Those apps — which include Skype, Pinger, WhatsApp, Tango and Viber — are all great apps, said Julien Decot, the new VP of business development and monetization at TextMe. The problem, Decot claimed, is they’re five separate apps, each specializing in a different set of features. TextMe, however, has a plan to combine the best aspects of each of those services into a single multidimensional communications tool.

Decot spent the last five years at Skype tailoring the VoIP giant’s corporate strategy, and while he believes Skype has designed a juggernaut of a communication platform, it was one that was always optimized for a PC environment. The hole Skype left in mobile was filled led by numerous mobile over-the-top (OTT) communications apps like WhatsApp. What the market needed, Decot said, is a made-for-mobile Skype incorporating the new features of the emerging class of OTT apps.

Note: This story is just one in an occasional series of stories on important under-the-radar mobile startups.

Starting with a clean slate

Julien Decot

Microsoft obviously wasn’t going to rebuild Skype from scratch, but Decot found his new Skype in TextMe, a 2-year-old San Francisco bootstrapped startup, which has already seen 10 million installs in the last two years of its Android, iOS and Windows Phone apps.

TextMe provides a unified voice, messaging and video chat platform, but it can also reach beyond its own network of users to touch any phone number in the U.S. and more than 200 other countries. It’s designed a device-agnostic platform that can turn any tablet into a phone. And to top it all off it’s created a “freemium” charging platform that allows customers to earn credits for services they would normally pay for.

One of the most interesting aspects is how it has overcome one of biggest problems plaguing a new over-the-top app developer: cultivating the network effect. To become truly useful, a communication or social network needs a large number of users. TextMe has solved this problem by issuing every user a phone number just as Google Voice does in the PC world. That means any TextMe member can automatically send and receive text messages from any mobile device as well as place or receive calls from any phone — whether or not the person at the opposite end is a TextMe user.

Of course, not all of the services are free. As with its competitors’ apps, all in-network SMS, voice and video communications are gratis, but TextMe also doesn’t charge for out-of-network text messages to U.S. numbers or for any inbound call, no matter where it originates. TextMe charges for phone calls to non-TextMe numbers, both domestic and international, and this week TextMe this week also introduced a paid international SMS feature.

Customers start out with 10 free credits, which is enough for a 10 minute domestic or U.K. call or a two-and-a-half minute call to France. TextMe sells credits in buckets: $1 for 40 credits or $10 for a bundle of 500. But the startup also offers ways for customers to earn credits through promotions. If you watch video advertisements or download promoted apps from your devices app store, you’ll accrue credits in one-to 20-point increments.

“Most of our credits are earned not purchased, but that’s fine with us, as long as it keeps our customers happy,” Decot said. “We get revenue either way.”

Forget innovation. We need aggregation.

Like I said before, all of these features are available in one form or another in other OTT apps. Pinger assigns phone numbers to handle its voice messaging and out-of-network texts and calls. Skype and Tango offer in-network video chat, and Skype offers exposure to the wider telephone grid with SkypeIN and SkypeOut. WhatsApp is the king of rich-media mobile messaging. TextMe just wraps them all into a single service.

TextMe has so far focused its efforts on smartphones, tablets and iPod Touch (effectively turning the Wi-Fi device into a softphone), but the company is exploring PC clients — bringing it full circle back to Skype — and even WebRTC browser-based communications technologies, Decot said. TextMe will even let you make a mobile phone call without a mobile network connection, tapping into Open Garden’s ad hoc mesh network.

As for competition, take your pick. There is more OTT software in mobile app stores than you can shake a line of code at. The company closest to TextMe’s model, though, is the similarly named TextPlus (formerly named Gogii), which also issues a phone number to each and every user. Last time we checked, TextPlus had racked up 27 million users, and it is even showing signs of adopting an earned-credit charging model via a new partnership with FreedomPop.

TextMe, though, has stumbled onto an interesting idea. A quick look at my smartphone reveals a miasma of IM, chat and social communication apps. If I wanted to reach out to my wife there are literally 20 different services I could use to reach her. Each of those services offers some kind of compelling feature to recommend it — not only could I call, IM, text or video chat with her I could use an app like Sidecar or Glympse to let her know where I am or where I’m going.

