(Credit:
Evite)
As of Wednesday, Evite's Send-to-Phone text alerts--which let users get event details on their mobile phone--include a voice-activated directions service. Yes, the addition of direction texts means partiers have lost one of their top excuses for being late. That drawback aside, this free new feature could be quite helpful.
It works from any cell phone and doesn't require any GPS, data plan, or registration. Guests can just click the "directions" link in the Evite event details text message to launch a call to the voice-activated service. They then say their start address or intersection and get turn-by-turn driving directions via SMS.
A partnership between Evite and mobile voice-entry technology company Dial Directions, the feature is available immediately nationwide. Watch the video below to see how it works.
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Mobile users away from their computers have had a handful of options for directory services in the past couple of years. There's TellMe (555-TELL), FREE-411, CALL-411, and GOOG-411 to name some of the free ones. There are also the official ones from each of the carriers that are billed a la carte--and usually at a high price.
This morning FREE-411 (one of the older services of the crowd) has announced a partnership with a useful driving directions service Dial DIR-ECT-IONS to help people find phone numbers and addresses for businesses or residential listings along with step-by-step directions for how to get there. The service starts next month in three major cities (Los Angeles, the SF Bay Area, and Chicago) and then nationwide in April.
This is immensely helpful if your handset isn't on a data plan, or you're away from a phonebook or map. Competitor TellMe, which is owned by Microsoft, has had such a mixed feature using its downloadable phone app, but no such service for its text, or 800-based phone services.
Under the Radar's Mobility is all about accessing Web services while away from the comforts of your home computer. While a great deal of that has to do with phones, many of the sites and services can be useful even when you're back at the homestead. The first four companies showing their stuff are Boopsie, Buzzwire, Dial Directions, and ImThere. While all four have mobile components, Boopsie and Dial Directions are phone-centric.
Boopsie showed off its mobile search application, which has both a standalone application for phones with open platforms like Windows Mobile and Palm, along with a BREW and J2ME application, and an ajaxy Web interface the company touts as iPhone-friendly. The search tool is focused around categories, which the user has to choose before seeing a search box. Boopsie's CEO Greg Carpenter did a live demo of the service on a Palm Treo for finding a Wikipedia entry. The results come up live and very quickly. It's also got prefix search, meaning you need to type in only the first few letters of a word in multi-word searches.
The company makes its money from theme-skinned clients and an enterprise version that can be tweaked for businesses wanting to use it as an internal tool. Eventually Boopsie hopes to integrate keyword placement with wallpapers, ringtones, and all the other things that are making buckets of cash for mobile-phone companies.
The panel of judges chided Boopsie for putting too much pressure on the consumer who needs to pre-think searches by picking a category--something that goes against the current trend of letting users be "lazy" and simply type into a blank search box. Carpenter says consumers who use the application tend to use it extensively enough after doing a single search that they identify channels they go back to.
Buzzwire focuses on streaming media, which is made from audio, video, and written content like blog posts and news articles. The service is launching "early" next year, as soon as it can line up carrier support, although the company has had a 3000-user beta trial going since July. The application lets people find stuff to read, listen to, or watch online, and make customized lists of favorites that can be accessed on both the phone and from a desktop browser. There's also a social-networking component with a sharing service that lets users swap bookmarks with one another.
The big question from the moderators is how the company would maintain whatever deal it have with the carriers without being pushed out over time. Buzzwire's answer was that the content it serves up is king, and that it always tries to maintain compatibility on as many platforms as possible.
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