messaging

Mozilla, which had hoped its Thunderbird e-mail software would rise to financial self-sufficiency like its better-known Firefox project, unveiled a Plan B yesterday that instead increases the organization's focus on other communication technology.

The Thunderbird group, called Mozilla Messaging, will become part of Mozilla Labs--a research center rather than a profit center--and lose its official name. David Ascher, who has led the Mozilla Messaging group, "now will lead a new innovation group within Mozilla Labs focused on online communications and social interactions on the Web," said Mitchell Baker, chair of the Mozilla Foundation, in a blog post … Read more

Always looking for new ways to deliver its search results, Google has rolled out a new app that combines instant messaging with search.

Launched today as the latest experiment in the Google Labs playground, Google Talk Guru offers you a chat session through which you can ask certain questions and receive responses from an automated bot set up on the back end.

For now, the app can handle only certain types of questions from among a limited number of categories, such as weather, sports scores, math equations, definitions, and translations. But like other Google Labs apps, it's something to … Read more

People are finding charges on their mobile phone bills that they say weren't authorized, including mystery text services that appear out of nowhere and charge for content that people believed was free.

I was the victim of a scam recently in which $9.99 was charged to my cellular account for so-called "inspiration" text messages for which I definitely did not sign up. The phone, a BlackBerry on Sprint, is a second phone kept around for emergencies only and had not been used for about a month before the text messages were noticed.

I halted the service … Read more

The number of people accessing their bank or brokerage accounts through mobile devices surged 54 percent in the fourth quarter last year compared with the same period in 2009, according to a new report from ComScore.

During the fourth quarter of 2010, 29.8 million Americans tapped into their bank, credit, or brokerage accounts via cell phones and other mobile devices, according to the Mobile Financial Advisor report released yesterday.

Drilling down further, 18.6 million people accessed their financial accounts via a mobile browser, 10.8 million used a mobile app, and 8.1 million used text messaging, said … Read more

At the South by Southwest Interactive Festival (SXSW) last week, messaging start-up GroupMe gave away 2,500 grilled cheeses branded with the company logo, and drained 13 kegs of Shiner Bock beer. It also saw over 2 million messages sent during groups created specifically for communication during SXSW, too, co-founder Steve Martocci told CNET.

"Things are going very well," Martocci said of the start-up's promotional efforts at SXSW, which included the "GroupMe Grill" strategically placed across the street from the Austin Convention Center for the distribution of the aforementioned free beer and grilled cheese to … Read more

AT&T is offering free service to people who want to communicate with friends and family in Japan.

The carrier announced today that postpaid subscribers won't be charged for calls or text messages to Japan through the end of March. The free service started Friday, the day that a magnitude-8.9 earthquake rocked the northeastern part of the country and sent tsunamis out into the Pacific.

Customers will either find no charges on their monthly bill or a credit for the amount they would have spent. AT&T is only offering the deal on phone calls that … Read more

Scandinavian post offices are using mobile phones to lick the problem of buying stamps. Denmark and Sweden are introducing a system of paying the postman via text.

Danish service Post Danmark and Swedish postal service Posten AB are adopting the high-tech system to make it easier to post letters, packages, and cards.

The system will work by sending you a code to write on your letter. Danes simply stick the letter, card, or parcel--up to 4.4 pounds--in an envelope, as normal, then text-message the word "porto" to the number 1900. Then they receive a unique code to write where the stamp previously would have gone and pop their goods in a mailbox as usual.

Read more of "Text messages replacing stamps for Scandinavian posties" at Crave UK.… Read more

Group messaging service GroupMe launched a big upgrade last week, timed to occur right before the South by Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas, the biggest event of the year for digital start-ups looking to make it big. But that wasn't enough: GroupMe today launched what co-founders Steve Martocci and Jared Hecht call "version 2.1-more-thing" in a nod to the famed Steve Jobs line.

What's new this time? Instead of making groups invite-only, groups can now be "joinable" through solicitations on Facebook and Twitter. There are also some smaller tweaks, including avatars alongside … Read more

A group of researchers who describe kicking a habit as "a war that consists of a series of momentary self-control skirmishes" have found a link between texting and controlling cravings among a group of 27 heavy smokers in Los Angeles who participated in two related studies.

In the first study, the findings of which are reported this month in the journal Psychological Science, the smokers performed a basic self-control task while three regions of their brains most involved in impulse control were scanned using fMRI. They then described their cravings and smoking patterns, and their urine and lungs … Read more