Public Knowledge is a Washington, D.C.-based public interest group working to defend citizens' rights in the emerging digital culture. They have filed an important petition with the FCC:

Text messaging is a part of everyday life for people—a fast and convenient form of communication useful in every situation. Because of its importance, in 2007 Public Knowledge and others filed a petition with the Federal Communications Commission asking that it clarify that text messaging is subject to the same nondiscrimination rules as voice communications.

You can learn more about the petition (and sign on) @ http://www.publicknowledge.org/issues/text-message-petition

So why is this an issue? Let's look at an article in yesterday's New York Times:

When the earthquake devastated Haiti, Catholic Relief Services tried to gather contributions for its efforts using the hottest trend in giving: donations via cellphone.

But the charity wanted to try a twist on the technology: when people sent a text message to donate, they got a reply offering to connect them via phone to the charity’s call center. The group hoped that the calls could build a stronger bond with donors, and garner larger contributions as well.

But just three days into the effort after the Jan. 12 earthquake, the charity got word that Sprint Nextel was demanding that the “text-to-call” effort be shut down. The charity had 40 days to abandon the feature or lose access to millions of Sprint customers.

Sprint’s original motivations are murky; it said that an intermediary company had failed to properly fill out a form to verify that it was dealing with a legitimate charity.

The conflict underscores a problem that public interest groups asked the Federal Communications Commission to address more than two years ago: the hazy legal status of text messages, which are controlled by telephone companies without any real government oversight. The laws that prohibit phone companies from interfering with voice calls do not apply to text messages, a fast-growing medium.

“We should be able to communicate with people the way they want to be communicated with, not the way the phone company wants them to be communicated with,” said Jed Alpert, a founder of Mobile Commons, the company that connects Catholic Relief Services and 100 other nonprofit organizations with text messaging networks. 

Read more @ The New York Times.
Check out the petition here.

We're pleased to announce that Ez Texting won a hot tech demo award at the 5th Annual Small Business Summit last week! Joshua Malin, Ez Texting’s Internet Marketing Director joined Ramon Ray, Co-Producer of the Summit, Editor & Technology Evangelist of Smallbiztechnology.com, on stage to demo Ez Texting’s SMS Marketing service to the 500 summit attendees. “Hundreds of attendees learned how to deploy SMS marketing campaigns first-hand,” says Ramon Ray. “Everyone pulled out their mobile phones and texted SB2010 to 313131. Small businesses saw how easy and affordable Ez Texting makes SMS Marketing.”

The Fifth Annual Small Business Summit was held on March 16th, 2010 at Digital Sandbox with a focus on “Strategies for a New Economy”. Hundreds of small business owners and vendors came together to learn and share their strategies for navigating this tumultuous, and potentially lucrative, economic landscape. For more information please visit http://www.smallbiztechsummit.com/.

See a list of all of the award winners here.

Want to learn more about how Ez Texting can help your small business? Check out the small business resource center.

Dan Butcher at Mobile Marketer looks at Yahoo's Mobile Search efforts and asks some tough questions:

Yahoo’s CEO Carol Bartz recently broke up the company’s mobile group and spread out the employees across other departments, leading to the departure of several senior executives. In addition, T-Mobile USA discontinued its search deal with Yahoo, instead tapping Google as its default mobile search provider, although Yahoo is still the default on the carrier’s European networks.

...

And despite the fact that it is the early days, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo all understand the stakes.

As smartphone penetration increases and brands start to realize the potential of mobile search, revenue will grow quickly.

This all may be moot though:

Yahoo is transitioning its algorithmic and paid search platforms to Microsoft, with Yahoo becoming the exclusive relationship sales force for both companies’ premium search advertisers globally.

...

Microsoft’s Bing is the default search engine for Verizon Wireless, which is the No. 1 carrier in the United States in terms of the number of subscribers.

Interesting times in the mobile search space, which is growing rapidly. Read more @ Mobile Marketer.

We love hearing about innovative uses of our group text messaging service. Today we listened to the Geeks & God Podcast, featuring Pastor Lucas Forsthoff. Head over to Geeks & God to check out the Podcast. They start talking about texting at the 26-minute mark.

Want to learn more about group text messaging for ministries? Head over to the resource center.