• Posted by: on
  January 25th, 2010
• Category:latest buzz

Hi there….we know you guys were kind of missing hearing from us, but then being SMS GupShup is not easy. …and you know that right?

Loads of updates to share:

We will not bore you by saying things like we are the No.1 social messaging platform in India, we got an additional $12 Million funding and tons of appreciation from across the globe.

What is most exciting to us is that we are a 25 million big family now!!!! Hurray. That means, we have the power to talk to 25 million people and hear back from them ….all on sms. 

While new product launches for our corporate and SME clients kept us busy over the last few months, we are seeing many more interesting applications of this community- many celebs now have fan clubs on your favorite platform! It is quick, easy and a personal way for them to keep in touch with their fans between busy shoots and travel.

GupShup Headquarters in Mumbai had surprise visitors this Friday. Pop icon Shibani Kashyap, DJ Amann and soap star Vishal Singh stopped by our office for some gupshup with the team. Check out the pictures! Shibani mesmerized with her live performances of “Ho gayee hai mohabbat”, “Zinda hu main” and then “Sajana aa bhi ja”. Vishal enacted his favorite scene from “Kuchh Iss Tarah”. Setting the mood for the party were an eclectic mix of tracks from the house of DJ Amann.

There was champagne and cake to celebrate 25 Million users on GupShup. Some spying media followed the guests as they signed memorabilia and left their palm-prints on GupShup Wall of Fame.

Which of your favorite stars will visit GupShup next? Keep guessing….

• Posted by:GupShup on
  March 20th, 2009
• Category:latest buzz

Cricket Communities on GupShup

With IPL just a few weeks away, cricket fever is gripping the nation. GupShup is excited to announce that 3 IPL teams

have decided to build their official fan community on the SMS GupShup platform. Join your favorite teams and get latest updates from teams and players, participate in contests, play games, win incredible prizes…..

Product Updates

For publishers: As you know, GupShup currently allows a limited number of messages (4-8 per day) and limits the message length to 140 characters. Based on the feedback from the community GupShup will soon be reducing the message length, but increasing the number of messages allowed. Message posts will be restricted to 100 characters. The number of messages allowed per day will be increased to 6-12 per day.

For subscribers: On web and GPRS, subscribers will have unlimited access to all messages on all groups. Subscribers on SMS will get a limited number of free incoming messages per day and after that will have to pull additional messages by sending a GET message. These limits vary based on the activity level of the subscriber.

Games and Applications

GupShup is introducing a powerful new application platform (http://api.smsgupshup.com/) to enable you to quickly and easily develop and launch your own SMS games and applications. The platform gives you the benefit of all the infrastructure that GupShup has already developed. There are a few sample applications available, along with the source code, and instructions on how you can build your own. You can also earn revenues from the premium incoming messages. It’s like building your own VAS company – quickly and easily.

• Posted by:GupShup on
  December 24th, 2008
• Category:Uncategorized

Extending the Reply functionality we released a few weeks back, here’s Chat from SMS GupShup, probably the most awaited feature since we started last year.

Everyone talks to everyone

GupShup Chat is GupShup in true sense of the word – the easiest way for a group of people to talk to each other. Anyone can start a chat, everyone gets to participate – all messages and replies go to everyone at once. Just remember to set your nick names to avoid confusion.

When to Chat

GupShup Chat has many uses, here are some interesting situations:

• Plan weekends and vacations: A little planning can help make weekends more fun and exciting, chat with friends to plan trips, have fun, and chat later to live the memories yet again.
• Distributed family together: Parents living in another city, brother working in another MNC in another metro, sister married in a third city? Share tidbits of your daily life, bring the family together.
• Gup – Chup GupShup: Sitting in a boring lecture, have a joke to share? Share a smile. Silently.
• Quick opinions: Going out for a date? Cant decide where to go or which dress to wear? Friends are always there to help.
• Live cricket together: Friends living in different places, can now live a match together. Chat about Sachin’s sixers and Dada ke dhamake, have friendly bets on how the match will end, some of you might even be in office.
• Change of plans: You planned with friends for a get-together at the local hangout. You’re the first to arrive and the waiting time is an hour – let everyone know, decide the new place over chat.

