now using 3jam in more than 180 countries.
A special thanks to everyone who has been involved with 3jam to date. Well…it’s finally happened…we launch on Tuesday at DEMOfall in San Diego! If you’re attending the show, please drop us a line.
We have been working on a major upgrade to the 3jam service, which is currently being tested and will be available soon. Here is Enlai doing a late night hardware setup of one of our racks at the data center.
Dror Bin, Vice President and General Manager, SMS Division, Comverse says that SMS Is About to Become Even More Popular — and More Versatile
SMS is riding a growing wave of popularity. Global consumption will increase from 760 billion in 2004 to a mind-boggling 2,379 billion messages in 2010 — generating a whopping $50 billion in operator revenues.
SMS is one of the most accepted and popular communication channels in the world. Even with the advent of exciting multimedia content, SMS remains irreplaceable, certain to continue to reach new milestones as a global communications phenomenon.
SMS: There’s Just No Stopping It
Industry experts once predicted that MMS would cause SMS to wane and disappear. The opposite occurred: the popularity of text messages is growing. SMS and MMS do not actually compete against each other; they have complementary assets and are used differently. Rather than cannibalize each other’s traffic, they provide the user with more choice, convenience and control.
A basic, extremely effective communications channel, SMS pioneered messaging and data usage, creating a new market reality of broad consumer acceptance. It changed behavioral habits and even language usage in peer-to-peer communication. A convenient way to keep in contact, often cheaper than calling, SMS is only a couple of clicks away on the mobile phone, usually more accessible than emailing from a PC.
SMS usage is still increasing, even though new communications technologies such as MMS, mobile IM and mobile email are available to consumers.
We were at the Stirr mixer last week at Blue Chalk in Palo Alto…the event was a great success, and my thanks to Sean and Sanford for their work in putting it together.
That’s me standing next to Sean on the stairs. If you click on the link to the larger photos on Flickr you can see Enlai in the crowd just above Sean’s head and Tom all the way to the back right.
I was introduced to Rafe Needleman, whose technology writing I’ve been following for ten years. We had a great conversation, and he published some thoughts on 3jam on his CNET blog. Thanks Rafe!