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Austin Roundtable: The Web Starts At The Grassroots (100 Tickets Available)September 15th, 2008 at 7:30 pmSource:TechCrunch iPhones and Blackberries with all-you-can-eat data plans may be commonplace in Silicon Valley, but for the vast majority of mobile phone users in the United States, data plans are still an unneeded luxury. That said, nearly every phone built in the last decade includes SMS - the immensely popular text messaging format that now counts over 2.4 billion users worldwide. To capitalize on the ubiquity of SMS, a number of companies such as Pizza Hut and Amazon now allow users to place orders and query information using some basic commands in a text messages. Unfortunately, these commands are clunky and impractical for most users (for example, to order my favorite Pizza from Pizza Hut I would need to enter “O FAV”). SmartTouch, a mobile software company that launched at last week’s TechCrunch50 DemoPit, is looking to fix this. The company has developed a suite of basic widgets for mobile phones that visualize these SMS services, allowing users to navigate through an intuitive menu instead of having to remember keywords and commands. As CEO John McDonough explains, it’s sort of “like moving from the days of command line MS-DOS to Windows 3.1″.Source:TechCrunch The Roundtable will be held at the AT&T Executive Education and Conference Center located on the University of Texas at Austin campus, starting at 3:00 p.m. (Austin Time) on Thursday, September 25. This will be similar in format to the Mobile Web Wars Roundtable I hosted in July—two dozen founders, CEOs, VCs, and execs in a room talking about a single issue, live streamed over the Web. The Roundtable will focus on how to use the Web to build grassroots support for startups, brands, politicians, and social causes. |
Today, we are releasing 100 