These are but a few of the many uses we use GupShup Chat for, we are sure you can think of many more..

Start a Chat

Chats can be started over SMS or from the Web (you will need a SMS GupShup account, sign up for free if you dont have one already).

To start a chat from your phone, SMS to 567678:

To set your nickname, SMS to 567678:

there you go, all set up! We hope you enjoy it as much as we do.

Already logged in, then give it a try or sign up for a GupShup account

• Posted by:GupShup on
  November 27th, 2008
• Category:news, product

SMS GupShup is an excellent way to reach your friends, family or target audience. Yet, even with all of this power, SMS GupShup users still disliked the lack of interactivity of the medium. Today we take a step towards solving this issue.

Introducing Reply

Wouldn’t it be great if group owners and members could talk to each other?

How would it be if members could tell the group owners what the liked and what they did not?

What if group members could just reply to a post, and the response comes back to the group owner?

Now all of this is possible on SMS GupShup, with the new Reply feature.

Members can just reply to group posts, like they reply to other SMS, by hitting ‘Reply’ on their mobile phones, and SMS GupShup takes care of the rest and sends the reply to the group owner.

How does Reply help you

When we asked a few of our group owners what do they need most on SMS GupShup, most of their answers boiled down to more interaction with group members.

Interactivity between group authors and members is key to a group’s growth. GupShup group members can tell the authors what they like, and what they would want more. The authors can tailor the content of their posts accordingly.

All of this leads to happier members, who in turn help the group to grow.

Talk to your members, interact with them, ask them to Reply.
——————————
If you have doubts, have a look at the FAQs.
To start using SMS GupShup, sign up / login here.

• Posted by:GupShup on
  October 23rd, 2008
• Category:latest buzz, product, release

Today, we launched a new version of the website, with exciting new features to celebrate a great Diwali with all of you.

What are the Diwali goodies?

SMS Greetings which reach your friends and family instantly, and bring them joy. Check out the Gallery for the latest in Diwali greetings and more fun stuff.

SMS Pokes: Pictures speak louder than words. Want to ‘ Hug’ someone, ‘Kiss’, ‘Kick’ or ‘Slap’, on the mobile phone? Then SMS Pokes are the coolest way to do it. Send pokes in quick easy steps.

Gallery: Currently home to SMS Greetings and SMS Pokes, the Gallery will soon provide you themes, wallpapers, ringtones, games for your mobile and more.

Faster, Longer message posts: Want to send long messages to your group but don’t know how. Now you can post messages, greater than 140 characters, all the way to 260 characters in length, and have them delivered really fast. All this for just a token fee.

And to help all you lovely people to buy all of the new, cool stuff, we now have a GupShup prepaid account, including an online payment system. You can now recharge your GupShup account using any mode of payment. Buying stuff was never so much fun.

Although GupShup now has all these prepaid features, we would like to emphasize that the SMS GupShup group messaging service is still free to use.

Wish you and your loved ones a happy and prosperous Diwali.
GupShup Team

• Posted by:Neeta on
  August 20th, 2008
• Category:news

The Mumbai Traffic Police has joined hands with SMS GupShup to provide FREE regular traffic alerts to Mumbaikars. Commuters will receive information regarding traffic jams, traffic diversions, waterlogging, accidents and other related incidents which add to the traveling time. The alerts are posted from the control room of the Mumbai Traffic Police.

The service is offered across the city and the three groups are -

• TrafficCity which provides alerts from Colaba upto Mahim & Sion

• TrafficEast which provides alerts from Sion to Vashi & Thane

• TrafficWest which provides alerts from Bandra to Dahisar

You can join the group(s) of your choice by sending JOIN groupname to 567678. Alternately you can subscribe to the groups here

Mumbai Traffic Police has set up a network of electronic banners at various important junctions across the city. These banners will also carry information about these groups, and how to join them.

Join the group of your choice, plan your route and save time, courtesy the alerts from Mumbai Traffic Police! Do spread the word around.

