Mobile analyst Dean Bubley, on the other hand, is clearly unimpressed with the coverage of this subject. In a somewhat irate blog post today, he attacked the notion that there is a simple dichotomy between SMS and “over-the-top” (OTT) apps such as WhatsApp, along with the idea that the carriers’ Joyn collaboration might save their bacon:

“A central theme in these articles is a supposed battle for the ‘messaging market’, with lazy journalists or vendor marketeers painting a dark picture of mortal combat between the righteous fortress of SMS revenues, the marauding hordes of barbarian OTT players at the gates, and the Knights of Joyn riding to the rescue in their shining armour of interoperability.

“This is all palpable nonsense — a strawman argument to reframe a complex and dynamic situation into the usual fatuous and imaginary Us vs. Them, Telcos vs OTTs narrative, coupled to a desperate attempt to make RCS and its GSMA-branded offspring look relevant. Not only is this argument flawed, the likely outcomes will in many cases be worse than useless.”

What really gets Bubley’s goat is the idea that there actually is a “messaging market” as such. As he points out, there is little to compare between a WhatsApp chat and an embedded customer support IM conversation, or between an SMS exchange and an email with a document attached. They’re all messaging, but they’re not the same thing at all.

And what’s more, each one of those scenarios could be supported by a variety of “messaging” technologies:

“Any worthwhile analysis would look at various ways to slice up this supposed monolithic market into separate buckets reflecting context or intent. Perhaps social messaging vs. advertising vs. standalone information vs. gossip vs. B2B meeting arrangement vs. one-way app updates. Or sliced by length of a messaging ‘session’ or number of participants, or a hundred other ways.”

This is very true, and it has me thinking about what we mean when we talk about messaging. But it also has me thinking about our use of other terms, in particular the word “social”.

Facebook, for example, is a service we would think of as quintessentially social — but it’s also a messaging service. Just look at Facebook Home, where the social network takes over the user’s Android handset in a way that effectively melds Facebook messaging and SMS. When you’re sending a message through that interface, which medium are you using? Who cares?

When I was talking to Viber CEO Talmon Marco ahead of today’s desktop app launch, he characterized his Skype-rivaling product in interesting terms:

“We’re starting to see the lines between communication and social are breaking. Once you go into groups and larger groups — today we support groups of up to 40 people — and put a picture in there, is that a communication or social?

“I exchange Viber messages hundreds of times a day. On Facebook I share something once a week, once every two weeks. I’m always thinking twice about what I put on Facebook. I find myself more engaged with an app like Viber than with Facebook. I create far more content for Viber than with Facebook and I think the same applies to most people.”

Most people, of course, aren’t the CEO of Viber, but his underlying point is nonetheless valid. “Messaging” and “social” are merely two facets of modern communications (which can itself be a subset of some other service) and trying to tease the two apart is increasingly difficult.

Which brings us back to Bubley’s post. As I suggested above, I don’t think it’s entirely fair to discount the recognition of OTT apps’ acceleration past traditional SMS. However, it is certainly true that clear-cut comparisons between the various messaging options out there today are near-impossible, if not futile.

Ultimately, messaging is increasingly just a feature, as is the case with social. When you’re designing the communications services of the future, or even the services that make use of communications, context and intent are what count.

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But now the Cyprus-headquartered startup has taken things to a whole new level with its Viber 3 version: it’s released a desktop app for OS X and Windows, making it a full-blown alternative for Skype’s core user base. At the same time, Viber has also beefed up its Android and iOS apps, while introducing support for eight new languages (reaching a total of 27).

“Viber for desktop lets you do pretty much everything that Viber lets you do on your mobile phone, with minor exceptions such as stickers,” Viber CEO Talmon Marco explained to me. “What puts it apart from Skype is how tightly integrated it is with the mobile experience. Skype went from the desktop to the phone. Viber went from mobile to desktop — the implication for the user is amazing.”

Hello desktop

“Amazing” might be a tad hyperbolic, but Viber’s cross-platform integration is genuinely impressive.

As someone who has a greater variety of smartphones and tablets than most (hey, it’s my job), I can attest to one of Skype’s most annoying quirks – its inability to recognize on one device that I’ve already read the day’s messages on another device. This isn’t an issue with Viber.