What I really want is one service that does all of the above.

Correction: An earlier version of this post stated that TextMe was able to reach 40-plus countries with its international voice and SMS services. The company recently expanded its reach to over 200 countries.

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The iPhone update complements the VoIP calling feature it added to Android back in February. There’s no way of dialing out from the service, which only works between VoIP-enabled clients, but imo.im doesn’t face the same network effect problems of other early stage over-the-top IP communications startups. Since ex-Googler Georges Harik and his brother Ralph Harik founded the company in 2007, it has already built up a healthy customer base for its primary IM service.

Imo bridges the IM protocols of 11 different chat platforms, from Facebook and GTalk to AOL,Yahoo and Microsofts’ instant messengers, allowing customers to send text, multimedia and even short voice messages to any of those users through a single client. According to the company its app has been downloaded 4 million times on the iPhone, iPad, Android, BlackBerry and Nokia-Symbian platforms, and it averages 700,000 million daily users sending a combined 50 million messages a day.

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Our first look at Nimbuzz in early 2007 left us uninspired. But perhaps the company isn’t to blame when you consider the mobile landscape at that time. Apple’s iPhone wasn’t yet in consumer hands, Symbian was the top smartphone platform, and here in the U.S., for example, 3G data networks were still getting rolled out and adopted by consumers. Fast forward 18 months and our second look at Nimbuzz showed far more promise as the evolution of mobile picked up the pace.

Why such growth in the takeup rate for Nimbuzz as well as other related communcations services from Skype, Fring, Truphone and others? The answer already appeared above: mobile. Gone are the days where we had to be in a certain place to get a call on wired line. Instead, our calls are finding us, regardless of our location, the network we’re on, or — perhaps more importantly — whatever device we’re using.

Going cross-platform has surely helped Nimbuzz just as support for various IM networks has: Let the consumers pick their device and support it whatever that choice is. It’s a smart move and one that Nimbuzz embraced early through Symbian, Java, Windows Mobile, desktops and eventually the newer mobile platforms such as iOS and Android. Of course, it never hurts to offer a free or low-cost service that lowers the bill from your network operator too!

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The service is called tt.One and assigns a real phone number either temporarily or permanently to almost anything, whether it’s a social network ID, IM account, mobile app or even an online dating service profile. That phone number can then be used to make voice calls and send text and multimedia messages into and outside or the app or service.

Tyntec has been working with Web-based peer-to-peer messaging company Pinger in Europe to extend its voice and text messaging services beyond its app, allowing members to send SMS messages to any mobile phone. But on Wednesday, Tyntec announced plans to expand to the U.S. and Canada (Pinger’s U.S. SMS service is powered by a competitor). CEO Michael Kowalzik said there is a huge opportunity in North America given the sheer volume of new over-the-top communications services emerging here each year.

How it works

Tyntec’s technology sounds like a lot like Google Voice and SkypeIn, and the principles are the same. The difference is that Google and Skype have built their own vast infrastructures, something that most Web companies have neither the money or inclination to do.

Instead, Tyntec is working directly with the mobile carriers, building a parallel network of SMS centers and servers within their networks. That allows Tyntec to replicate every aspect of a mobile phone – SMS, voice, subscriber authentication, and, of course, an actual phone number – and virtualize it in an IP environment.

“In the end, we’re operating a whole separate core network within the operator,” said Kowalzik said. “Over-the-top players want to get into the legacy mobile world, and we can give them that access.”

Not all operators are willing to play ball

Why would operators allow such access when over-the-top players are the ones cannibalizing their voice and SMS revenues? The short answer is they get paid. Tyntec functions essentially like an MVNO, buying SMS transactions, voice minutes and phone numbers from its operator partners at wholesale rates. In the case of most over-the-top traffic, they see no revenue at all, except what they collect in data subscriptions. By offering up access to their networks, they share in wealth rather than just stand idly by, Kowalzik said.

But there’s a Catch-22: The ubiquity of their services is really the only thing protecting the operators from losing their SMS and voice revenue entirely. If every app or Web service could reach outside of its confines and touch 6 billion mobile devices, there would be little reason for consumers to use carriers’ voice and SMS services at all. That’s why Tyntec’s partners have been smaller operators like Germany’s E-Plus that are looking for a way to differentiate themselves from their larger competitors, Kowalzik said – they have a lot less to lose.

