Comments on: How did I not hear about Teleflip before now?

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 04:33:38 +0000

Teleflip – Flip Your Phone…

Teleflip is revolutionizing communications between email and cell phones through flipMail™ and flipOut!™ services. Teleflip can deliver your email messages directly to ordinary non-smart cellphones. Teleflip is a largely free service but does cha…

By: Marcus

Marcus — Sun, 04 Feb 2007 01:00:14 +0000

right on billy. I don’t use my cell for sms nor do I want to. The last thing I need is for people to start using this damn serrvice.

By: Billy

Billy — Sun, 04 Feb 2007 00:57:01 +0000

Without the ability to opt out of SMS reception, which is in fact the case with major US cellular service providers such as T-Mobile, this service is detrimental to those who do not want to receive SMS messages. Yes, I know, I’ve heard it a thousand times before: someone can just email cell@cell-provider-domain.com or use some other service, given they know the provider. However, proponents seem to miss the point entirely. This simplifies an otherwise more involved process and opens it up to immense abuse.

By: Anthony

Anthony — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 23:18:26 +0000

I see nothing wrong with what Teleflip is doing, they are providing what seems like a great service for free. The issue here seems to be that no opt-in via short code is required. We run a site http://www.webtext.com with a strict anti-spam policy, these guys have gone around the short-code opt-in system but seem to be acting very responsibly. Best of luck to them. I may be wrong but I think US short code regulations would not allow their service (which I think is a great) on a short code, does anyone know if this is true?

Anthony

By: JP

JP — Sat, 06 Jan 2007 16:10:37 +0000

I think TeleFlip is a great innovation and very useful service.

But, it’s not very easy to protect. In a fact, everyone can build similar service in matter of days.

How to figure out the carrier by cell phone number then? Contact NeuStar, they can offer the number lookup service. They also announced a new pricing model last month which is VERY attractive to newborn startups.

Sorry Guy, but I just want to see this industry a little more transparent to avoid bubbles.

By: the watcher

the watcher — Fri, 08 Dec 2006 04:41:58 +0000

When the site becomes extremely popular as a free service it will be sold. Short advertisements will be attached to each message like the free yahoo email service by the new owner. I wish I thought of it!

By: Helge

Helge — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 15:04:13 +0000

asbestos cancer danger38

By: Accro au Web » Blog Archive » links for 2006-01-14

Accro au Web » Blog Archive » links for 2006-01-14 — Fri, 30 Jun 2006 21:51:48 +0000

[...] Microsoft hopes to cash in with click-on ads Suite un mémo “‘interne” de R. Ozzie largement divulgué, Microsoft parie sur les technologies liées à la pub en ligne qui ont fait le bonheur de Google. Article également intéressant en ce qu’il démontre que Microsoft tente de s’émanciper du PC. E (tags: TV media web microsoft) Om Malik on Broadband : » Silos Are For Grain, Not VoIP De l’importance de la compatibilité des terminaux pour le développement de la voix sur IP. A mettre en perspective avec le maquis tarifaire dont les abonnés de Free font depuis peu les frais (non-gratuité des appels à destination des opérateurs alte (tags: voip telephony telecom skype) Om Malik on Broadband : » Skype, The Bandwidth Hog Skype utilise les ressources CPU des PC des utilisateurs finaux. Cela est bien connu (principe du peer-to-peer), mais qu’en adviendra-t-il lorsque les terminaux seront des téléphones Skype ? (tags: security skype voip telephony telecom p2p) TechCrunch » How did I not hear about Teleflip before now? Est-ce qu’un service équivalent existe en France ? Ce serait bien commode. (tags: internet messaging web telecom telephony sms) TechCrunch » 1000Tags – Another Stupid, Brilliant Idea Comme le site à un million de dolars, l’idée qui marche une fois seulement ? (tags: folksonomy tag) TechCrunch » AOL Acquires Truveo Avec le développement de contenus multimédias sur le Web, un service d’indexage de ces contenus devient une nécessité pour pouvoir les trouver facilement. Rappelle l’initiative de Chirac sur quaero. Flickr. (tags: mp3 music tag search flickr) Transnets, des gadgets aux réseaux: Skype au quotidien Skype ne coûte rien et permet l’audioconférence. C’est vrai que c’est génial. A comparer avec l’article de Om Malik sur le même sujet. Les telcos n’aiment pas beaucoup skype… (tags: telephony skype social) [...]

By: Graydon

Graydon — Thu, 13 Apr 2006 05:32:30 +0000

It looks to be a good service. I’m wondering if the fact that it’s completely free makes some think twice… you know, the it’s too good to be free type of thing… there has to be something going on.

Just a thought.

By: Serena

Serena — Tue, 21 Feb 2006 01:45:06 +0000

Funny in that not funny way. I discovered teleflip on February 13. One week later it is gone!

By: Guy Botham

Guy Botham — Thu, 16 Feb 2006 00:20:53 +0000

Just reading all your comments. We figured out how to get the carrier info for every cellphone in USA/Canada. We only send one email per Teleflip (there are over 70 providers in North America). It’s a minimal cost to host the mailservers. We don’t store the emails, the email addresses, nor the cell numbers.
No spam. No selling numbers.
We’ve been running the servers since 2003 with no valid complaints.
Enjoy!
Guy@Teleflip.com
Founder

By: Fish

Fish — Tue, 31 Jan 2006 05:34:37 +0000

No one has discussed how Teleflip is figuring out the proper @carrier.com suffix?