“Another annoying thing is my wife always complained that would leave Skype running on my computer at home and every message I exchanged with somebody [while on another computer] would beep,” Marco said. “Viber doesn’t – when you get a message, it beeps at both places. Depending on where you answer the message, the next messages only beep on that device.”

Small things, but useful. A far more major advantage is the ability to quickly and simply transfer calls between devices and network types. So you want to start a call on your home desktop, then pop it over to your Wi-Fi connected smartphone, then maintain the call as you leave the house and move onto a cellular network? It should work.

Ironically, I find this all a bit reminiscent of Telefonica’s Tu Go play, which extends the functionality of that carrier’s phone number-linked mobile services to the desktop. Marco doesn’t see Viber as being in direct competition with the cellular giant’s “over-the-top” app but, as the lines between traditional and new-style messaging functionality continue to blur, I think the similarities between the two are worth calling out.

After all, both essentially extend the same services across both mobile and desktop platforms while using the mobile phone number as the key to the user’s identity. When Tu Go came out, it struck me that this number was one of the carrier’s most underappreciated weapons in the fight against third-party communications services – now that Viber’s also exploiting it on the desktop, though, I’m not so sure.

The desktop Viber app also allows video calls, in the style of Skype and Google+. This isn’t available for the mobile apps just yet, though – it will be, Marco promised – and it also doesn’t allow group videoconferencing at this point.

Mobile revamp

Viber’s announcements today aren’t all about the desktop. For one thing, we now have the full new version for BlackBerry, which – as we reported last month — finally includes VoIP functionality. This makes Viber the first mass-market VoIP provider to offer such a feature on the platform.

However, as we noted when covering the beta, it’s only available for versions 5 and 7 of the platform. According to Marco, this is because Viber has to implement IP-based voice on BlackBerry in a slightly roundabout way (“pretty much recording and playing back”), which makes latency a serious issue on BlackBerry OS 6, but less so on 5 and 7. Even on the supported versions, “users should manually set the APN settings to do 3G – there’s no way around that,” he warned.

Users on iOS will find their updated app now includes video messaging capabilities: previously, you could send photos and locations, but not videos. “Last online” status has also been introduced, bringing Viber in line with WhatsApp on that front – Marco admitted that he himself wasn’t sure how useful this would be, given Viber’s push notifications, but “it’s there.”

Other tweaks on iOS include the ability to search contacts specifically for groups, rather than having to scroll through individual contacts to find them, and the introduction of a new voice engine “that provides better performance on low bandwidth or in poor network conditions.” The aforementioned ability to roam between Wi-Fi and 3G coverage is also a new feature, and the overall app design has evolved.

The Android version gets the same features as the iOS app, but also a hefty redesign. It previously looked very much like the iOS version but is now all Holo — as Marco put it, “the iOS version looks iOS and the Android version looks Android.”

Next trick

Viber now has 200 million users, Marco said. This is the same number WhatsApp announced less than a month ago, but it’s important to note that WhatsApp’s 200 million users are active on the service at least once a month, while Viber is only talking about the number of its registered users. That said, Marco claimed that the majority of those users did use the service last month.

Given the fact that Viber VoIP calls only sometimes use Skype-esque peer-to-peer (P2P) technology, often going through Viber’s servers instead, this means the company has to spend a lot of money on servers – “We’re probably one of the largest users of Amazon Web Services,” Marco said, while conceding that his firm is still generating zero revenue.

So when is Viber going to start monetizing its service, then? This year, apparently. According to Marco, the company will start selling stickers to its users, along with other, as-yet-undefined “value adds.”

How about an enterprise play? After all, the addition of the desktop app makes Viber an increasingly credible unified communications service. “We have nothing to announce at this point in time, but we think that the desktop offering gets us closer to this,” Marco said.

Whatever happens, there’s no question that 2013 will be a very exciting year for the rapidly evolving Viber.

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Facebook’s Android announcements on Thursday, which essentially create Facebook-centric launchers for Android phones, further underscored that the future of the company is mobile. ”Facebook Home” makes some nice UI improvements around messaging, but considering the long-time buzz surrounding the potential for a “Facebook phone,” this particular announcement did not seem revolutionary.

The biggest message from Facebook on Thursday in Menlo Park was was that the company wants to improve our ability to communicate with loved ones on mobile. That’s not exactly a new theme. Facebook’s Home basically presents a package of the company’s apps that users can download from the Google Play store that creates a dominant Facebook home screen of photos and an integrated launcher for apps and notifications on Android. The company also announced an HTC First phone with a deeply-integrated version of Facebook Home pre-installed.