Kowalzik wouldn’t reveal Tyntec’s North American carrier partners, but it’s probably a safe bet they aren’t AT&T and Verizon. In Canada, Rogers has actually tried to head off the over-the-top onslaught by launching its own softphone service called One Number. It will be interesting to see if more Web companies begin to use Tyntec and other virtual number services like those offered by Bandwidth.com to take the battle even further to the operators.

Feature image courtesy of Flickr user @boetter

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Let’s face it: SMS is a dinosaur. Except for the addition of basic multimedia through MMS, it’s hardly evolved in a decade. A rash of new mobile IP services have emerged to profit from SMS’s shortcomings: iMessage, BlackBerry Messenger, Google Chat and countless other IM and social networking apps. Not only do they offer more features and functions than SMS, they have the ultimate benefit of being free. Ovum estimated that, globally, operators missed out on $22.6 billion in SMS revenues in 2010 and 2011 as IP social messaging apps took over their traditional texting traffic.

The ironic thing is that operators could have lost much, much more. SMS traffic is still increasing despite the move to smartphones, and the reason is SMS has one ace in the hole: it works. I can send a text message to almost any mobile phone number in the world, and I’m virtually assured my intended recipient will receive it. Platforms like iMessage and Messenger require you to have an iOS or BlackBerry device. IM and social messaging services require you and your friends to have an account and their apps installed on your phones.

SMS has the added benefit of using the signaling channel of an operator’s network to transmit its payload, ensuring the message will go through no matter what network and what network conditions it traverses. IP services depend on having a decent data connection, which is hardly a given, no matter how far we’ve come with 3G and 4G.

Bridging the IP and SMS worlds

What Mavenir proposes is to combine the universality of SMS with the IP messaging features that SMS technology can’t support: live chat, group messaging, multimedia sharing, and network storage for shared files. But rather than tie the service to a particular device ecosystem like Apple or a particular account like Google, Mavenir’s Mobile Cloud Messenging (MCM) is tied to a phone number, just like SMS.

Mavenir’s platform isn’t standards based, which would normally be a big problem. It depends on operators running Mavenir’s network equipment and pre-installing Mavenir’s client on all devices. If your operator isn’t a Mavenir customer, then those richer features won’t work for you. At first glance, it seems Mavenir is asking us to substitute Apple’s proprietary solution for its own. But the beauty of Mavenir’s implementation is that it simply defaults to SMS and MMS if it doesn’t find its client or server at the other end of the message.

“We have enabled this whole interoperability with MMS and SMS on the backend,” VP of marketing Shubh Agarwal said. “You’re not restricted to talking to other customers on the carrier’s networks or phones with the MCM client. … It will simply use the SMS channel rather than the IP channel.”

Of course, all of those extra features go away if the message is forced onto the SMS channel, but the point is that MCM acts as a bridge between today’s new richer IP services and old reliable text messaging. Except for SMS forwarding and other gimmicky approaches to the technology, the two camps have always been isolated. MCM probably won’t stop the flood of users to free IM platforms, but by offering more features, operators could at least try to justify the SMS rates they’re charging.

Ideally, a platform like MCM becomes part of a standard, not a proprietary and closed system, and Shubh claimed that Mavenir has the exact same aim. The problem is the standards process is slow and unwieldy. The GSMA and many of the operators have backed a technology called Rich Communications Suite, which promises all of the features of MCM plus video chat and instant file sharing. RCS, however, requires a lot of network ingredients that will take operators years to find: LTE, moving voice and SMS over to LTE (or VoLTE), an overhaul of their core service delivery architectures (know as IMS), and the replacement of billions of phones’ SMS clients with RCS clients.

Shubh said Mavenir plans to integrate MCM with RCS standards as they emerge, and is already working heavily within the VoLTE standards space. But operators need to start moving SMS forward while waiting for those standard to become commercially viable, Shubh said. Otherwise, they’ll watch all of their SMS traffic disappear into the IP ether.

Disclosure: Mavenir Systems is backed by Alloy Ventures, which also backs GigaOmni Media, the parent company of GigaOM. Alloy’s Ammar Hanafi is on the board of both companies.

