How Can I Text Without Phone Service

Kids, of course, come in all varieties, and their interests run the gamut. But when it comes to x-year-old girls, I dare say, at that place are two ubiquitous desires: getting one's ears pierced and getting a cell phone.

And you may equally well allow get of that ol' schoolhouse stereotype of a preteen--telephone glued to ear, gabbing on and on with friends about inanities--the telephone is not really for talking. It's for texting.

This is why my ain 10-twelvemonth-old daughter--too young in her stodgy mom's optics for piercings or a cell phone--was ecstatic to have establish a work-around for the latter. Earlier this summer, a friend told her about an app for her iPod Bear upon chosen Textfree, which assigns her a real telephone number, and lets her send and receive texts for gratis.

In other words, "She's in," said Pinger CEO and co-founder Greg Woock, whose company makes the Textfree app and who, too, has a 10-year-old daughter. "If you have a phone number, now you're cool, even if yous don't have a telephone. No i knows you lot don't have a phone."

And the trade-offs are minor, particularly by the standards of a x-twelvemonth-old. To text, she needs to be continued to Wi-Fi (which she says "is basically everywhere"), and she needs to deal with ads bannered across the bottom of the app. (She says she doesn't "even notice.")

A screenshot from my daughter's Textfree in-box.

And so my now-absurd girl, at the very least, is helping illustrate a trend among tweens who are turning their iPods into texting devices. Unbeknownst to her, however, she might also exist helping shake upwards traditional wireless-carrier models as we know them.

In the roughly ii months since users of Pinger's Textfree app started getting assigned actual telephone numbers, Pinger has handed out ane.6 1000000. That's equally many wireless numbers as AT&T gave out to cyberspace new subscribers in April, May, and June, according to the company's second-quarter filing. Pinger is now sending out most 630 million text messages per month; 70 percent of those are sent from iPod Touches, and xxx percent are sent from iPhones. The median age of the app's users is 18.

Textfree is one of a handful of mobile-texting apps that you can find in Apple's App Shop, Gogii's TextPlus among the higher-ranked ones. Merely only Textfree (for now, anyway) hands out an actual phone number, which can later exist ported, equally required by law. Other apps send texts from an email or short code.

The handing out of telephone numbers was part of Pinger's preannounced program to showtime offering voice-calling options--"Textfree with Voice"--slated for a beta launch at the end of September. Users will take the selection to pay for voice minutes, or they tin earn minutes past doing things like downloading gratis apps, filling out surveys, or performing other tasks that don't seem to bother youth already accepted to having their consumer habits tracked.

In other words, using Wi-Fi on her iPod Touch (forth with microphone-equipped earbuds), my daughter will be able to actually phone call and talk to me. And an iPhone customer--say, a higher educatee like Woock's son, who'due south grown accepted to getting everything for free--could use his Textfree phone number every bit an extra one that doesn't price anything to utilise.

Textfree's model is non earthshaking, in that similar services are also offered through the likes of Skype mobile or Google Vocalization. But will it disrupt wireless carriers accepted to their profitable texting fees? The verdict is still out.

Carrier consequences
AT&T declined to comment for this story. And a Verizon Wireless representative said the visitor is aware of Textfree only that it's besides early in the game to draw whatever conclusions well-nigh the impacts of it and other such free texting apps. She did, however, offer figures to illustrate the growth in texting. Verizon customers sent 180 billion text letters in the second quarter of 2010, versus 148 billion in the same quarter in 2009.

In Pinger'south own surveying, it has found that about half of those using Textfree on an iPhone accept reduced or turned off their texting program. Simply the company maintains that its business concern is still a net win for the carriers, who haven't yet called to complain.

Textfree in conversation mode. Y'all tin can assign dissimilar wallpaper to unlike contacts. Pinger

"If they really look at the math, we are very internet-positive for them," Woock said. Of the roughly 22 million messages Textfree sends out each 24-hour interval, about 14 meg today are sent to paying phone customers. And then those customers reply, he said. Same goes for Textfree with Voice.

"When your daughter makes a telephone call to another person who has a prison cell telephone, that person is going to pay for the minutes. Now the carrier wins not just on texting, but on vocalisation minutes also," he said.

