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!

Health check

Numbers: We crossed 2500 users a couple of days ago. Growth has slowed, but is still steady.
The system is chugging away normally once again - no more delayed messages!
We hope to add our new hardware by mid-January so please bear with the limitations of Mobs until then - we're going all out in the meanwhile on improving features.
On a slightly different note, Asim Rehman from BMS dropped us a mail about the fact that towards the middle of last week, the first few characters of the message was getting lost. We've got this fixed now - thanks Asim! So keep talking to us - we need to hear from you guys.