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If you’re not familiar with iChat, it’s Apple’s multiprotocol IM client that comes preinstalled on every new OS X computer. Users can enter AIM, me.com, Yahoo, Google Talk and Jabber account credentials to use those services, and they can sign in to more than one account at a time. Like Mail for OS X, it’s a flexible tool that can centralize much of a user’s IM-based communication needs.

Code discovered by developer John Heaton (via TUAW) in the most recent iOS update includes mentions to those services that iChat works with out of the box. Of course, Apple doesn’t yet let you sign in to IM services from AIM or Jabber natively on iOS devices, though there are a wealth of third-party options that do in the App Store.

Still, if Messages continues to grow into something that allows access to multiple IM services in one central location, in addition to text messaging and iMessage services, that will expand its usefulness quite a bit. Of course, I’m still hoping iMessage makes it to the desktop first, but this would be a nice small feature update for iOS sometime down the road.

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LiveGO is essentially one app that houses both instant messenger accounts as well as Facebook, Twitter and Google+ activity. The software actually started up in 2006 as a web-based IM client called MessengerFX, and the web roots show through in the app. From a technical standpoint, the software is mainly an IM client with wrappers for the social network services, so you won’t see redesigned clients for Facebook, Twitter or Google+. Instead, LiveGO integrates the standard web interfaces for each.

As a result, it offers a single app where you can quickly switch between social networks with the press of a button. Sure, you could run each app individually in iOS and multitask between them, but I find it much faster to just tap a button in LiveGO to move back and forth between networks. And the software is a full-featured IM client that supports MSN Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger and GTalk. LiveGO also supports IM notifications, but only for three hours after inactivity or closure of the application.

Again, LiveGO is more of an aggregator and doesn’t add new functionality to social network management, but it’s free and might be a faster way to stay in tune with friends on different networks.

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Communication has evolved with technology, but many of those now IMing colleagues cut their teeth writing internal memos on typewriters. Cultural and generational clashes are both common in distributed collaboration, and more damaging than they might be if the working relationships had a face-to-face component.

Many have discussed email etiquette, but for the average web worker, the notion of politesse can seem archaic — or even counterproductive in some circumstances. Here, then, are five golden rules for respectful, productive digital communication, whether you’re using email, IM, video chat, phone, or other communications tools like document sharing and time tracking systems.

1. Have an agenda, and meet it

To keep digital exchanges functional, set an agenda. Whether it’s a one-line email, or a one-hour video conference, your interaction will be more productive if you stay on track. Your colleagues will appreciate it, because it shows respect for their time. And it’ll let you identify any part of the exchange that’s off-topic, and end it — perhaps suggesting an alternative time to address it — before it gets out of hand.

Having an agenda helps cut down on time-wasting, but it also encourages responsiveness, since your collaborators know what you need, and don’t need to wade through the waffle to give it to you.

2. Don’t spam

In this context, spam is any form of unwanted or unnecessary communication. It doesn’t need to involve multiple recipients: leaving your colleague a phone message, then sending a text, and following up with an email, is example of spam. Sharing your new document with a colleague who’s on your team, but doesn’t need to use it, is an example of spam.

Spam overwhelms us. It makes us stressed and cranky, and it makes maintaining focus difficult. Be astute in working out what to share with which team members, and learn to differentiate between information for information’s sake, and necessary communication.

3. Respect time constraints

Having respect for the time constraints of your colleagues governs a range of collaborative behaviors.

Give collaborators time to receive your communication, digest it and formulate a reply around the other work they’re doing before you bug them for their response. Prioritize your communications points so that colleagues know what’s most important, and tell them if something’s urgent. Conversely, don’t earmark a task or communication as urgent if it’s not. As well as indicating the reason for your communication, identify your expectations of a response timeframe, so your colleague can prioritize your request.

Remember: while digital communications tools may seem immediate, we’re only human, and none of us can be in two places at once.

4. Be clear

Clarity and directness underpin digital collaboration. But, particularly in written or very short communications, choose your words carefully. Short can very easily come across as terse. Speak in a way that’s appropriate to your colleague, and your relationship with them, as well as the communications medium your using.

