Zemble publicly launches Tuesday morning, after a week of letting the founders’ family and friends test it out.
Zemble is a social networking site that allows users to text message en masse from the browser. Competitors in this space include Dodgeball and Twitter. TechCrunch has been following multi-person SMS for a long time but Zemble believes they have something new. Users create groups of friends, or Zembles, and can then text a message to the entire group at once. Not only can users send texts to several people simultaneously, recipients can opt to reply to all. While this may be a new text messaging feature, I’m not convinced that it’s preferable.
First of all, recipients cannot see who else was on the distribution list so it is difficult to know who you are replying to if you reply to all. Ludlow said that users can familiarize themselves with group members so that they know who they are writing when they reply to a group. I think that might just be too much to keep straight.
Even if I do know all of the recipients of my book club email list, (which I do), do I really want a text message from each of them to know who is bringing what dish to the next meeting? Not everyone has unlimited text messaging as part of their mobile phone plan so is it really wise to facilitate text spam?
To Zemble’s credit, they do allow users to turn off text notifications within certain groups. The site is designed like MySpace where users can personalize their pages and link to friends. As of Monday night, they had approximately 300 users.
Zemble was founded in Los Angeles in March.
“Our funding has come so far from a friends and family round,” Ludlow said. “We’ve managed to raise approximately $90,000, which has been good enough to get our product to this point. We’re open to looking for venture capital now.”
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seems to be down
doh. that was fast.
I would check it out but it looks like the server crashed. Maybe their first experience with the techcrunch effect! Hopefully for them it wont be the last.
Oops. Hey we’ve all been there, right? Just not after a fancy article by the esteemed Mr. Arrington.
well in this case, the fancy article was written by the brilliant Ms. Del Conte.
site still down.
so how much TechCrunch effect on site? I mean not the most popular one but on average.
Hey Guys,
Sorry the site is down right now. We were in the middle of a db update, when this was posted. The site should be up in a couple of minutes.
Regarding SPAM: you will never get SPAM from any member of zemble. Only your friends can send you messages and you can turn off messages from any group or person whenever you would like. The members of each group are clearly listed on your “zembles” page, so you will always know exactly who is in the group. We even have user specified group limits to make sure that you never get too many reply all messages from groups that you are not interested in.
Regarding the book club, zemble will probably be better used to let everyone know that the time has been changed from 8:00pm to 9:00pm, rather that what dish they are bringing.
-Johann Moonesinghe
Co Founder, Zemble.com
You might also want to check out HuddleBox (http://www.huddlebox.com/). HuddleBox gives you away messages for your cell phone. Its a great way to keep in touch with everyone. Text a message like “At the movies” to set your away message or “friends” to see all your friends’ messages.
Its a nice balance because you choose when you want to be involved in the conversation but at the same time, when you set your message, its available to everyone.
this is actually extremely useful– especially within my group of friends. every text message, but more importantly social invites are sent in bulk.
Yup, the services is good but depands on how you can dig inside…
Ok. You have a service that is substantially similar to existing competitors, including one owned by Google. You have 300 users. You raised $90,000 to get going and to develop your technology, which isn’t incredibly special or defensible. What’s the logical next step? Launch with a review on TechCrunch (while you’re doing a “db update”) and tell everyone you’re now “open” to venture capital. What a plan!
Any investor looking at a company like this as an investment opportunity should ask: why are they so eager to give me a piece of their company so early on if they really think they have a shot at success? Smart founders would at the very least try to get as far as possible without institutional funding. Gain traction. Get some validation. Put themselves in a position to get a better deal and better terms. Does building a copycat social network with $90,000 make you a bonafide candidate for institutional investors? I’m always skeptical of companies that are looking for a handout before they really have anything to show, and unfortunately there are a lot of VCs more than happy to fund these things despite the obvious and significant problems and challenges.
I am a member/user of the site and I don’t think people’s replies are “spam”. Besides, if you don’t want to be in a group, you click a button and you don’t get messages from that group anymore. You can also see on the site everyone who’s in the groups you’re in, even if you didn’t create it.
I use SMS to receive server error messages, but other than that I haven’t adopted it much, so this service is near useless for me. I much prefer email - it takes far too long to type sms messages, even on a nice phone.
how is this any different than another startup featured here called 3jam? i will say my first reaction was…’yet another site that allows me to create a friends list?!?!’ Drama 20 was right, how are any of these sms services defensible?
none of them.
You write: “Competitors in this space include Dodgeball and Twitter. TechCrunch has been following multi-person SMS for a long time but Zemble believes they have something new.”
