Crickee's Blog

Nokia 6101 Advertisement …

Argentina Jan06 Nokia 6101
Originally uploaded by crickee.

Look at what I saw in Buenos Aires last January ... Isn't it a beautiful ad with a Crickee look & feel ...

BTW, Nokia 6101 is VGA camera with self-portrait feature, camcorder, MMS with intuitive audio messages, XHTML browser, email, and two color displays and Crickee compliant ...

if you are a happy owner of a Nokia 6101, join early pioneers by adopting Crickee now !

Over 400 Millions Mobiles users in China ….

and nearly 34 mio SMSs sent last Month (66% increase compared to Jan 05)

Crickee is dreaming !

more info at USAtoday

89 percent of major European brands say …

logo-vb-top
Originally uploaded by crickee.

they'll extend their marketing reach to mobile ...
Source: Vanson Bourne.

An interesting survey just came out, interesting for both Crickee users and partners I believe... For users first, because it shows that Crickee's willingness to provide free service to you is a viable business, as partnerships with brands, advertising agencies and whole eco-system can finance your free text messaging service :)

For partners, as it shows that mobile is the future of advertising:

According to the Vanson Bourne survey done with 50 major brands, by 2008, 89% of those brands intend to use the mobile messaging to communicate with their customers...
It is also the present: about 40 percent already have used text messaging to reach consumers.
The same study shows that in five years over half of brands (52%) expect to spend between 5% and 25% of total marketing budget on mobile marketing.

Now, I believe Crickee, beside riding on those trends, can and does make the game funnier: it takes advantage of the mobile advertising to provide a free service to end-users (cool isn't it?) and as it is much smarter messaging application than the classic SMS applications are (Crickee is updatable unlike most SMS applications)... Concretely what it means? Just a few tips for your imagination: we can make a difference between a brand you want to hear from and a friend you chat with, we can suggest you some text message alert service to which you may want to subscribe (eg astrology, sports news, theater releases, weather, reminders, jokes, etc)... So I already invite all the people who have this kind of content to contact us - and of course we'll decide to propose it to you, Crickee users, if YOU find it appealing!

So feel free to tell us what kind of brands, what kind of newsletters and alerts you'd like to see in Crickee in your comments to this post, we'll be glad to publish you :)

The survey is readable at (http://www.wirelessweek.com/article/CA6309048.html)
Keep watching ;)

The Sony Ericsson K750i is in love with Crickee

A friend of mine recently purchased the Sony Ericsson K750i. Although this device has been around for a few months, I had a chance to play with it only last week.

As a member of the Crickee Team, I couldn't help installing Crickee on this sleek, black, beautiful little thing.

And YES it works great ! Sorry guys it's not "officially" Crickee-compatible yet but will soon be, just like a bunch of other phones. You can buy it and wait a few weeks ... Crickee's around the corner, so stay tuned.

One thing though, my friend bought it at his operator's online store. That's why he thought the data/web access woud be working...but nothing happened out of the box.

So guys, be sure to check your Wap/Web settings to make sure your Crickee-friendly phone will adopt Crickee and maybe ... fall in love too ;-)

Groundbreaking features?

Nokia
Originally uploaded by crickee.

Mobile phones have come a long way in becoming powerful convergence devices, but now and again a new innovative feature emerges that starts a movement in the world of mobile phones. Remember the arrival of the first camera phone? then the first MP3 player handset and yes even the first 3G phone.

Although CNET classes the following features I want to talk about as 'what's cool' they cannot be considered as groundbreaking but will surely set new trends: The Motorola ROKR E1 is the first phone to be fully I-Tunes enabled (do you ever get the itch to download a few tracks while you're in the underground/subway/metro) and the Nokia 5140i includes a fitness coach application and is totally splash and dirt resistant. Unfortunately unless you are a fitness freak and live on Miami beach, it's features do not make up for it's very dated looks :-(...Finally, the Nokia N90 has the most amazing Carl Zeiss lens, I imagine life looks pretty rosy looking through that.

