geoffc

Hi Stan,

We did a group chat product at groupflier.com and got great traction on the free version but the SMS costs killed us and we had to switch to a paid model. Happy to trade PM on our experiences if you are interested and have a blog about it at:

http://gcrawshaw.posterous.com/group-texting-is-a-telco-game

Twilio has now achieved Kleenex status in the tech community, nicely done!

Nicely done! We have just launched a similar concept for Windows desktops at leostreamdesktops.com.

I think the growth of tablets is really going to drive the cloud desktop market as people switch to tablets as their primary access device.

I was going to post this next week but after seeing the Rent-a-Mac post I figured let make this a cloud day and announce our new Rent-a-PC service :-)

Nice focused implementation of group broadcast texting.

You might want to tweak the Perfectly free message on the home page to sync up with the freemium model described in the FAQ. It will probably help with your target market to explain you do actually have a business model.

Good luck with the venture!

Nice idea. Good luck!

Nicely done you sucked me in for a few drawings :-)

Alternative virtualization platforms are proliferating and get better all the time. Vmware has an early lead like Palm did and is correctly optimizing revenue from that lead but down the road ... where is palm today?

Pretentious. The points that particularly irk me are:

#1 - Duh, everyone does.

#3 - Why do you assume I need pen and paper to keep track of what is going on.

#5 - Why am I responsible for your lack of time management skills.

#8 - The async nature of email threads works well for a lot of complex topics.

#17 - The definition of irony.

Edit: My HN posts like this one usually get a quick down one negative vote and then climb out of the hole from there. It all started after I posted this comment http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1331769. Could whoever has me on their bozo filter lighten up. Thanks.

Thanks. I updated the blog with a pointer to the module.

How is the latest iteration on the blog?

I have updated the code to use the standard storage format and switched to a better salt generator.

Yes but the second comment on the blog was great, truly an education in encryption for me.

Thanks for the feedback. I will make some changes.

$3K claim letter to 23K defendants is $69M in potential revenue. The defendant has potential liability of $150K and probably has to pay more than $3K in legal fees to defend themselves. My SWAG is 10-20% pay for a $7M - $14M payday for the lawyers.

Meh, live hard, have fun and then die so the next generation has their turn.

Same here

Yes I saw that announcement. Our iPhone app also uses TCP, the goal is to to switch SMS traffic to TCP traffic over time.

Beluga doesn't use SMS for the transport layer they use TCP. Groupflier (me) and Groupme use SMS and Twilio. Congrat's to the Beluga team!

Yikes, sorry to hear this. In retrospect probably your best play was to work with the acquirer to negotiate a low figure 100% cash deal with good going forward comp and equity options for you and your operating team. With that in hand you then lay out a scenario to the VC where your team is exhausted and it is either this deal of the company falls apart. The hope is he grumbles all the way to his low cash takeout and you get another chance to prove your company out in a different equity structure. Good luck going forward!

The most interesting thing about Redis is that it removes the impedance mismatch between in code data structures and the data store. It is doing for data stores what server side javascript does for AJAX applications. OO persistence was the first step in this direction but Redis nails the real world use cases a lot better.

No they won't pay but if you shift enough of the traffic onto smart phone clients and show mobile ads you have a killer business.

America wants to group text. At GroupFlier.com we just reached 1M cumulative texts in 12 weeks. The demand as very broad as we see traffic from just about every age and activity group.

Neat use of an SMS anonymous relay, very cool! Ditto on Twilio, we use it at GroupFlier.com and love it, definitely an enabling platform.

Interesting metrics on the growth and engagement rate. FWIW, I am seeing similar metrics at my group texting site (groupflier.com), a 15% engagement rate and linear group growth. I wonder if that is the natural growth rate of closed groups?

Amen on that! Tarsnap is a key tool in my stack and I feel like I pay 1/10 of what it is worth relative to the other tools.

Thanks, will fix.

Thanks for the feedback, I will pass this on to our graphics guru.

I picked * as it is a primary key on a regular cellphone keypad. I might add the option for the user to customize the command prompt. Thanks for the feedback.