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March 09, 2006

Rabble expanding carrier reach

We enter the very large house of Cingular.

We have been focusing on establishing our international expansion for Rabble so I haven’t said much lately about our footprint in North America. (We’ll be launching on-deck in Latin America is several markets – more on that some other time.) We like to soft-launch before we announce, so although it has been available for several weeks on certain handsets, Rabble is now officially up on Cingular Wireless. You can find it on your handset in the Media Mall. Here is the link on the Cingular site. You can also get it directly from the Rabble website. Cingular is a big company with a lot of subscribers, most of which can now enjoy the beauty that is the instant gratification of mobile blogging for a scant $2.99/mo. We are happy that they brought us into the fold. Our on-deck reach is now over 100 million.

Remember that Rabble is both a tool and a community: On one hand, it has bi-directional publishing capability with sites like Blogger, LiveJournal, TravelPod, Zoto, Eventful, etc. and we are adding more all the time. In this way, Rabble is a sort of a mobile aggregator of web-based blogging and social networking sites. (We aren’t totally obvious about the integration part, but it is an important part of Rabble’s value to users. Ping me if you want to learn more.) On the other hand, it is also a fully self-contained mobile-centric community that enables people to create and share content right from their mobile phones, so a native mobile user who has never been on LiveJournal can start from their mobile device and have a great experience out of the box.

Anyway, Cingular rules for taking this step forward to offer this in-demand functionality to their subscribers. We like them.

I am happy to say that metroPCS is also currently soft-launched and we will be announcing it fully in a week or so. (So I guess you heard it here first.) Incidentally, metroPCS is a great company and a joy to work with. I really love the value proposition metroPCS offers: Unlimited flat fee prepaid. Talk all you want, same monthly fee. The MOST you can spend is $45 for unlimited local and long distance calling, unlimited text messaging and unlimited picture messaging. For consumers in their markets, how could they choose anything else? I am excited about this relationship. Compared to the national carriers, they may be a bit smaller, but they are giving consumers what they want, which probably means they won’t be smaller for long.

I feel like I owe you an overall update on Rabble, but the problem is that all the stuff I want to share is sort of secret until we launch the next version. I’ll try to share some more about that in the near future as we go into beta.

Posted by Shawn Conahan at March 9, 2006 08:14 AM

Comments

Posted by: Juan Gomez de la Vega at March 9, 2006 10:07 AM

Posted by: Jeff Schottland at March 9, 2006 06:01 PM