Messaging

AT&T Wireless currently has two text messaging plans. 1. $10 per month gets you 1,000 messages. 2. $20 per month gets you unlimited messages. Guess which option is going to disappear in a few days?

Join Baratunde Thurston (left), The Onion’s Director of Digital and author of How to Be Black, for an entertaining look at creative social media campaigns in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. Other speakers include Morin Oluwole (Facebook), Tim Devane (bitly), and SocialTimes' writer Devon Glenn.   Register now.

Video courtesy of LGTexter2010

Got really fast texting fingers? Interested in seeing some of the fastest fingers in the U.S.? If so, you might be interested in the LG U.S. National Texting Championship. You can see a bit of the competition from the 2009 competition in the video embedded above. LG’s site says that it is possible to win up to $100,000. That’s some serious money for texting IMHO. Twenty-four finalists will compete in New York City today for the grand prize.

FYI: LG says that you can win up to $2500 from home. More information is on their Facebook page.

http://www.facebook.com/lgtexterus

The main contest web site is here.

http://www.lgtexter.com/

My long standing belief based on casual observation was that most tweeting was being performed using thumbs flying across a virtual keyboard or physical thumb keyboards on smartphones. However, according to Twitter (the firm) itself, this is not the case. 78% of tweets by people are created using the twitter.com website interface!

The Evolving Ecosystem

Twitter acknowledges that a given individual user may use more than one interface. So, the totals from the other major tweeting tools add up to more than 100%. So, what is the most used mobile Twitter creator? Why, none other than Twitter’s own mobile friendly page at m.twitter.com at 14%. Number 3 was even more surprising: SMS (text messaging) at 8% tied with the Twitter (formerly Tweetie) for iPhone app.

I added up the other mobile interface percentages (splitting TweetDeck & Echofon which combined their desktop and mobile clients together) and found that 42% of tweets from a given average user came from a mobile device.

The lesson learned, I believe, is that the path of least resistance is the one taken even with Twitter. The top 3 methods of tweeting all require zero app installation (Twitter.com, m.twttier.com, and text messaging).

FYI: You can find me on Twitter at: @ToddOgasawara

CNN reports that some flights in Europe are returning to operation despite new ash clouds. But, if you know of people looking for additional inforamtion to get to their destination, you might want to let them know about a SMS-powered Facebook page enabled by Ericsson Labs where people can text questions to in order to try to get information. Instructions for the service can be found in this blog post:

Stranded in Europe. Need help?

The Facebook page where the threads live are found at:

Stranded in Europe

YOu can SMS a question in the form of:

“labs volcano question-text”

to:

+46737494050

To anyone still stranded in Europe or attempting to get back home to Europe: Best wishes, good luck, and safe travels!

YouTube video courtesy of TechFlashVideos

I discussed my good experience with Microsoft Research’s freeware Image Composite Editor for stitching panoramas from photos taken by my Nexus One. Here’s another very cool (actually much cooler) Microsoft Research project reported by TechFlash’s Todd Bishop…

Microsoft’s Translating Phone

So, what can this research project do (it is not available for general use)? It can transcribe voicemail (Google Voice already does this – somewhat). The next part is quite interesting: It translates from one language to another (German to English in the demo above) and then uses a speech synthesizer to speak the transcribed and translated speech.

Ribbit Mobile is a Google Voice-like service that was acquired by British Telecom. It’s service, however, is available right here in the US of A (as they say). Unlike Google Voice, Ribbit does not offer the choice of using a unique Ribbit-provided phone number or your own cell phone number.

I was fortunate enough to get a Ribbit Mobile beta service account for testing recently and followed Ribbit’s instructions to auto-forward unanswered calls from the cell phone I use as my main voice phone to Ribbit.

The initial tests of calling my phone, letting it ring until it went to voice mail, and leaving a voice mail all worked fine. Ribbit recorded my message and sent an email notification. The problem turned up with the first actual incoming call I received after setting up the service (a call from my daughter). My cell phone rang once and then stopped. My daughter said she heard a strange sound on her end and then ended the call. Both my phone and Ribbit logged it as a “missed call”. A second test confirmed this odd behavior.