Mobile is where most of the world is headed, as we spend increasing amounts of time staring at our phones and tablets. A company like Facebook, as hungry for user data as any other online advertising business, likes a product like Home because it gives the company greater data about its users. Also, Wall Street has pretty much mandated that Facebook has to make more money through mobile advertising. While ads won’t roll out immediately to the rotating photos on the cover screen, the company didn’t rule it out, meaning it’s probably coming.

But as Om so aptly noted earlier today, people already spend a good deal of time on Facebook on mobile — about 30 minutes per day. But the only people who will use Facebook Home are those who choose it, either by purchasing the HTC First phone through AT&T, or downloading Facebook Home through the Google Play store. It’s not a product that everyone will immediately have to or choose to use, the way the revamped News Feed will shortly roll out to everyone. And it’s certainly not something Apple iPhone users will likely see any time soon.

My favorite aspect of the new features through Android revolved around messaging. Messaging and chat apps on mobile are huge, especially for users in Asia, and Facebook needed to make improvements there to push back the third-party apps encroaching on that space. There’s already a good deal banter on the internet making fun of the “Chat Heads,” which are bubble photos of your friends that live on the screen and show you activity and messages from each person. But as a frequent texter who carries on a variety of iMessage threads at any one time, I might appreciate the ability to conduct chats on top of other apps so you don’t have to stop what you’re doing.

Mark Zuckerberg checks out one of the new phones with the Facebook Home at Menlo Park headquarters.

Facebook’s business both as a social network and an advertising network completely revolve around sharing, as Zuckerberg said Thursday when he emphasized the importance of a social, connected world. If users stop sharing data with Facebook it will have a problem, so it’s worth asking how Home might encourage people to share more. The revolving cover photos on the homescreen certainly bring photos to the forefront and encourage likes and commenting, which you can do from that screen, and Home’s emphasis on messaging could increase how often people use Facebook Messenger if it’s featured more prominently.

Zuckerberg noted that people check their phone’s lock screens hundreds of times a day, but might only check the Facebook app 12 or 15 times, and Home aims to change that. So Home, if you choose to use it, would have you checking Facebook more often and consuming more visual content. But will it have you sharing substantially more? That doesn’t seem like a given.

Fundamentally, keeping users inside Facebook is great for Facebook (and when the company eventually rolls out ads to the cover screen photos, it could be quite lucrative.) But for Android users who already have the Facebook app and can customize their launchers? There doesn’t seem to be a lot about this announcement that changes that experience.

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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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Session initiation protocol (SIP) is the signaling system used to manage IP-based voice and video calls and messaging capabilities in many carrier and enterprise networks, but it’s a protocol foreign to most developers. “What’s exciting about this news to the common geek is that Twilio is further establishing itself as the bridge between disparate forms of communication,” Twilio director of product management Thomas Schiavone told GigaOM.

Schiavone readily admits that no developer currently unfamiliar with the arcane ways of SIP is likely to pursue the protocol, but there are plenty of enterprises and enterprise developers that do, and they’re looking for easy ways to link their insular business networks to A broader range of public and private communications tools.

The idea is that Twilio can perform the complex translation of different kind of calls or messages in the cloud. A regular phone call from a landline, a VoIP call from softphone client or a WebRTC call from a browser could all pass through Twilio’s application programming interfaces (APIs) and connect as a SIP-based call on an office extension. “Twilio sits in the middle, allowing you to mix and match all these forms of communication,” Schiavone said.

Twilio’s SIP service, which launched as beta in October, aims to become more than just a translation service. Twilio claims that by connecting its cloud platform directly to legacy PBXs, companies can move the application logic of their communications platform into the cloud, where they can build new features without having to upgrade or reconfigure their hardware.

Feature image courtesy of Flickr user 2 Much Caffeine

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Turns out Kik is alive and, ahem, kicking, with 30 million registered users — growing at a rate 100,000 new users a day in the last several months — and now it’s out with a new update. To understand the update, it’s important to look at how Kik has amassed its big following, said founder Ted Livingston. He said the app has caught on with younger users, who like the simplicity of the app, with its basic two buttons for chatting and settings. Kik didn’t share how many monthly active users it has.

