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Source: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
Today, we are releasing 100 tickets for “The Web Starts at the Grassroots” Roundtable Discussion prior to the TechCrunch Austin Ventures Meet-Up at Pangaea. Tickets are $50, with all of the proceeds benefiting the Lance Armstrong Foundation.

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. Source:TechCrunch

Just asking. Tech stocks closed down almost 4 percent today (3.24 percent since Thursday), versus almost 7 percent for financial stocks. Google is only down 1.05 percent. Amazon is down 1.35 percent. But Apple is down 5.76 percent. And RIM is down 7 percent (Wall Street banks are a big customer).

Did anyone buy any tech stocks today?

This entry was posted on Monday, September 15th, 2008 at 7:30 pm and is filed under google, apple, amazon, Company & Product Profiles, CrunchGear. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.