If you don’t have an all-you-can-eat subscription plan for your mobile phone that includes text messages, those messages can really add up on your bill. Especially if you are a teenager. Or a Twitter addict. Now there is a way to bypass those costly text-message fees when you are online. A new service by 3Jam called SuperText is launching in private beta that detects when you are at your computer and lets you send and receive text messages for free.
The first 100 Techcrunch readers to send an email to cathy[at]3jam[dot]com will get priority invites to the private beta. If you don’t get one, you can sign up here to be put on the waiting list.
Whenever you are logged into the service on your computer, it reroutes text messages sent to your phone so you don’t have to pay for them. And the text messages you send appear to recipients as if you sent them from your phone. It will soon work with 3Jam’s Facebook-to-SMS application as well. CEO Andy Jagoe describes SuperText as “an IM-like experience with SMS on the backend.” When you walk away from your computer or don’t respond after a certain amount of time, the message gets sent as a regular SMS to your phone.
SuperText will join 3Jam’s existing reply-all SMS service that is already used by three million mobile phone subscribers. I recently wrote about Jagoe’s attempt to run test ads on Facebook for SuperText, only to find that the term 3Jam was oddly blocked, along with other terms such as “Myspace” and “Hi5″ (After the post ran, Facebook stopped blocking those terms).
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Great concept!
No joke, I was looking for something like this for Windows Mobile the other day.
Of course, my reasons aren’t cost… I have very little service in my house unless I put my phone in a windowsill. Thus, every time I get a damn text message, I have to get up off my ass and walk to the window and reply to it there.
I’ve tried syncing via bluetooth to activesync and use Jeyo Mobile Commander but ActiveSync SUCKS and it works about 10% of the time. This would be awesome and I definitely requested a private invite.
I’ve been using Teleflip for some time now and it works really well. anyphonenumber@teleflip.com and it emails that message as a text. The replies come back to your inbox. With today’s world of Blackberries and iPhones that can get email on the fly anywhere, Teleflip sounds like a better solution than 3Jam.
Ely Rosenstock
http://www.crastinate.com
Brilliant use of presence information
Love the idea of this service! Definately something I could use!
yawn this tech industry is beginning to be boring. needs to be more meaningful. i mean really like if smart people who have time sit there and try to figure out pain points and create companies, they could have a few big organizations implement them could they not? ignore what i just said.
yeh i mean i was excited about twine and i hardly got around to using it. i guess in the end us users just suck
It’s essentially bridging the feature gap between SMS and email. The danger is, by the time 3jam becomes widely adopted, mobile-email would already be common place and thus erodes the relevance of this company.
@Qdub: mobile-email won’t replace SMS (or IM). They each serve different purposes and are used differently. What I would love to see is better integration across the three in a unified client.
For example, Google Mail and Google Chat do a great job of letting me IM folks I’ve had email correspondence with (or vice-versa), and then keep a record of the chat so that when I search for a conversation, I don’t have to remember if it took place across email or IM (or, as is often the case, bridged both). It’d be spectacular if my SMS were integrated there.
I’d already suggested elsewhere that it’d be wonderful for Apple to integrate iChat to handle SMS as well as IM and to sync with an iPhone version. 3Jam sounds like they’ve taken an important piece of that puzzle, hopefully they have a brilliant API to make it easy to take advantage of (such as for Google Mail/Chat or Apple Mail/iChat).
aaah! the glorious space of europe, where receiving SMS messages is free
but still, interesting service, just for the convenience of having a full scale PC environment of dealing with SMS messages.
to Q dub: mobile email taking over SMS is stil many years away, IF it will ever happen. John Doe doesn’t want mobile email, they just want a phone with basic txt. (but then again, John Doe wouldn’t need or use a service like 3jam, so you may have a valid point after all)
@Qdub: I disagree. Mobile email will never replace SMS, even if all phones have email in the future. SMS is great for short, quick, personal conversations where email is better used for longer, more formal messages. I don’t see where these two will overlap and cause a user to pick between one or the other.
Congrats to 3Jam for another cool advance in SMS.
Got an invite (thanks) and have been trying it out.
I haven’t seen the following functionality as described in the article:
“Whenever you are logged into the service on your computer, it reroutes text messages sent to your phone so you don’t have to pay for them. And the text messages you send appear to recipients as if you sent them from your phone.”
Interesting and possibly useful service, but doesn’t seem to do as described above. It’s pretty obvious the text did not come from my phone and so far it doesn’t seem to “reroute” text messages sent to my phone. Will continue to test though.
I too received an invite and am not seeing the described functionality. It would be useful if it re-routed text messages to my e-mail while my phone was connected…but until then it’s just another site with curvey borders.
I think you only get ‘re-routed’ text messages if you send the text first. And then only if the person actually hits reply rather than sending you a new message.
Here is a video from the ceo:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDnzgvRh6Xk
What the service does differently is if someone hits reply and 3jam discovers you’re not logged in, then 3jam forwards the text to your mobile.
I too am not seeing the functionality as described. it appears i have to origionate a message from their service and the user has to hit reply to that message. Does absolutely no good for other services (ie twitter) that send message to your phone number.
interesting idea, but i dont think it has a practical application. unless i am IM and the other party only has sms.
Erick:
No offense, but that’s some sloppy reportage/copyediting.
In order to achieve this, the company would have to have done a deal with every carrier in the country and assumed control over the message routing system in realtime. That, clearly, didn’t happen.
I’m sure you know that there’s not even text message forwarding capability in the US, let alone rerouting. Unless, of course, the message was started from a gateway or shortcode in the first place (making it much less useful).
So, you *really* overstated what the product can do. Now, just out of curiosity…why?
In complete agreement with the above poster.