To be fair, it appears as you may have inadvertently (or not?) left out even some of your own (Techcrunch) previously reviewed mobile group messaging tools that have recently launched.
Swarm-it! http://www.swarm-it.com, in fact does all that Zemble does and more, allowing you much finer and granular control on who gets the message and what he/she can do with it.
Further, and valuable for those readers that look at the business side of things, is the fact that Swarm-it.com bigger brother Swarm-Pro is a great tool for interactive mobile marketing to any-size audience and a perfect two-way communication channel for events and conference participants.
Thanks for reporting about Zemble, but I felt relevant, providing a more comprehensive and full reference to all relevant competitors a must.
(Disclosure: I have worked in the design of the Swarm-it UI and consulted extensively on its feature-set development)
Robin… not quite.
swarm-it costs $.10 per text message… Zemble is 100% free.
Also, the title of this article is rather misleading… Zemble protects against spam by only allowing “friends” to text each other. This is also where it differentiates from 3jam which allows anyone who can guess your phone number to spam you with text messages…
now, now swarm-it. it’s zemble’s time to shine. let them have the spotlight…you had your time, now, let’s be fair and allow zemble to convince the techcrunch audience why their service/offering is better than yours. I have one question for all the sms services out there. What is your revenue model? will you charge users eventually?!?! or (gasp) will you eventually include ads in your users’ text messages?!? As a potential user of this service, i would like to know what is coming down the pipe.
Jason - exactly! That’s been my primary beef with all these free sms services. How are they going to make money?
You might also want to check out Friendstribe.com (http://www.Friendstribe.com/). Better than Dodgeball, more features, more Cities, all USA, FREE, they launched yesterday the beta version, few members but looks ok, i saw on Mashable.
“The site is designed like MySpace” now there’s a comment to strike fear into your heart!!!!
;o)
Drama 2.0, you should start your own blog. call it “truthseekr” or something.
zemble is a hobby project, not a business. I am sure of this because they do not have a shiny logo.
I’m all for building cool web apps, but save yourself the embarrassment and don’t call it a web 2.0 startup. it’s not.
it has to be a web 20 startup. they’ve spent $90k. that seems a bit much for an unproven business modeled after a service that’s starting to be more and more common.
sounds interesting, but honestly, these sms related sites in the states are just creating cost in two directions: for the recipients (most, if not all of whom are paying to receive) and the companies putting up dollars for the gateways..
is there some kinda free sms gateway that these companies foresee to offset this cost?
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i hope you have good friends and forgiving family. maybe yahoo! will buy you. they buy everybody.
Txtmob.com has been doing this for the last 3 years, they’ve open sourced the code and been covered in the NY Times. This is nothing new.
rabble…you just poo-poo’d the party. get ready for the shakeout in this space.
We built an entire sms platform for checking your email on any POP3 provider (including gmail) - complete with syntax for checking, replying, composing, etc…
Lemme tell ya, it did NOT cost us 90k to build it. Who the heck is investing in this crap and where are they? I have some businesses with actual revenue that I’d love to show them.
The site I mentioned is Tapgad.com
Here’s another site that does bulk text message launching — http://www.txtlaunchpad.com .
Michael, why do you post about crap Web 2.0 “companies” - and I use that term loosely - like this? It’s a crap service and there is NOTHING original about it at all. I’m sick of these bullcrap “web 2.0″ ideas that take 2 weeks to build being posted everywhere.
LOL @ the “founder” trying to defend his stupid startup. Hey buddy - go and build a REAL product that’s not targeted at the “MySpace generation”. No one wants your group SMS tool.
So I have used the service, and I found it really useful for trying to coordinate a dinner outing with my friends while we were all home for Thanksgiving, especially since e-mail access was harder at the parents’. And I think that was great, since text messaging is becoming a more common and widespread tool.
What I don’t understand is why people who are critiquing the product have to make personal attacks on the founders of the service in order to make their point. It’s pretty easy, and more helpful to readers and to the founders in their attempts to improve the service and respond to the market, to make substantive comments that aren’t petty or mean.
OK all you guys who are bashing this guy and his company Zemble. I went to a Meetup event tonight and watched this guy present his site and felt bad for him while he got all kinds of questions that were biting into his business. But if their is one place I gotta give credit is that he is an entrepreneur who has an idea and he believes in it. Now all of you who have been in those same shoes know what I am talking about, so I hope you write stuff that will actually help this kid. All the rest of you who are participating in the bashing I dare you to get off your asses and get some balls to do something yourself and then read my name.
hi latrist i think i found away for you to text me back.nyala
hey yesenia how you been