So when it came time to add more features, Livingston decided to go with a very simple approach. Now when viewing the app, users can swipe to the side to reveal a set of “cards” that work as mini-apps, adding additional features to Kik. 

The first three, which are built in HTML5 and can be installed on a new deck, offer YouTube viewing, sketching and image search. More cards will be added later. Users can receive a message originating through one of the cards, but they’ll need to install the appropriate card to interact with the message.

Livingston said the benefit to this approach is that the main interface remains the same for users. But the app can be customized to go deeper with features for those that want them.

“What we’ve been struggling with the last year and a half is how to take something simple, which is why people love it, and make it feature rich without ruining the simplicity we love,” he said. “We feel this is how you do it.”

In the future, the cards could be how Kik finally starts to make money. Livingston didn’t commit to this idea but he said a company could pay to have their own card listed on Kik. I like the approach Livingston took with the update. A lot of apps start to suffer from feature-creep over time, crowding the basic home page with more and more options. By making additional features optional that can be added like apps, it keeps Kik clean and make it more personal.

Kik has continued to fight on while rivals like GroupMe sold out to Skype, Beluga went to Facebook  AND others like Fast Society moved away from messaging. Livingston said Kik, which also got into a stand-off with Waterloo neighbor RIM, has grown by becoming a back-channel communication tool for Instagram and MeetMe users. He said 50 percent of users on MeetMe, formerly MyYearbook, have a Kik account.

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MightyText isn’t your typically over-the-top messaging startup. Rather than cannibalize operator SMS services by launching its own texting app like WhatsApp, BlackBerry Messenger, or Apple’s iMessage, MightyText rides over the SMS client on an Android smartphone, using the device’s data connection to almost instantly replicate every message sent or received on the PC through a browser extension. Ultimately, MightyText is acting as an SMS proxy, not a replacement.

Users have been able to text from their tablets as well, but only through an open browser window, which led to an onslaught of requests for MightyText to develop a dedicated Android tablet SMS client, MightyText CEO Maneesh Arora said. The beta app is private so you won’t find it on Google Play, but new users registering for MightyText on its website will get access, while existing users can contact the company directly via email to request a download link, Arora said.

MightyText has also polished up its interface, introducing a new PowerView mode in the browser that shows all recent SMS conversation as open threads on one screen. It also introduced a handy battery monitoring feature that shows the current power levels of your phone on the PC.

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That milestone is just for Android installs and doesn’t include iOS, BlackBerry, Windows Phone or Symbian and Nokia’s S40 devices. But it gives you a good sense of just how big this app is. It’s now in the 100 million download club on Google Play along with Skype, Facebook, Angry Birds and a bunch of Google apps.

WhatsApp is also the top overall paid app in the Apple App Store in 119 countries, according to analytics firm App Annie, and continues to be the top paid social networking app in the U.S. and among the top five overall paid apps here.

It’s possible and likely, even, that WhatsApp could actually have more than 200 million installs collectively when you count all the other platforms. And these users are also heavily engaged with WhatsApp. The company tweeted in August that it hit a new daily record of 10 billion messages sent and received in a day. That’s up from 1 billion messages a day one year ago. 

I’ve reached out to WhatsApp to get a word on its overall download totals, but the company declined to comment, only confirming that it passed the 100 million mark on Google Play last week. This is a huge group of people messaging at a prolific rate outside of traditional SMS. So you can understand why WhatsApp makes some carriers nervous.

WhatsApp, however, is also working with carriers and trying to encourage subscribers to buy data plans. It has struck deals with more than 10 operators including Indonesia’s Telkomsel, which released an unlimited data plan for WhatsApp, KakaoTalk and Opera Mini. In September, the company signed a deal with Hong Kong operator Three, allowing Three subscribers to gain unlimited data access to the app for $1 a month. Three users also had the option of paying $6 a day for a WhatsApp Roaming Pass in 78 places around the world.

With WhatsApp showing no signs of letting up, we will probably see more operators line up and try to secure deals with WhatsApp.

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Spotbros, which launched internationally last month on Android and iOS, served more than 130,000 downloads in its first week and now has more than 300,000 users, primarily in Spanish speaking countries.