I myself have worked on a very similar application (now defunct as this area is horrendous to monetize in within the US and practically impossible to outside of the US) and when I was reading this all I was thinking is ‘wow..impressive…but how in the hell did the manage to reroute SMS sent from network user to network user??!’ i.e. putting a physical block in place to stop the incoming SMS on the recipients phone.
3jam would not only have had to done a deal with every carrier in the country but the deal itself would clearly be unbeneficial to them.
Personally I think SMS is the purest form of profit invented in the last 25 years. Carriers would never agree to such an easy reroute.
I too was pretty disappointed.
I’ve been looking for something that does what this article CLAIMED 3jam could do, signed up for the beta, created an account, entered all my info only to find out it couldn’t.
I give Erick the benefit of the doubt that it was a simple misunderstanding, however, when your cover this for a *technology blog* be a little more accurate.
( I really hope it wasn’t a way to get ppl to sign up for the private beta with something in it for them ) …ok, ok - likely not, but just SAYIN
Still haven’t received my invite… From what I’ve heard and seen though it’s a little bit of a letdown. Bummer.
Hasn’t been working at all for me all day to AT&T, T-Mobile seems to work OK.
Looks like it runs to and fro a shortcode, but it makes me wonder how many shortcodes they have, and how many conversations it can support per endpoint.
Also, I was able to text a bunch of my friends without them opting in to the shortcode or anything, isn’t that against MMA rules?
The concept as presented is amazing, but nobody’s quite at that point yet, I’ll be very very excited when somebody finally has the clout to bring it to market.
Hi All—
Thanks for the comments and thanks Erick for the coverage. The way the service works is to let you send text messages for free when you’re online instead of paying to send them from your phone. When your friend gets a text message from you, he/she can reply and the message comes back to you on the web into a threaded inbox (and you don’t pay to receive this response as you do to receive a text message). You can message like this from the web as long as you like. What is most different about SuperText is if you shut your browser or step away from your PC, 3jam notices you’re not there and didn’t get the message from your friend. We then redirect the message to your mobile phone as a text message and your conversation keeps going. When you’re back online, you stop receiving text messages on your phone and can pick up your conversation on the web, complete with your entire message history (even the text messages you sent from your phone).
Thanks again, everyone, for all the interest. The response has been tremendous and we gave away the 100 invites almost immediately yesterday. If you’re still interested in an invite, please register for the beta at http://beta.3jam.com instead of sending email to Cathy…she’s struggling to process them all manually. We are fixing bugs and adding features and will have some more beta invites very soon. Look out for more from 3jam in the near future.
well if it works like that its really something very creative infact it is much easier to write a message from p.c rather than mobile and the fact thats free adds some positive points to it.
I’ve been using Joopz, http://joopz.com, when I am at my computer to send and receive text messages because I hate trying to text on my cellphone (next phone will have a qwerty keyboard). I like it a lot and signed up for their premium service so I could use the Outlook plugin. They have a free service that allows you to send 50 messages a month, the premium service allows unlimited messages and is $19.95 for the year or $2.95 monthly.
Joopz offers group messaging, forwarding of conversations to your mobile phone, and message threading.
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There are 12 months a year…30 days a month…7 days a week…24 hours a day…60 minutes an hour…but only one like you in a lifetime.
There are two reasons why I wake up in the morning: my alarm clock and you.
Great minds contain ideas, solutions and reasons; scientific minds contain formulas, theories and figures; my mind contains only you!
Love can be expressed in many ways. One way I know is to send it across the distance to the person who is reading this.
If I could change the alphabet, I would put U and I together!
Minsan caring is better than loving. Minsan tea is better than coffee. Minsan smile is better than laughter. Pero nobody is better than you.
There is night so we can appreciate day, sorrow so we can appreciate joy, evil so we can appreciate good, you so I can appreciate love.
You look great today. How did I know? Because you look great everyday.
What is love? Those who don’t like it call it responsibility. Those who play with it call it a game. Those who don’t have it call it a dream. Those who understand it call it destiny. And me, I call it you.
What is love? It is what makes your cell phone ring every time I send text messages.
gloria this is sammy your only lover…………………….. i love you
There are 12 months a year…30 days a month…7 days a week…24 hours a day…60 minutes an hour…but only one like you in a lifetime.
There are two reasons why I wake up in the morning: my alarm clock and you.
Great minds contain ideas, solutions and reasons; scientific minds contain formulas, theories and figures; my mind contains only you!
Love can be expressed in many ways. One way I know is to send it across the distance to the person who is reading this.
If I could change the alphabet, I would put U and I together!
Minsan caring is better than loving. Minsan tea is better than coffee. Minsan smile is better than laughter. Pero nobody is better than you.
There is night so we can appreciate day, sorrow so we can appreciate joy, evil so we can appreciate good, you so I can appreciate love.
You look great today. How did I know? Because you look great everyday.
What is love? Those who don’t like it call it responsibility. Those who play with it call it a game. Those who don’t have it call it a dream. Those who understand it call it destiny. And me, I call it you.
What is love? It is what makes your cell phone ring every time I send text messages.
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google we cube http://net.suixi.gov.cn student dog home apple http://walmartwatch.com tree yahoo watch bag http://www.enchantedlearning.com
jhon ugly key bag we tom white
Yeah I missed out on the invites too, but put my name on the waiting list. It does sound like a cool system, but anyone know if there is an API or something that we can hook other stuff into?
kuj e tib re
Does this concept still work if I’m overseas? I can recieve SMSs all day for free. It just costs .35 a hit to send one. Also someone says that with T-Mobile users, the user has to give permission to send the message. are there some kind of hidden fees for the recipients. Love the concept though.