Send High Quality Unlimited Multimedia Messages For Free With Jongla
We talked about Jongla a couple of years back. The Finnish startup promised to leverage the personal capabilities of the mobile devices and become personal marketing tool. The startup offers smartphone users the ability to send unlimited text messages, videos, images etc across the globe for free. Sounds quite a useful tool for bulk marketing.
The core issues or problem addressed is with the limitations that we have when it comes to the size of the multimedia files we share via SMS or MMS and the quality that we do share is awful by all mean (could be my personal opinion). With Jongla, users are freed of this size and quality limitations with the traditional methods. With Jongla you can share all these files directly to their friends. So this means another application, another setup file, a whole new registration or account association. Well not exactly.
BrowserTexting Seeing Worldwide Growth After Going Freemium
You might remember our coverage of BrowserTexing last August. BrowserTexing is the Danish Android app that allows you to text from your phone number in your computer's browser. This makes it an valuable service for people who send a lot of text messages, group sms messages, and people who would rather type on their keyboard while leaving their phone in their pocket.
46elks Connect Apps To Voice And SMS
Making your app interact with voice and SMS often requires learning new software and buying hardware. 46elks is a Swedish start-up that offers a cloud-based platform that easily connects apps with telephony technologies. Founded in January this year, they have just released second alpha version of their product. The newest addition to the release enables apps to interact with phone calls as well as send and receive text messages. Developers can try it out for free with an invite, which you can get by registering on their website. Priority is given to developer communities from Europe to get feedback from their early users.
Blyk Closes A Whopping 17M€ Investment
The Finnish mobile media startup, Blyk, has closed a very impressive 17 million euro investment lead by Nexit Ventures and other individual investors. Blyk started off its path in 2006 as an ad supported virtual mobile operator, which was later pivoted to focusing on the mobile advertising platform as a business of its own. Blyk's revenues in the recent years have averaged around 12 to 22 million euros with over a six hundred thousand euro profit in 2009.
Fortumo Growing Like A Weed, Expands Into 9 New Countries
Fortumo, an Estonia portal that offers free access for website-owners and small businesses to monetize their user base through Premium SMS messages, announced that they are expanding internationally the way rest of us only tell our investors we do with little hope of actually doing it.
Fortumo announced that they are expanding into 9 major markets in Western Europe, namely UK, Germany, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, France, Belgium, Netherlands and Switzerland. That's right, 9 at once and we're talking about a startup which needs to deal with notarious Telcos to do this. This means today Fortumo is providing its service in 26 different countries.
Fortumo Enables Easy Creating of SMS-Based Services
Fortumo is an Estonian mobile service startup. The company advertises you can start earning revenue with SMS services in just 5 minutes, without any technical skills. They offer a simple way of creating different mobile services without startup or monthly fees.
The basic service version allows for different models like selling information via SMS, creating SMS-based text-to-win campaigns, or SMS-based chat boxes or advertisement columns to web pages. You can set the end user price and SMS keyword for your service yourself. In case you know your stuff and have a place to host your service, with a little coding you hook up to their APIs, create practically any kind of service you want, and get better revenue share. One of Fortumo's client is MTV Estonia, who uses SMS services in the programs and webpage e.g. to choose songs or win tickets in competitions.
Fortumo also has a couple of trial services: other enables pay-per-view video business for your YouTube videos, and the other one allows you to set up SMS chat board on your Facebook profile. While the services might not make too much commercial sense, they do give a good example of what kind of options you have with Fortumo.
Fortumo takes commission of the revenues earned by all the services created using their service. Fortumo takes 2-3% of the end-user price depending on country, type of service and volume. (I have to love the way they frame it, though, as after tax and operator share that would be more like between 6-10% of the net revenue.) In essence, the customer payout rates range from 30-60% of the end user price price after the tax, depending on the country and service type.
Fortumo currently supports billing in the Nordic countries and Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, and, interestingly, China (China Mobile and China Unicom). They mention in their blog two new countries in the Balkan Peninsula will be added soon, while continuing expanding in Europe, Asia and to North America. The biggest challenge for Fortumo most likely is that the mobile billing channels are notoriously hard and slow to establish (if trying to go direct).
Dopplr adds automated trip updates
Dopplr has finally added three key features that have kept it short of TripIt in terms of ease of use. With their newest update, Matt Jones writes, that you are now able to add trips through Twitter, SMS and e-mail.
Twitter and SMS automations work alike, you need to send a private message to the Dopplr bot and it will add your trips to your account (after you've activated your account to support these of course). Lastly, the email update works just as Tripit's trip updater - you send the itinerary/confirmation received from your airline to Dopplr and they will update the trips accordingly to your account. This has been a major shortcoming in terms of adding new trips and will surely speed things up in the future.
Another question to ask is; Will Dopplr be looking forwards to integrating itself closer to Tripit and possibly looking for an early sell-off?
