It's the little things that count

Here's a story about a little technology that has big potential: E-Mailing a Cellphone by the Numbers. Teleflip provides a service for people sending email to a mobile phone that eliminates the requirement for the domain name. In other words, rather than sending an email to my phone by dialing 6137979793@rogers.pcs.com (I think) you would only have to send to the 10-digits @teleflip.com. Their proprietary algorithms match the phone number to the correct domain and complete the delivery.

Now, it's not exactly rocket science as best as I can figure out: take the number, use the first three digits to locate the geographic area where the phone is tied, the second three digits to determine which carrier the phone belongs to, append the carrier's domain, and forward the message. There are problems too. First, number portability will make my little approach more difficult, so maybe there's more to their algorithm than all that. Second, some people might be off-put by sending their private email to a third party (although I think that's mostly a red herring).

The capability is kind of cool and relatively simple. So, were your ISP to license the capability, it's not entirely impossible that it could catch on. Me, I'm less thrilled about scrolling email on my phone, but there are others . . . It could also, if successful, fallow the ground for Neustar's eNUM project.

Posted by Grayson at February 5, 2004 07:22 AM