Some states, including California, require the use of handsfree devices while driving. But, we all know that texting is more risky and distracting. How long before texting while driving is banned?
LubDub offers you a free text messaging system, but we want our users to use it responsibly. To get this application, please sign up at http://www.fonlover.com/forms_module/track
In a story titled “America’s Biggest Ripoffs”, CNN features text message fees as the #1 ripoff at a staggering 6,500% markup over costs. FonLover will be launching a free text messaging application for Blackberry, Apple and Android by the end of this month. If interested, write to us at support@fonlover.com
http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2010/news/1001/gallery.americas_biggest_ripoffs/index.html?hpt=Sbin
Text messages are short, quick and cheap to transmit. So why are they adding so much to your wireless bill?
The messages are such a tiny piece of data that they cost carriers only about one-third of a cent to deliver, according to computer scientist Srinivasan Keshav, who testified before U.S. senators on the issue last summer.
But on a pay-per-text plan, the 160-character messages typically cost 20 cents outgoing and 10 cents incoming. That’s a markup of as much as 6,500%. OMG!
“It’s pretty much pure profit,” Keshav says. “Carriers would argue they put that money toward investing in new technology.”
Even if customers sign up for an unlimited texting plan for, say, $10 a month, carriers are still cashing in considering that their overhead is basically $0. That’s a lot to pay for a few LOLs.
Y’all, we are pleased to announce the limited availability of LubDub. After an all night QA session, we sent out the release e-mail to selected G1/Andriod users. We are glad we made it! Alpha testing is by invite only and is expected to last for a month. If you are interested in signing up as an Alpha tester, please send an e-mail to support@fonlover.com and we’ll send you an invite.
Features currently implemented include:
- Ability to track your phone’s location from our web service. This assumes that you will keep the GPS enabled on your phone
- Ability to switch the mode of the phone from our webservice (for instance, you can switch from silent->normal or vice versa)
- Ability to send an SMS message to your phone and receive a response with its location
Over the next month or so, we’ll incorporate user feedback and make LubDub functionally richer. The beta release which will be open to public. So, watch out this space for more announcements regarding the progress of our alpha testing as well as beta development.
One of our friends asked us if we felt lucky that we picked Android and not iPhone as the first platform for LubDub. With Apple’s introduction of Find my iPhone as part of the MobileMe service, an iPhone product would have meant a month of wasted effort (yes, we started on this on the first day of our summer break). We won’t go into various definitions of “Luck”, but just point out that our choice of Android was not an accident. We had surveyed the major platforms and chose the Android because -
1. the iPhone app space is very crowded and we were just learning to write Apps for the iPhone platform. We felt that an iPhone port would be easier than a full-fledged implementation.
2. the Blackberry platform is just a big mess. We have developed a few Apps for the Berry which we will shortly make available from our website, but the whole process was painful. Clearly, RIM never intended their development platform to be used by a large number of developers and hence many of the steps involved in publishing an App for this platform are complex and unintuitive.
3. Android offered a fairly underserved market and a new development paradigm. Android is expected to grow considerably in 2009. After writing LubDub, we are convinced that its development model is far superior to that of Blackberry’s.
What about the feature set, he asked? Why and how did we come up with a nearly identical feature set to Apple’s Find my iPhone?
In designing LubDub, we followed the Blue Ocean Strategy to identify features that other products already have (lock and wipe, tamperproofing, handling SIM card removal) and came up with a set that was unique, while also having the order winning minimum feature set. LubDub is a work in progress and we hope to learn from the market as we go along. Prioritization is only a part of building a new product and it is often difficult to judge whether the success/failure of a product is due to wrong prioritization or poor execution. However, in this case, we have a strong indication that our prioritization was in line with what an industry leader like Apple would do. Let’s see how well we can execute against this.
June 15th vs June 17th, iPhone vs Android, Find My iPhone vs LubDub. We are excited!