Choosing the right tool for the job can influence your ability to communicate what’s needed. Limits on length, or attachments and other inclusions, can hobble communications, so make sure you choose the medium that suits your needs best. Don’t try to wedge a phone conversation into a voicemail, for example — your garbled, rushed message will just add to the “noise” to your colleague’s day. Instead, just explain why you’re calling and ask them to call you back. Explain the details in person when they do.

Being clear is particularly important in shared, multi-party systems like document sharing and contact management systems. Stick to the guidelines your team has set for aspects like naming and storage conventions — it’ll reduce confusion and communications noise, and generally make life easier for your colleagues.

5. Be open

Digital workers can end up hiding behind a smokescreen of task managers, email autoresponders, and voicemail all too easily if they feel overwhelmed. Lead by example. If you’re asking a team member for something, be available to answer their questions about your request. Be diligent about responding to colleagues in an appropriate way using the foundations outlined here.

Accept that good digital collaboration takes time and mutual understanding — it is, after all, communication between people. Relegating a colleague whose communications approach annoys you to the back of the queue is rarely productive; the best way to encourage others to collaborate with you in the way you want is to take the time to explain your preferences to them.

That conversation could eradicate the kind of uncertainty that undermines good distributed working relationships, and cement the foundations for ongoing productive collaboration.

Image courtesy stock.xchng user JR3.

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The key to remaining productive is to not let distractions sidetrack you from your primary job. Here are a few tips for taking charge of your day and kicking a few of the most common distractions to the curb.

1. Social media. Turn it off when you need to focus. Seriously. Shut down your Twitter client and log out of Facebook and other services for at least part of the day when you really need to focus on your work. If you can’t turn them off, you can still disable notifications so that you aren’t having them pop into view constantly. This doesn’t mean that you can’t check social media while you work, but you can minimize the impact by only checking in periodically. Maybe you look at Twitter and Facebook once per hour, or when you finish one task and are moving to the next. But really, if you are checking Twitter every few minutes, are you really going to get as much work done as you would if you weren’t checking it?
2. Visitors. Whether you work in an office or at home, people will drop in and distract you. I’ll admit it, I often listen to music or put my headphones in just to signal to people that I am not available. If people see that you have headphones in, they will at least think twice about bothering you. Leaving your phone headset on can also work. You might try “do not disturb” signs or shutting your office door, if you are lucky enough to have one. I’ve even had pretty good luck with hiding and working in a super secret location until I finished a piece of work that needed focused concentration.
3. Unnecessary or unproductive meetings. I’m a big fan of not attending meetings that aren’t valuable in some way. Now, this probably doesn’t mean that you can blow off your manager’s staff meeting or important meetings with clients, but you can probably skip a few meetings. I’ll often look at the agenda for a meeting, and if there isn’t anything particularly relevant for me, I’ll send the organizer an email to let them know that I won’t be attending. On the flip side, you should be considerate when scheduling your own meetings. Cancel them if you don’t have anything important for the meeting, and always send an agenda in advance to let people know whether or not they need to attend.
4. Email. Most of us get more email than what we can possibly read anyway, and it just keeps coming in! You could probably spend all day just responding to email, but then you would never get any work done. The first thing to do is turn off any pop-up notifications that you get every time someone sends you an email. Next, set up some filters and color code email from important people to help you notice the ones you care about while ignoring the rest. Now, the hard part. You have to actually ignore your email and focus on other work without that distraction. You can occasionally glance at your email on a regular schedule or between tasks and look for anything critical. If it’s not critical, ignore it for a bit until you are ready to spend a little chunk of time focused on doing email.
5. Instant messages. For really serious work, you might think about logging completely out of your instant messaging client. For most of us, we can use custom status messages to signal to people how urgent their request should be before they interrupt you. I recently set my status to “cranky, interrupt at your own risk”, and I don’t think I had a single IM during that time. I also use the generic, “busy – priority interrupts only” status, and you can get pretty creative with these to let people know that they really should think twice about interrupting. It is also perfectly acceptable to not respond immediately to an IM. If a friend or co-worker sends you a message on a topic that isn’t going to be critical, ignore it until you get to a good stopping point or when you are ready to take a break and respond when it makes sense for you.

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