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Such is the staggering pace of technology...
Here's what happens when a maturing industry hits a sufficiently motivated small group (Guy Bothamand and Steve Stephani). They've created an email mapping gateway for many (all?) of the major telco's, all of whom refused to get together and do so for customers. Send some mail to somenumber@teleflip.com and its likely to get there.
As usual, there is a caveat (even though the service is currently free)...
"Even if you knew your friend had, say, Cingular, you'd never be able to figure out that the e-mail domain is mobile.mycingular.net without looking it up," Mr. Botham said. Neither he nor his business partner, Steve Stephani, who worked with him to write the programming behind Teleflip, would discuss the method by which each e-mail is steered to the proper phone, and they said they had applied for a patent on the algorithm.
A patent on what amounts to a number translation and lookup service? It's been done before (in many ways) and worse, plays right into the hands of the companies who want ownership and control. Things are going to get ugly here.
Many thanks to Susan's Cell phone heaven article (and Jarvis' BuzzMachine).
Posted by Dave at February 8, 2004 08:48 PM