Fortunately, Ribbit provides clear instructions on how to deactivate call-forward-on-no-answer. My phone rang normally and let me pick up the call as usual after deactivating Ribbit.

My action plan is to activate Ribbit for testing once a month until it seems to work as expected and then begin longer term testing of the service. Let’s hope this happens soon.

I love my Google Voice service and my Google number. It is what I give out to many people now. If I decide to switch between carriers everyday (I have multiple carriers to test phones), I can just change which one it forwards to my current primary phone with worrying about number portability. I also have that number set to forward and ring both my desk phone and cell phone during the working hours during the work week. So, I am probably one of the few people not tempted to take advantage the new feature that lets you use…

Google Voice with your existing number

If you check Google’s…

Basics: Using a Google number vs. a non-Google number

…you’ll find quite a few features disappear if you decide to use your non-Google number with Google Voice.

I think I’m going to setup a second Google Voice account to test this non-Google number service. I don’t want to mess around with my current configuration. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” is my philosophy in this particular matter.

17 billion text messages were sent in the U.S. in 2000 and 500 billion in 2004. Let’s assume that this has at least doubled to 1 trillion text messages this year (probably an underestimate on my part). People without add-on text messaging plans pay about 20 cents per message. If you have some kind of plan, you probably pay about 1 to 5 cents per message depending on a variety of factors (limited vs. unlimited plans & how many messages you actually sent). Text messaging is probably the most expensive data related service in the U.S. on a per byte basis.

Let’s compare it to a typical 3G wireless data plan for something like the Verizon or Sprint MiFi 3G WiFi router. Both firms charge $60/month for 5 gigabytes of data. Let’s assume that the typical text message is about 100 characters long (a huge overestimate in my opinon, but it makes the simple math even simpler). That means that you could send the equivalent of 50 million 100 character long text messages every month and still not go over the 5GB/month 3G limit. And, yet, cell phone companies typical charge $5 per month for a mere 200 to 300 messages and $20 per month for unlimited. Although fractional 3G data accounts are not available, let’s say for the sake of argument that you could get a 1.6GB per month 3G data plan for $20 month. It would let you send 1.67 million messages per month. Even with an unlimited $20 per month text message service, will ever send anywhere near 1.67 million messages per month on your phone?

According to MyNewsJunkie, the U.S. Senate has a few questions of their own for cell phone carriers about their text message pricing…

Cell Phone Execs Will Face Questions On Text Messaging Price Hikes

Their answers should be very interesting (if not downright amusing).

The Los Angeles Times has a great story that tells us…

Why text messages are limited to 160 characters

I’ve wondered about that 160 character limit but never thought to learn why that number was chose (as opposed to something like 255 for example). The article explains how Friedhelm Hillebrand (working for German Telecom) decided upon the number after some informal tests of simply typing a bunch of sample sentences.

The article also explains that Twitter’s 140 character limit comes from SMS text messaging’s 160 character limit. Twitter reserves 20 characters for a unique user address and leaves the rest (140) for the tweet.

As always, you can find me on Twitter at: @toddogasawara

Mobile transaction network mBlox has expanded into the mobile advertising market with the launch of an ad-insertion pilot. According to the company, this pilot program is meant to demonstrate the effectiveness of putting ads in the “dead space” in commercial SMS messages. Content publishers and service providers will benefit because the ads will offset the cost of sending an SMS.

mBlox isn’t altruistic, however. The addition of an advertising service gives it a new space in the mobile value chain, connecting content providers and ad networks.

The pilot will run with an inventory of 10 million messages a month. Content providers have the opportunity to review and improve any ads that are inserted into their messages. Also, mBlox will vet all messages sent to ensure that consumers aren’t spammed with unwanted SMS messages.

Publishers and content providers taking part in the trial include Myxer, LSN and dmd:mobile. Participating advertisers and ad networks include MoVoxx, Kadoink, Jingle Networks and Pudding Media.