sms

Sending group messages to family and friends is a great way to communicate with everyone without having to retype or copy and paste a message over and over. The iPhone just so happens to be capable of sending and receiving group messages. Even though the phone used in the video is running iOS 5, this feature has been around for a while and is not iOS 5 specific.

Enabling this feature is simple:

Go to Settings > Messages > Group Messaging and turn it on. That's it!

Now, when you send a group message, if the other user has … Read more

The latest build for Windows 8, known as Build 7989, has leaked onto the Web, reportedly revealing a batch of potential new features.

Windows has long offered a virtual keyboard. But with Windows 8 destined for tablets and other mobile devices, Microsoft has reportedly revamped the keyboard with a new look and feel. Unlike the current keyboard, which requires mouse clicks to operate, the new keyboard will offer touch friendly buttons along with a split keyboard option, according to WinRumors, which has posted a video demo of the new virtual keyboard.

The Win 8 keyboard will reportedly provide built-in support … Read more

Perhaps when iOS 5 arrives this fall, it will offer a way to delete text messages en masse. Currently, your deleting options are limited in the iPhone's native texting app, which is disappointing to anyone with dozens if not hundreds of old text messages littering your inbox.

At the present, you have three methods to delete texts:… Read more

Glympse is a brilliantly conceived mobile application that lets you share your real-time location via SMS, email, Twitter, or Facebook. It's a useful, easy-to-use tool that doesn't require you to sign up, create any profiles, or invite contacts.

Imagine asking a friend to meet you at a new restaurant in your neighborhood. With Glympse, you wouldn't text her the address; you'd merely send her a Glympse of your current location, and with a tap on her screen, she'd navigate her way there. Or if you're not yet at the restaurant, you might send her … Read more

The most audacious start-up pitches are those that propose changing people's communications habits. No matter how clever a company's technology or gorgeous an app's interface, getting users to adopt new modalities of communication is perhaps the hardest job in tech.

It's a social challenge as much as a technological one, which means that if you get it right, your technology spreads from person to person--virally, as the overused term calls it. Lately, social start-ups have been adopting strange, mutated viral models: Path is a social app that launched with a bizarrely limited way to join networks. Color opens you up to pop-up social networks based on physical proximity. Both clever but far outside most users' comfort zones.

A new app, CloudTalk (previously Pana.ma) is a person-to-person voice and video messaging app. On paper it looks like an unpleasant mashup of voice and SMS, but it's not. CloudTalk is a very smart system for sending asynchronous voice (or video or text) messages to your contacts, and I believe its interaction model is appropriate for the way people communication today--especially kids.

As CloudTalk founder David Hayden (formerly of Magellan and Critical Path) says, as we discuss the younger generation's growing reliance on text messaging, "It's not that kids don't like to talk. It that they don't like phone calls." CloudTalk is designed around recording voice messages. You can also send photos, videos, or text, but the interface favors voice. Conversations appear in a list window much like a iPhone's display of an SMS thread or an instant message chat.

I was skeptical that this app would add anything worthwhile to the standard quiver of smartphone communication tools we all have, but to my surprise it works well, and it's worth using. I've never seen an application that does such short work of sending voice messages or that makes it so straightforward to mix modalities in a message thread. If you want to reply to a voice message with text or video, it's easy. Or vice versa. The only thing you can't do yet is call or FaceTime a person for a real-time discussion from within an asynchronous thread.

It's easy to add people to your CloudTalk address book by scanning through your smartphone's address book to find people who are also CloudTalk users. You can also search the online directory for users you know, much as you can with Skype.… Read more

The latest version of connection-tethering app PdaNet masks its tether from your phone service provider, just as major carriers move to block tethered connections that bypass their services and hide unapproved tethering apps from the Android marketplace when viewed over certain carriers' networks. Released on April 30, the major feature update in PdaNet 3.0 (download for Windows x86 | x64 | Mac | Android) is the tethering mask. Additionally, publisher June Fabrics Technologies noted unspecific performance and connection quality improvements.

In addition to supporting wired USB tethering, PdaNet 3.0 also includes support for Bluetooth DUN tethers, and offers an SMS agent … Read more

Normally I don't cover companies run by friends or colleagues. How can you trust me to review a product when I have an emotional interest in its success?

So meeting with Joe Gillespie, CEO of Zoove and former executive vice president (my boss' boss) at my division here at CBS Interactive, put me in a bind. He's sitting on what looks like a very smart business that I believe is already well past the tipping point of success. I cannot not cover it, and I'll be damned if I'll give it to someone else. But if Zoove fails, I will have to re-evaluate any respect I ever had for Joe.

Zoove is a registry of mnemonic and short dialing codes for U.S. cellphones. All codes are preceded with ** ("star star") and they can be any length. Here's a demo: Call **SUZUKI from your mobile. You should get a recorded message from the phone call, as well as an immediate SMS with a hyperlink to a marketing video.

The marketer, in this case Suzuki Motorocycles, gets your phone number, phone type, and rough location, not to mention the opportunity to send you whatever data they want on your mobile--a text, a link to a coupon, or an actual voice call connection (as the StarLaw Network will be doing with **LAW).

The big news today is that Zoove has signed up all four of the major U.S. carriers: All the phones on AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon work with Zoove's single directory of star codes.

Nobody is likely to step on Zoove's action here. Getting baked into the mobile carrier infrastructures took years. Having them all route ** calls through Zoove is a major coup. Theoretically, another company could come along and offer up a competing short code system, like ##, except, sorry, Zoove owns the routes to those numbers, too.

The fact that the company now has these networks locked up--with no competitors aside from archaic and overloaded toll-free number directory and the clunky five-digit SMS shortcodes run by CSCA--means that advertisers can start blasting these codes out with abandon.

And they should. Star codes are easier to use than other types of real-world links. With QR codes, for example, you need an app and you need to point your phone at something--tough when you're driving past a billboard (QR codes have other advantages, though). Using an SMS shortcode is twice as complex as a star code; you have to send a code to a code. Zoove codes can also be any length.

Want one for your business? Pay Joe--a lot. Short and generic codes cost the most. Two-letter codes are $75,000 a year; three-letter codes $50,000, four-letter codes are $25,000. I wanted to get **RAFE but Joe did not offer to make a deal. Shorter codes can be less, down to $7,500 a year, but generic codes are expensive. (**FLOWERS cost 1800Flowers.com a substantial sum.)

… 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

Links from Tuesday's episode of Loaded:

The U.S. State Department plans to announce new policies on Internet freedom

HTC unveils its first tablet, along with five new phones

Facebook launches an SMS version of its site for non-smartphones

Skype launches the Skype Mobile Partner Program for low-bandwidth Skype use in markets without reliable 3G

The FAA may consider repealing the ban on cell phone use during air travel

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers considers awarding the rights for the .gay domain

Japanese researchers are working on robot babies