Mobile Behavior: an Omnicom Group Company

Textie is a text messaging application for Apple mobile devices. By the makers of Tweetie (recently acquired by Twitter), Textie lets users across iPhones, iPod Touches, and iPads message anyone for free, send photos, and receive push notifications.  Just as Skype for iPhone worried carriers, this should too.

For those under 30, it's hard to remember a time when the text message did not exist. The first SMS message was sent in 1993 by a Nokia engineering student, Riku Pihkonen. While telecom companies didn't see it as important, users discovered the power of quick, short messages. It was perfect for modern life and has since exploded; trillions of messages are sent in a year.

While traditional SMS is ubiquitous now, it's functionality is limited -- namely, it's siloed on the phone and it's 1:1. People have developed ways around this -- you can SMS from GChat and group message through TextPlus, for example. Textfree has also solved the expense problem. For some, Twitter replaces SMS because you can access it anywhere. Motoblur introduced a universal inbox to certain Motorola phones, enabling users to check all their messages (SMS, email, tweets...) in one place.

Textie is yet another way to have a better messaging experience. For one, it looks pretty -- clean, simple, well-designed. It combines SMS and email into one unified place. You can communicate with people who don't have the app. Oh, and it's free.

Carriers should be scared. And they should be thinking of ways to improve SMS, and not just overcharge for an archaic service. Otherwise we expect users will gradually move to these free and flexible alternatives.

Pathways To Housing and Sarkissian Mason are using mobile technology to build awareness around helping the homeless. 

The campaign to raise awareness hopes to create interaction with someone most people just pass by, in prompting the public to interact with the virtual homeless man by SMSing a number that opens a door.

One simple text message lets users make a quick donation towards the project.

See it demonstrated here.

[via debaird / @derekeb]

At last night's Academy Awards, the world received a call-to-action from Richard O’Barry, a key figure in the awarded film “The Cove". During the acceptance speech for "Best Documentary Film", he unrolled a sign to then raise up triumphantly. It read: "Text DOLPHIN to 44144".

The cameras quickly panned away from Richard towards the audience, but by observing how sluggish the system was, it seems the damage was done. It took three hours and twenty-five minutes to receive a response message. I woke up this morning now opted-into monthly “dolphin alerts” and linked to a petition for President Obama.

"The Cove" is a documentary about the dolphin slaughter in Taiji, a small Japanese town where dolphins are herded and then butchered by fisherman. Before Richard and crew took the stage, the world was shown clips of dying dolphins leaving streams of blood as they unsuccessfully tried to escape the deadly cove. As the clips ended I heard a sniffle and looked over to discover a friend in tears. Just a fifteen-second clip was enough to transport my friend to that level of passion. Thanks to Richard’s controversial sign, my friend didn’t just wipe away the tears and move onto Alec Baldwin’s next pun. Instead, through text-messaging, she was provided an outlet to immediately act on.

As marketers, we strive for consumer engagement and  their interaction with our brands. We spend a lot of time and money in order to reach audiences on a certain emotional level so that they’ll do just that. What we need to remember are the available tools placed in front of us. With mobile devices, these inspired moments of heightened emotion can be captured.

For Chinese New Year, those residing in the Middle Kingdom sent a total of 23 billion text messages over the course of a week. Over half of those being sent in the first two days.

According to Engadget, these were sent by just the 747 million phone users in China.

Imagine what would've happened if all 1.3 billion people in the country had a phone during Chinese New Year. Throughout the same period, China also produced 1.33 billion MMS messages -- a staggering 40 percent increase from last year -- while China Telecom, China Mobile and China Unicom operated 127.6 percent, 19.5 percent and 15.7 percent more voice calls respectively.

Clearly, by observing the provided numbers, we are able to get a good sense of the level of social activity within a country by way of mobile technology.

The Capital Area United Way is applauding their successful activation of a text messaging campaign, one that raised $8,550 during a LSU-Auburn football game at Tiger Stadium. Fans made $5 donations by texting LSU to 864833, an option that is still open for those wanting to help out.

[via textually]