AT&T is ramping up promotion for its “It Can Wait” campaign to end texting and driving.

The effort, by the carrier’s own admission, was significantly bolstered Tuesday by the commitment of Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile US, Inc. and more than 200 other organizations to join the movement.

AT&T says their involvement will support a new national advertising campaign, a nationwide texting-while-driving simulator tour, retail presence in tens of thousands of stores, and outreach to millions of consumers with a special focus throughout the summer months between Memorial Day and Labor Day—known as the 100 Deadliest Days on the roads for teen drivers.

Continue Reading

Google can give just as much as it can take away. That’s what avid Google product users are learning once again today.

Just days after Google shocked some by shuttering its SMS search, Google announced on Monday that it is combining its free storage options across multiple apps.

“Life gets a bit easier when your Google products work well together—whether that’s inserting a Drive file into an email or sharing a photo from Drive on Google+,” Google posted on its official Gmail blog. “As this experience becomes more seamless, separate storage doesn’t make as much sense anymore. So instead of having 10 GB for Gmail and another 5 GB for Drive and Google+ Photos, you’ll now get 15 GB of unified storage for free to use as you like between Drive, Gmail, and Google+ Photos.”

Continue Reading

Google angered scores of longtime users over the weekend when it effectively dumped a number of popular products in one swift motion.

Among the casualties is one of the SMS-based products that had been enormously helpful to owners of low-end mobile devices or individuals without expansive data plans.

To the dismay of many, Google closed SMS Search.

Continue Reading

According to Derek Johnson, founder & CEO of Tatango, the explosion of mobile marketing over the last couple of years has resulted in Tatango seeing an increased interest in location based SMS campaigns.

Along with that interest have come some surprisingly common questions.

“While this type of technology has been around for years, there’s still a lot of questions regarding location based mobile marketing, and concepts like mobile geofencing, and how these technologies can be used to improve your SMS marketing campaigns,” Johnson says.

Continue Reading

According to a new forecast issued by research firm Informa, consumers are on pace to send 41 billion over-the-top mobile messages per day by the end of 2013.

The volume of OTT messaging traffic is set to be twice that of P2P SMS messaging by the close of the year, today’s report reads, noting that there are far more P2P SMS users than there are OTT messaging users.

There were about 3.5 billion P2P SMS users in 2012, according to Informa, compared with about 586.3 million users of OTT messaging.

Continue Reading

M-Pesa, the popular mobile money program that enables one to send or receive funds through mobile text messages, was first introduced in Kenya when the service initially launched six years ago.

Today there are more 17 million users with more than 100,000 authorized agents across multiple countries, the latest of which is India.

Mobile Payments Today confirms that the unbanked population in India is nearly 700 million. As a result, the much-needed service will be made possible through a partnership between Vodafone India and ICI Bank, which is India’s largest private sector bank.

Continue Reading

SMS spammers looking for cover have found there are few places left to hide.

The FTC has begun aggressively following up on its pledge to crack down on the tricksters taking aim at our cell phones.

In the last two years, regulators have found that hundreds of thousands of mobile phone users have been charged for “premium text” services that they did not authorize, a practice known as bill cramming.

According to comprehensive coverage provided this week by the New York Times, the Federal Trade Commission has announced its first cellphone cramming case.

Continue Reading