So, calling all manufacturers and Santa Claus or the birthday fairy (she'll be visiting me sooner ;-)) I've thought up my ideal phone. Please, please could I have a phone with the sexy sophisticated look of the Nokia 7380, the astounding functionality of the Sony Ericsson P910i, a Carl Zeiss lens, plus ideally it should be WiFi, I-Tunes enabled and come complete with the fitness coach application. Oh, oh, and could you make sure it's Crickee compliant please.

I can just see myself doing stomach crunches between meetings listening to the Arctic Monkeys ;-). Anyone want to join me?

Travelling through Australia

Australia Feb06
Originally uploaded by crickee.

Recognise this rock? Crickee's been spied in some unusual places recently. From the top of the Sydney Opera House to the depths of the Australian bush.... Where have you seen Crickee?

Wonderful ad …

Argentina Jan06 Movistar
Originally uploaded by crickee.

I'd the chance to spend 10 days in Argentina last January ... Look at what you could see in Buenos Aires ... Texting is a really global phenomenon !!

Yet another version of the HTC Wizard: T-Mobile MDA

Some of you might know that the PDAPhone "HTC Wizard" is available under different brands and operators.

In fact, all these phones are the exact same model, sometimes with a slightly different packaging or radio (GSM or CDMA):

T-Mobile MDA (released this week), Verizon XV6700, Cingular 8125, Sprint PPC-6700, i-mate K-JAM, O2 XDA Mini S, Qtek 9100 and Orange SPV M3000

They all feature a full AZERTY or QWERTY keyboard.

I have the 9100 version with AZERTY keyboard. I bought it in France and as I said in a previous post this is one hell of a good phone. This is my first phone with a Windows Operating System (although I had a couple of PDAs). I have to say that this thing does the job pretty well: email, contact management (via the phone or PC), MP3 player, Internet, video, digital camera (ok, not that good)... and I probably forget a ton of features.

I've been playing with Crickee extensively over the last few weeks and believe me, this is a killer-app. It works like a charm on my french Orange network (via my GPRS and EDGE connection) and when I'm at home or at work I use my Wi-Fi connection, super fast ... and super free !!

I'm one of the few lucky guys who can test and enjoy the Crickee software before the world can do it. You don't know what you're missing guys ... but don't worry Crickee will soon be officially compatible with many phones.

To sum it up, my phone is pretty nice and Crickee works very well on it ;-)

Picture from Engadget

Crickee is not only free, it’s also better :)

I've started to play around with the official beta release on my Nokia 6230 and as I played around, noticed a few (cool) differences with the classic texting...

With your regular texting menu of your phone, looking at your inbox you can see a list of message and senders (Bob, Brad, Nancy,Brad, Tom, Jessica, Nancy). You can only read one message at time and classified in pure, (stupid?) chronological order...

So what's new with Crickee on that? It's simple.. you take any of your contact and you see all your past and current discussions at one glance, this with any of your contacts... In other words, you click on Nancy and you see all your messages exchanged with Nancy and can send from this same view a new message... You click on Brad and so on.. So Crickee is really relationship-based, and not tech-time-based....looks like a little thing... but use it and you'll see it makes a real difference!

Another thing is a comparison to our PC experience... You go to MSN or whatever and your contact is not online but you'd like to leave him a note... impossible.. you'll have to wait for him/her to be online... With Crickee, even if s/he has is phone off, you can send him/her a text message and he'll get it next time he connects... Nice too...

So I thought Crickee will make me save money, but it actually does more, it makes definitely more friendly my texting experience. cool ...

Crickee Beta available for a limited number of mobiles

A year ago, I had a dream ! Imagine mobile texts globally, instantly and free of charge ...

Last sunday, at 5 PM Paris Time, Alexandre called me asking me for a Go/NoGo. My dream became a reality, Crickee is here and public !

I am very proud to work with Pascal, François, Sébastien, Alexandre, Nikki, Andres, Michael, Marc, Gregory, Bertrand, Matthieu, Gilles, Marie, ... who have been incremental to reaching this first public milestone.

Feel free to adopt your own Crikee, we are waiting for your feedback ...

If your phone is not compliant please leave us your email address so that we can inform you as soon as you can adopt Crickee. The number of compliant phones will double within the next 2 or 3 weeks and triple within the next 4 to 6 weeks !