IDEA #8 – Anonymous Email Address to Your Cell
By Steve Poland • January 31, 2007
Simple one-page website — input your cell phone number, select your phone carrier, and choose your own identity (email address) that will allow you to receive text messages to your cell.
As of right now, if I wanted to give you an email address that would send me a text message, it would be my actual phone number @vtext.com (Verizon). I think in the future we’re going to see a lot more mobile communications and users are going to want to hide their actual phone number.
The domain for this should be short (like ‘@mycell.com’ would be great — actually, I just looked and they appear to be doing somewhat I’m suggesting here as an idea). Additional options would allow the user to select whether they can receive images and/or videos to their cell phone. (This info would come in handy in the future.)
Then as the owner of the service, I’d expand with various offerings — sports scores to the user’s cell, alerts of comments to their MySpace page, groups created that allow users to blast messages off to their group for say an announcement of a happy hour or concert tonight, etc.
Also want to be clear that you will not spam the user.
What other free mobile services could this offer a user? Eventually you integrate ads to these users — particularly if you can send them sports scores, you could send them in that same message a one-liner ad from Pepsi or Coors (”Brought to you by Coors”).
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4 Responses to “IDEA #8 – Anonymous Email Address to Your Cell”
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Teleflip would be a candidate to provide this service.
Of course that is if they were still doing the same thing they were way back when I wrote this (http://marlincreek.com/content/view/49/35/)...
But maybe they’ll score with whatever it is they are going to launch in March.
The domain name registrar eNom, Inc. (www.enom.com, now part of Demand Media) offers a free “name my phone” service when you buy a domain name. Part of the configuration is to choose a name (e.g. myphone.mydomain.com), the cell provider you have, and a theme (e.g. business theme, techno theme, etc.) This appears to be exactly the “1 page website” you mention.
this is already possible.
you can set up an alias with verizon at vtext.com
my email is jacob25@vtext.com
and it goes straight to my cell via text message.
endjunk.com.
Give out cindy@yourname.endjunk.com to cindy. when you get a text from that address, you know it’s her. Automatically creates addresses if a message is sent to it. Free, unlimited (for the last few years and the time being). Block addresses that get spammed. Get all your mail in one box with no spam, ever.