I personally think that all that is happening here is that they try to send to all US providers and when they don’t get an error, they log the users number and the carrier that worked. Then they use this information for future sends. To speed the process up.

Just a thought. I hope its more complicated than that! Anyone have any ideas how they are doing this?

By: Marcus Troiano » Teleflip Lets You Send Free SMS Text Messages to Any North American Phone Via E-mail

Sat, 21 Jan 2006 18:18:52 +0000

[...] TechCrunch » How did I not hear about Teleflip before now? [...]

By: Stuart

Stuart — Wed, 18 Jan 2006 12:03:54 +0000

REply to Branco.
Thank you for your considered reply. After much thought I have now reasoned that an inexpensive model such as yours is a better economic model. However I predict that VOIP services will adopt a free SMS service for their paying customers i.e. Skypeout as a bait to reel in Non American
users. I see a divide forming.

By: Branko

Branko — Mon, 16 Jan 2006 18:41:18 +0000

While I think that the service offered by Teleflip is great and simple, I feel that it has serious flaws related to SPAM, billing model and reach. I discussed both in my blog posting on http://www.ipipi.com (http://blog.ipi.../11/237663.html).
Namely, while Teleflip has honest and progressive anti SPAM policy, it is not able to stop malicious use of its service. It is too easy to spoof IP address or email address for any throttling block to work efficiently.
Similarly, the billing model of email to SMS services/gateways is wrong. It is as if you had to pay for each piece of mail you received. Finally, the reach of Teleflip and similar services is limited to North America.
Stuart, for the reasons above it is not possible to find a service similar to Teleflip in most other countries in the world. The reason is economic in nature. When the sender pays there needs to be a business model associated with provisioning of such a service. There were many services over the years that offered PC to mobile SMS. Most of them were ad supported, however, few, if any remain today.
In my opinion, the only model that works is a paid one – which is what we at http://www.upsidewireless.com adopted. This prevents SPAM (economy does not work for spammers), provides global and two-way instant communication. Our customers mostly agree that it is also inexpensive and in many cases irreplaceable mean of communication.

By: panlibus

panlibus — Sun, 15 Jan 2006 16:07:56 +0000

Getting information to library users in ways that make sense to them…

With apologies for the plethora of Michaels and Crunches in this sentence… Michael Casey at LibraryCrunch picks up Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch post about Teleflip, and he considers possibilities for the deployment of such a product in the servic…

By: Bala

Bala — Fri, 13 Jan 2006 22:43:34 +0000

BTW Brian, if you think you are being spammed because you used the TeleFlip service, I recommend you report it to them. According to their website they have a “One strike – You are out” policy. http://www.tele...lip/faqpage.jsp

By: Stuart

Stuart — Fri, 13 Jan 2006 22:24:03 +0000

I have been searching the net for two days now and tried at least 20 different apps and clients/services and I still cannot find anything SMS PC to Mobile free for the UK. Does anyone care about it over here? Or are we a backward country? Still trying.

By: Bala

Bala — Fri, 13 Jan 2006 21:29:46 +0000

Just read their privacy policy and it is not comforting. Similar to what companies like Plaxo have. I don’t know if TeleFlip uses the data for marketing purposes now, but their privacy policy allows them to:
http://www.tele...lip/ppolicy.jsp;
of course with user approval, but we know how well that works.

By: Bala

Bala — Fri, 13 Jan 2006 21:20:09 +0000

This is so much better than having to figure out each Carrier’s ID. I have used a couple services such as this one. But at least one of them turned out to be misusing the wireless number for spam and other purposes.

Does anyone know how Teleflip uses the wireless number after the SMS is sent? Is it persisted in their system. If so for how long? Why?

What is their business model? Do they use the number for other services that are not transparent to the subscribers?

By: Michael Arrington

Michael Arrington — Fri, 13 Jan 2006 19:27:49 +0000

Brian – Nonsense. If this was a new service I’d believe its possible, but as I said I was late to see this, and I can’t find anything on the web about people complaining. I’ve been using this and have not received any spam whatsoever. Before you slam a perfectly wonderful free service, please look into this more.

By: Brian

Brian — Fri, 13 Jan 2006 16:20:06 +0000

DO NOT USE THIS SERVICE. I thought the teleflip thing was cool and sent myself and a friend a message. Within an hour I started to get spam on my phone via text message. DO NOT USE TELEFLIP.

By: archyblog » Blog Archive » Send an SMS to any cell phone in North America from your computer

Fri, 13 Jan 2006 15:40:03 +0000

[...] Source [...]

By: Sohail Mirza

Sohail Mirza — Fri, 13 Jan 2006 15:21:03 +0000

I think some of the commentors are missing the point of Teleflip. With Teleflip you don’t need to know the carrier of your message recipient, you only have to know their phone number. Teleflip figures out the carrier’s SMS domain, etc, etc. It does all the heavy lifting.

By: wuhsin

wuhsin — Fri, 13 Jan 2006 04:33:50 +0000

can do this through google’s toolbar site pretty easily for free.

http://toolbar....le.com/send/sms