TechFold - Bold tech & web commentary

Bold tech & web commentary

TechFold is technology discussion, commentary, reviews, and opinions from well outside the valley. There's no koolaid to drink here, and TechFold is not in SL, or on Twitter.

TxtVox - fast, easy, useful info via SMS

TxtVox is a lightweight, simple implementation of a straightforward idea: get time sensitive information into your hands when its relevant. TxtVox offers SMS alerts for sports scores, stock quotes, stock market updates, local traffic, weather, craigslist listings, jobs, classifieds, and quotes-of-the-day.

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TxtVox offers a high degree of customization, letting you choose the scope of your alerts, allowing you to receive notices from multiple sites, for different keywords, categories, time of day, etc.

Basically, you can be up and running with a set of customized, relevant alerts in a matter of minutes. While individual peices of the TxtVox functionality can be found elsewhere (stock quotes by SMS are not new), TxtVox brings together most of the alerts you would want to get by SMS in a single, simple to manage interface.

Problem (for me): TxtVox is US only, so I couldn’t actually try out the service.

TxtVox is free - I’m not sure what their business model is; perhaps they’re in some sort of revenue sharing deal with carriers? I found out about TxtVox from a press release describing the fact that TxtVox had been “approved” by all major US carriers suggesting a relationship deeper than TxtVox paying for SMS messaging through Click-a-Tell or something. There’s no premium offering available, and I couldn’t find out if there were ads appended to text messages or anything along those lines.

I’ve always been surprised that services like these aren’t more aggressively developed and promoted by cellular carriers - they seem like a simple, natural way to increase utilization of a value-added, monetizeable feature, particularly outside of the core-SMS teen market. If TxtVox gets traction, I’d think they’d be an attractive acquisition for a larger firm (carrier or otherwise) looking to round out their offerings; something akin to the rmail purchase.

alerts, carriers, sms txtvox

Exodus from DodgeBall - Google’s Growth Working Against Innovation?

Om covers the departure of DodgeBall’s founder and first employee from the Googleplex. Of particular note is the comment in the departing team member’s announcement:

It’s no real secret that Google wasn’t supporting dodgeball the way we expected. The whole experience was incredibly frustrating for us - especially as we couldn’t convince them that dodgeball was worth engineering resources, leaving us to watch as other startups got to innovate in the mobile + social space.

Sheesh - fighting for engineering resources. Sounds like something more likely to happen at IBM, Microsoft, EDS, or some other lumbering 1.0 titan - not everyone’s favorite wizard of innovation. This is where I question Google’s scattershot approach to prioritization - why does Google pump resources into something like Google Base, Google Bus Routes, or Froogle, while viable acquisitions die on the vine?

If you’re losing presumably valuable people (you paid for them) and flatlining acquisitions (that were previously media superstars), its time to re-visit your internal prioritizion system.

EDIT: Scoble makes a parallel point - that Google has gotten “big company disease” and is no longer able to understand/leverage/utilize things below a certain scale threshold. This is similar to what I mentioned above - Google’s prioritization is skewing away from small/nimble/innovative towards large/slow/monolithic.

dodgeball, google, jaiku, sms, techfold twitter