Teleflip, a Los Angeles-based start-up that allowed you to send SMS messages to one and all has flipped for the final time, according to an email sent by the company to its customers. Teleflip Tony David wrote:
We’ve gone as far as we can with our financial resources, and the piggy bank is empty. Effective Friday, August 15, 2008, at 9:00AM Pacific Daylight Time, Flipmail will no longer be operating for either public or private use, and will be turned off at that time. We are sorry for any inconvenience this may cause you, however our other popular email to text service, Flipout, will remain functioning.
I have emailed Davis to find out the details. Teleflip that got going in 2003, received a lot of publicity in the New York Times, PC Magazine and several other publications, mostly because it allowed non-smart phones to get email via SMS. The company started off as a simple email-to-SMS service running out of founder Guy Botham’s bedroom. In August 2006 they raised an undisclosed amount of money from GRP Partners in LA, and made Davis the CEO.
Checkout their Wikipedia page. Alec Saunders shares his thoughts on the shutdown of the service, pointing out that as smart phones become commonplace, the need for a Teleflip type service isn’t necessary. We first wrote about the company in March 2007 when they launched at DEMO 2007.
3 trackbacks so far
10:20 PM PT
[...] According to GigaOM they sent the following message to all their users today: We’ve gone as far as we can with our financial resources, and the piggy bank is empty. Effective Friday, August 15, 2008, at 9:00AM Pacific Daylight Time, Flipmail will no longer be operating for either public or private use, and will be turned off at that time. We are sorry for any inconvenience this may cause you, however our other popular email to text service, Flipout, will remain functioning. [...]
3:14 PM PT
[...] free service which allowed anyone with emailing capabilities to SMS. Started in 2003, according to GigaOm, the business began “running out of founder Guy Botham’s bedroom.” No doubt, the [...]
1:57 PM PT
[...] Teleflipについてはスマートフォンの市場シェアが伸びるにつれて、その必要性が薄れてきたのではないかと見られていましたし、最近、サービス中止を発表するなど不調が伝えられました。 [...]
6 comments so far
7:06 AM PT
May be they should go for a market like India where mobile phone is poor man’s black. Netcore’s MyToday seems to be doing well their.
8:18 AM PT
I don’t think smartphones have reached a tipping point (and certainly data services have not)
I just think reading your email 160 characters at a time is a crappy user experience.
3:37 PM PT
@Erik
You nailed it.
11:18 AM PT
I was a teleflip user and saved a lot on data charges while “roaming” it was great but I found an even better one that also uses a system to compress your email while sending it as text/sms and it’s free (link)
8:16 PM PT
I could not be more bummed about this. I actually developed the platform before the VC came in. I’m happy it helped so many people, and I’m sorry the money was squandered away so quickly. Learned a lot from the experience. Anyone know how to investigate where all the money went? I’d love to know.
12:55 PM PT
At our company we have text messaging block for all phones because it was costing us too much per month. At one time we were paying up to $4,000 in text messaging for Nextel alone! And we have 3,200 phones on Nextel. To work around that, we were having our 1,070 Blackberry users, on all our cell phone vendors, use Teleflip to text their customers. Now that Teleflip is down we have been researching to find something, anything similar to Teleflip that does not require us to download any type of software or register for any service, even if it is free. Has anyone found a service similar to Teleflip that would meet our needs?