The app builds on a foundation of basic messaging and then layers on a host of features. There’s an option to send location-based messages called “shout” to the first 50 users inside of a mile. A shout can passed along to other users through a “re-shout”. Users can also set up their own permanent chat group called a “spot” that is tied to a place, so a neighborhood or activity group can set up an easy way to communicate. Users can join a spot or create their own.

The messages themselves have an extra layer of complexity. SBMails are actually separated into two parts — a basic message with 200 characters, which is connected to a microweb page that can hold a title, videos, images, text and maps. People who receive the message can comment, contribute to a larger thread or share the page through its own URL. 

Spotbros is designed to be secure, so it encodes messages with AES 256-bit encryption. Users must approve who is able to send them direct messages and they can filter out shouts they don’t want to receive. All of the messages get erased from Spotbros servers within 30 days unless someone chooses to save a thread.

The app faces a tall challenge in taking on WhatsApp and becoming a major player in the messaging wars. And it needs to find a way to make location-based sharing compelling for users. The space hasn’t been kind to many startups, including Yobongo and Color. And many location-based people discovery services have also struggled to gain a big following.

But co-founder Alejandro Lopez Monge believes there’s an opportunity to create a safer, more flexible messaging service that builds off the ease of instant messaging.

“We believe that instant messaging can be the glue that will keep together users, online content and location based services. We see IM as a means, not an end,” said Lopez Monge.

Lopez Monge, a foreign exchange trader at HSBC, launched the company with Fernando Calvo, a former Accenture strategy consultant, earlier this year and the two raised $500,000 from Spanish investors and Kallasvuo, who Lopez Monge met at HSBC. While the app doesn’t have any monetization features yet, Lopez Monge said they are looking at location-based offers from local merchants.

While Spotbros is finding adoption in places like Spain and Latin America, I’ll be curious to see how it can compete in the U.S. We’re still waiting to see if people want to really communicate with strangers nearby. But as we’re noticing with the growth of NextDoor, a social network for neighborhoods, there’s more interest in being connected to a group of people nearby. I can imagine that would be where Spotbros finds success, if it can be a mobile way for neighbors and like-minded people to communicate.

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At launch, Experiences will offer a handful of curated events in New York City that are designed for a set number of people, usually about 4 to 6 participants. Users can invite friends to join the event through a unique URL using GroupMe, Facebook or email. When a person reserves a spot, they enter in their credit card information for their share of the event cost but the card is only charged when all the spots are reserved. After an event is booked, a new GroupMe group is created so participants can coordinate before the event and stay in touch afterward.

The service will be limited to a beta group at launch and will eventually spread to more cities over the rest of the year. For now, GroupMe is working with venue owners to craft the events, which can include special perks and unique experiences beyond just admittance. For example, a VIP event for the Upright Citizens Brigade performance includes the ability to skip the line and a cocktail party. Experiences will be accessible only through GroupMe’s online site but mobile app support is in the works.

The plan is to empower users to create their own events and use Experiences to organize them and manage payments, said founder Steve Martocci. Ultimately, it’s about expanding the power of GroupMe beyond an online experience to an offline one as well.

“We want to be able to make groups an everyday part of life,” Martocci said. “Groups are a hard problem and that’s why we’re focusing on how to get people together and make that process easier.”

The move puts GroupMe into competition with other start-ups like CrowdTilt, a crowd-funding service for events and parties. Hecht said GroupMe excels because it has been focused on groups from the start and so it can offer not just event planning or payment but communications services to tie it all together. GroupMe’s ability to tackle event planning was one reason Skype bought the company in the first place. Skype’s CEO Tony Bates said as much at the time of the GroupMe acquisition, describing GroupMe as a service “that helps users stay in touch and make decisions.” Martocci and Hecht told me after the sale that GroupMe had an opportunity to get into the local offers market, using its GroupMe messaging tools to help people plan for offline events.

Here’s what Hecht had to say in a blog post at the time:

The peer to peer economy is driving unprecedented intelligence to the edge of the network, and messaging is just the first wedge in helping individuals and groups make decisions and take actions instantaneously. When I talked about Groupon closing the redemption loop a few months ago, I was adamant that a mobile commerce layer and a social / communication layer are being built out that will have unprecedented impacts on how we interact and consume things with friends in our physical environments.

So expect to see more of this kind of offline planning and local offers from GroupMe. Messaging was just the start but the bigger play is influencing local spending and getting a piece of the local ad market.

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