We are now running advertisement campaigns

So it's live now - Activ Mobs is officially an advertising platform. We can help you reach out to up to 5000 individuals between 17 and 25 years of age in Karnataka every single day.

All our ads are appended to regular mobs group SMS traffic; we never push ads alone to users. This means that when a Mobs user receives a message from us, it is always something he or she is interested in reading. You'd be surprised how much difference this makes, since the user does not regard your advertisement as spam.

How it works

1. Activ Mobs is a group sms service which sends out an average of 50,000 messages per day.
2. These messages are all expected by our users and are sent by people who are their friends and are part of their own SMS groups - i.e, they are not spam created from external sources.
3. We can append ads of upto 80 characters in length at the end of these messages.
4. We can ask users who see these ads to respond with a keyword - when they do, we can send them a message about your service or product containing upto 160 chars.

For example, a sample message might look like this:
adu(frnds):guys i leave 2mr meet today? coffee, drinks?
+Priests 2 Pubs find it all @ yulop.com, sms YULOP for more

So Adu sends a message to his mob frnds suggesting they all meet up; appended to this is an advertisement. If someone is interested by the advertisement, they request more information by sending the keyword - yulop in the example - to Activ. Activ in turn would send back a full, 160 character advertisement (which is the maximum length of an SMS). This could consist of anything from information about your services or products to a discount voucher - it's entirely up to you.

Introductory Pricing
Per impression cost: 15 paise
Per response cost:     1 rupee
Keyword cost:             Free!

What's more, we also let you decide how many impressions an individual receives. We're essentially giving you dirt cheap impressions on extremely high quality real estate, and you pay for responses what you'd otherwise pay for impressions. Yes, we've certainly learned a few things from Google's Ad-sense.

So let's do a campaign!
If you're interested, please drop us a mail (rahul@inactiv.com) - one of us from Activ will help you compose a good ad given the length restrictions. Once the campaign is done we will provide you with the statistics and take your feedback.

Note: We will not provide our users' personal information (which includes their phone numbers) as part of the statistics.

Activ in the Economic Times, Nov 21 2007

You can also read it online.

Micro blog to Blogger blogs using Activ

Now you can post to your Blogger blog when on the move via SMS. All you need to do is register your blog. Here's how you go about it:

1. Register your blog with Activ. SMS
   

   blog register myblog.blogspot.com myusername@gmail.com mypassword

   to 9844622848. You will receive a confirmation message.
   


2. Start posting. Any time you SMS the command 'blog' followed by some text to
   9844622848, it will be posted to your blogspot blog. For example,

   blog I'm watching Barman Begins. It's awesome!

   
   

All messages are regular, local SMS, so it costs you your regular, local rates. No Rs. 3 crap.
You can see an example of Moblogs at my personal blog, here.

Activ Mobs in the news today

We're ready to get serious

Activ Mobs now has 30,000 registered users. Traffic is now 1.5 million SMS text messages every month. And all this in eight months, with no publicity and very basic equipment. And only within Karnataka state.

The Activ team is now certain that Mobs is an idea which will work. Once we've upgraded to the right infrastructure and go national, we expect to scale to 50 million messages a month nationally inside of six months.

That's 1.6 million text messages reaching educated, upwardly mobile people, every day. The opportunity is clear.

Activ is now looking for investors to help us reach this goal. If you're interested, please do contact us by e-mail at rahul@inactiv.com

We are flying again

ActivMobs is up and running.

Keep Mobbing.

Good News/Bad News

Good News First

We are inches away from 20000 user mark. Added a new number: 9844124536

And now the BIG BAD NEWS

Our numbers have been blocked by the telecom operator. Are trying real hard to fix this issue. Please bear with us. ACTIV WILL BE DOWN IN THE MEANTIME.

Definitely no donuts for the operator :)


team activ

Activ Mobs at Barcamp Bangalore 3.0

Barcamp is one of the coolest tech conferences I've ever been to. Barcamp 2.0, which happened in December last year blew me away; both the people and the topics were absolutely amazing. Barcamp Bangalore 3.0 is happening at IIMB on March 31st and April 1st (Saturday and Sunday), so try to be there because it's totally worth it.
We'll be talking about Activ Mobs on Saturday and will be there for the full duration of the event as attendees, so feel free to catch us there. We're looking forward to talking to you guys face-to face and getting your feedback and suggestions first-hand. Keep mobbing!

Oh, and we've hit 9000 users, so yeah, baby, you guys rock!

Commuteeasy.com gets our vote

One of our friends, Vipul Kasera, is running commutueeasy.com - a website dedicated to promoting and enabling car-pooling in Bangalore. If anything can help improve the miserable traffic conditions we all have to deal with everyday, it's Commute Easy.
Commute Easy gets our vote and we're going to both promote the website as well as to enable car-poolers to communicate more conveniently by creating their own mobs for their pools.
Enjoy maadi!

Superfast mobbing! Alright!

So there's a lot that's happened in the month since the last post. Keeping to tradition, the first thing I'll cover is our user base - we crossed 6000 users a couple of days ago. Keep mobbing guys, we really appreciate your support!

Next, we added three new numbers to Mobs to increase performance and make the service more responsive. The numbers are 9964036113/4/5. You'd have started receiving messages from one of these numbers early in February and we're happy to announce that this expansion of our capacity has gone perfectly. So create all the mobs you want - we can now support them! Incidentally, you can now send Mobs messages to any of these numbers as well as the old faithful, 9844622848.

We also came across a problem with cross-network message delays, from a non-Spice network to Spice - for example from Airtel to Mobs (Mobs is on Spice). The deal is that these messages never reach our Mobs servers and so the messages never get forwarded. As an interim solution we've added delivery confirmation messages - the Mobs server will send you an SMS confirming that it has received your message and has forwarded it to your mob. So just keep an eye out for that delivery notification - if you don't get one then it's likely that your message hasn't been delivered. You can just resend the message to any of the Mobs numbers mentioned above. You can turn this feature off by sending delivery off to any of the mobs numbers, but we recommend that you keep it on if you are using a non-Spice connection.

Last but not least, we're working frantically on getting a new website up which allows you to create mobs and add people to them. It's going to be fairly basic to start with but we hope to build on it over time.

We can't afford you guys on some days!

Hey guys...
Here is the list of days on which we need to shut down Activ Mobs traffic as on these days Spice Telecom will charge SMS sent @ Re 1/- per SMS. If we keep Mobs running we'd sink because that would bring our SMS bills for that single day alone to about Rs. 8000/- so please - kindly adjust :-)

14 Feb - Valentines Day
4 Mar - Holi
19 Mar - Ugadi
1 Apr - Eid-Milad
5 Aug - Friendship Day
15 Aug - Independence Day
28 Aug - Raksha Bandhan (Rakhi)
15 Sep - Ganesh Chaturthi
25 Oct - Dussera
8 Nov - Diwali
9 Nov - Diwali again
25 Dec - Christmas
31 Dec - New Year Eve

We got this list from Spice Customer Care.

Keep mobbing, guys, you rock!