Forrester Research Principal Analyst Charles Golvin says the tween market for apps like Textfree used on an iPod Touch is worth watching, particularly if the ads served are meaningful and relevant. But he doesn't see consumers who can afford an iPhone and its required information parcel "pinching pennies" to use free texting apps to save mere dollars on their monthly bills. (AT&T charges iPhone users $20 for unlimited texts and $5 for 200.)

The overall trend, however, shows how we're moving toward a future in which the type of communication--be it text, vocalisation mail, phone calls, e-mail service--won't matter. "Information technology volition all be only a bunch of bits flowing," Golvin said.

Nielsen senior researcher Roger Entner said any impact costless texting apps are having on carriers isn't showing upwardly in the numbers. But he as well recognizes the power of something like Textfree for teens, for whom the texting numbers "are staggering."

Entner pointed to recent Nielsen research showing that U.S. teenagers are using three,146 letters a calendar month, which translates to more 10 messages every hour of the month that they are not sleeping or in schoolhouse. Even tweens under 12, he added, are sending 1,146 letters per calendar month, which is about iv text letters per waking hour that they are not at school.

Getting data from the under-12 set is difficult for researchers and carriers considering they aren't allowed to exist surveyed without parental permission, and they don't show upwards in the phone pecker data.

However, Pinger's own user registration data offers a pretty specific illustration. The majority of its users, 28 percent, fall in the 18-to-22 age range; xviii percent are xv to 17 years old; 18 percent are 12 to 14 years old; 10 percent are 11 or under; 10 percent are 23 to 28 years erstwhile; 6 percent are 29 to 34; vii per centum are 35 to 49; and 3 per centum are l and over.

Answering the call
San Jose, Calif.-based Pinger was founded past Woock and Joe Sipher, both veterans of Handspring (which was eventually sold to Palm) and and then Virgin Electronics. They incubated in 2005 with venture majuscule house Kleiner Perkins and got funding initially for a service that treated a voice message similar a text message--letting y'all send vocalism messages across any network. People liked the service, but there was never a good revenue path, they said.

With the advent of the iPhone and its App Store, the duo changed their direction. In 2008, they launched an app chosen Pinger Phone that helped integrate different types of communications methodologies for contacts (social-network usernames, IM handles, phone numbers, email addresses, etc.) Simply it as well let you text for complimentary, which is really why people were downloading it in big numbers, Woock and Sipher said.

That led Pinger to develop a dedicated advertizement-supported texting app, and the issue was Textfree, which hitting the App Store in February 2009. "It went crazy and connected to become crazy," Sipher said.

Initially, users could text upwards to xv messages a day for complimentary, or pay $6 a year for unlimited texting. In May 2010, however, Pinger made the app free for an unlimited corporeality of texting. That'southward also when it started handing out phone numbers.

"What that phone number does is, it creates a proxy social network. Information technology'southward your ID to all your friends," Woock said. "Once y'all requite people that number, they're texting you...our retention is off the hook."

And while Pinger gets its phone numbers just like the carriers do, by buying them from a local commutation carrier, they've been able to get practiced pricing because of their already established text volume. "We have carrier-like volume and so we can get carrier-like pricing," Sipher said.

Pinger, which offers other apps, such as i2i and Putter Buddy, has been profitable since September 2009 and employs more twenty people full-time. It generates about one.2 billion ad impressions a calendar month through a range of mobile-advertisement networks, though most are driven by Google'south. Textfree, itself, counting all its iterations, has been downloaded more than than seven meg times.

Although founded on the idea of carrier independence, Woock and Sipher admit that Pinger is very reliant on Apple right now. Still, all information technology needs is an open up operating system (they plan to launch Textfree for Android by the terminate of the twelvemonth) and a mobile device that can connect over data. "We are platform-doubter," Woock said.

So in time, my daughter might have more kids her historic period with whom to to text. For at present, all the same, I'grand enjoying being in-the-know nigh the daily goings-on in her life. Kids are much more than open up via text, I've learned. The New York Times' David Pogue came to a similar realization, after his xi-year-old daughter downloaded Textfree. "I've never felt so in touch with my ain girl," he wrote.

I wonder if Pogue's daughter has her ears pierced.