Joopz.com — free US web based two-way texting
I had a note from Tracy asking if I’d checked out Joopz yet. I hadn’t — but I have now. It’s gorgeous — absolutely gorgeous.
Created by MobileSphere, Boston, Joopz delivers a wide array of compelling features on top of straight text messaging — including Group Chat, Text Reminders and Scheduled Messages.
I really like the scheduled messages feature. If you knew someone was going for an interview on Monday at 9am, you could schedule a text to them to say ‘good luck!’ at 8.50am. Smart!
Alas it’s only US based at the moment but set to expand internationally soon.
Got a US number? Check it out and let me know what you think?
sorry but the information provided before I am forced to signup is too little, going on non-existent. And I aint signing up to anything that uses those ghastly words “FREE TEXTS” because I know for damn sure that there has to be some tiny bit of smallprint in there somewhere that tells me why they are free and why I probably won’t like that.
Bring it back to the table when you are prepared to be open and honest with your potential customers.
9/10 for nice looking website
7/10 for effort
0/10 for execution
StevieP
Posted by steve procter on October 4th, 2006 at 10:44 am.iTAGG
I work for the company that is providing the service. There is no small prints associated with “Free”. It is really Free. Since we are introducing the concept of web texting, we felt that customer feedback is critical at this stage. Thaty is why we’ve decided to offer it for Free for now. This may change in the future as we may move to subscription based service. There are no string attached. Feel FREE to sign up.
Posted by Toufic on October 6th, 2006 at 10:27 pm.Ewan, what’s ‘gorgeous’ about it? The website’s kind of pretty. Nothing exactly revolutionary.
This goes back to my point about the US market being so many years behind the UK in terms of service offerings. On the plus side if you throw enough mud, and i’m talking ‘SuperSize me’ style amounts, some will stick, and a few cool services may emerge.
Steve, you should know that US SMS work differently to the UK; users pay to receive SMS and as such buying them to send is much cheaper(and depending on how big / connected you are sometimes free). This service is much easier to run in the US therefore.
Ewan, imho you need to make bigger notices up front that a service is ‘US’ and ‘US only’!
Posted by njar on October 7th, 2006 at 6:06 pm.I was referring to the look with ‘gorgeous’ description.
I think you’re right about distinguishing between US/UK njar. I’ll do that in future.
Posted by ewan on October 7th, 2006 at 6:37 pm.I eat my words - seems I was able to register if I tweaked the format of my mobile number - needed to +447 format.
It does say ‘US Cell numbers only’ when you sign up, so perhaps I’m in breach of their terms.
I rather suspect that it may be a case of it’s available to us brits because they’ve not got round to actively blocking it (but i could be wrong).
It looks like they don’t have their shortcode live on Verizon, and this could be because this service is deemed to be a ‘chat service’ and Verizon currently have a chat service approval freeze on. If this is the case, the +1 number is probably a slight hack to enable Verizon users to still get involved, and as it’s a regular number it means us Brits can send to it. Again I could be wrong on all parts.
In the UK it would likely need an ICSTIS prior approval form, although if it’s totally free then perhaps not.
My point on the Joopz post holds for this one in terms of the fact you can send cheaper SMS in the US (since the user pays to receive them), however sending to the UK and worldwide will get very costly. There therefore needs to be a method of monetising this service (other than vc)
If it’s not premium I’m not sure if it’s red card material.
Posted by njar on October 7th, 2006 at 6:38 pm.cross post - this latest one of mine relates to 3JAM
(doh)
Posted by njar on October 7th, 2006 at 6:45 pm.