I had an interesting discussion with a friend last night. He knows I’m looking into mobile marketing and fundraising and we talked about text messaging. The rates of growth for text messaging are mind boggling. A recent article in the Star-Telegram quoted a Verizon rep as saying that text messaging has increased 20% in each of the last five quarters.

Will SMS messages kill e-mail?

Here are some interesting things to consider:

• Unlike a computer, your cell phone is almost always with you. You can send or receive a text message at anytime. Most people still e-mail from a computer.
• SMS limits a person to 160 characters. It forces one to get to the point — no e-mail dissertation from your colleague who wants you to know every single thought in his/her mind about an issue.
• Kids are used to IM and text messaging their friends. Computers are a part of work and school.
• Text messages are not the only type of messages that phones can send. Pictures and video can be sent now.
• The rest of the world uses text messaging a lot more than we Americans do.

My conclusion is that e-mail will never go away. It’s too nice for those of us who are in the workforce. My Blackberry will handle both e-mail and text messages. Look for more phones like this in the future.

E-mail programs like Outlook will soon ship with “Send via SMS” or “Send to phone”.

The text messaging market will continue to grow. Its simply too easy to send a message via phone — especially when there’s no time for a conversation.

C u l8r — (That’s text messaging for “See you later”!!!)

Teaching your child to tie his shoes? Is it possible? Yes.

Recently, the WSJ ran a story on outsourcing so much in one’s personal life. One company that helps you get things done is GetFriday. You can outsource quite personal tasks such as arranging party details, paying bills, setting up appointments, and so forth.

Their uncommon requests are great (and they say a bit about our society):

• Daily wake up calls with the local weather report and instructions to get up, make the bed and exercise.

• Reminding an over-zealous client to not speed and collecting parking fines. And pay his current parking fines.

• Apologizing and sending flowers and cards on their behalf to spouses of clients.

• Charting a diet plan, reminding client on it regularly, ordering groceries based on the specific diet plan

• Reading bedtime stories to a young kid on phone

• Getting a job for a person who lost his job due to outsourcing a year back. We did the job search, did the cover letters, did the resume tuning and got the client a job in 30 days.

• Fixing a broken window pane of a house in Geneva, Switzerland. Organized a repair firm to do it.

• Collecting home work information from teacher’s voicemail and emailing it to the client (parents of the kid).

• Organize an event in Columbia. Fixing dignitaries, calling up, getting appointments, scheduling meetings for the event. This was for a magazine.

• Buying underwear on behalf of a client (online purchase only, of course).

• Research on how to tie a shoe lace meant for a kid (client’s son).

• Find a parking slot for your car in some other city even before you make the trip.

• Ordered garbage bins for home

• Get an authenticated weather forecast and weather report for a particular time in a particular place on a particular day, five years ago. This was to be used as supportive evidence for a law suit.

• Finding a missing person in the Florida hurricane. We found a contact who had found this person. Task was handled through the web.

• Talking to parents in our client’s stead.

 

Hilarious…

I’ve long been a fan of Delta. Since I live in Lexington KY, I grew up flying Delta. However, as I sit on a very crowded flight to San Diego, I’m beginning to reconsider.

First, allow me to say that I understand revenue drivers — especially if Delta is coming out of bankruptcy.

Ryanair is an Irish airline famous for cheap flights. The company subsidizes its costs and pulls in great profit by selling everything else — even advertising space on the outside of its jets. OK — cheap flight and pay for everything else. I understand that.

Delta, on the otherhand, has normal prices and sells everything. I’m on a cross country flight and have been asked to pay for the headset ($2) and the movie ($5). Should I want to play a game, well, that’s $5, too.

Maybe its not fair to target just Delta. But, instead of nickel and diming us, charge $10 more per seat and give us the headsets, movies, and food.

Packaging makes a big difference.