• Posted by:GupShup on
  July 14th, 2008
• Category:news

We just learned that SMS GupShup has been named one of the MobileBeat Top 30 hottest mobile technology companies by VentureBeat. Thanks for your support and voting for us!
We will be presenting at MobileBeat 2008 in Bay Area on July 24th, where the top 10 companies will be selected. See you at the conference – you can still register here !

• Posted by:Beerud on
  June 25th, 2008
• Category:founders desk, latest buzz

Over the past 15 months since its launch, SMS GupShup has seen explosive growth. It is being used by over 3 lakh publishers sending well over 10M messages per day to millions of users across a wide variety of categories. SMS GupShup has become the preferred communication platform for individuals, merchants, companies, clubs, schools and colleges around the country. There are users from every state of the country and messages in over a dozen languages (albeit in English script). We thank you for adopting this platform and for telling your friends.

During this time, the product has evolved a lot. We started with basic group messaging then added a website, WAP/xhtml site, picture messaging, personal messaging, publisher dashboard and more. Less visible, but perhaps more important, are the upgrades on the back end where we’ve built a high-performance, robust, scalable messaging system that can handle the enormous volume of messages. We thank you for your constant feedback, which is invaluable in guiding our product roadmap.

We take another big step in that direction with this major new website release today. You’ll see a new design and lots of new functionality including multiple groups, better ways to discover groups, to share content, greater privacy controls, better gallery and more.

Our goal is to keep giving you increasingly powerful tools to help you communicate with your friends and to form communities. Please let us know how we can help you do that better. Meanwhile, karte raho GupShup.

• Posted by:GupShup on
  June 25th, 2008
• Category:latest buzz, product, release

We bring you a new version of SMS GupShup, the culmination of months of work by the GupShup Team. This release brings with it numerous improvements both at the server and the interface level, and some much requested features like Multiple Groups per user!

If you want it short and sweet, log on to the website, and the fresh new ‘welcome’ page will tell you things in a nutshell.

And if you want to know everything, we would recommend getting a cup of garam chai (or a bag of popcorn) and some good GupShup coz this post will take some time.

Features:

Multiple groups

Already have a group for your family and now want one for your friends? Or do you have one for friends, and need another for your colleagues? Probably the most requested feature in all the feedback we received; now we bring you Multiple Groups – go on, have one for each of your circles, and have fun!

Slick UI, and warmer look

Its not just the logo, the entire SMS GupShup website, and the SMS GupShup mobile website have gone through complete makeovers to be faster, friendlier, and we daresay more pleasing to the eye. It’s a place you would like to spend some time with your friends.

Larger and more accessible gallery

A few months ago, we introduced picture messages because we thought you would love them, and you made us happy by sending millions of them. Now we bring to you the improved Gallery, your one stop place to find new stuff from SMS GupShup. Keep a close watch, we’ll be adding more mobile goodies to it soon…

One-click forwarding of messages

Old jungle saying “Imitation is the best form of flattery”. (Well maybe, not so much from the jungle.) Nevertheless we’ve seen some cool creative messages doing rounds of various groups – now you can just forward the messages you like to your friends, with one click of a button. Say bye-bye to copy-paste.

Share with friends

Spread the GupShup cheer among all your friends – forward crazy, funny messages to them, or share interesting groups, to their mobiles, email addresses or Facebook accounts.

Easier discovery of interesting groups

The gallery is cooler but it is not even a fraction of the interesting content available on SMS GupShup. The ‘Groups’ page will now show the list of categories of groups, and interesting groups in those categories.
Psst… watch out for some more interesting features here in the coming months.

The SMS GupShup community is the police

While we are big fans of free speech, we know some messages may be offensive, or distasteful and unsuitable for public viewing.
We feel community members are best equipped to keep SMS GupShup clean and wholesome and have introduced the ‘Flag’ feature – a one-click way of marking offensive content. Please go ahead, use it to mark those messages and you can be sure one of our team members will definitely have a look at the offending message, and take appropriate measures!

Calling all ye developers and code ninjas

It’s not only about users. We’ve also released a new set of APIs, so you can better integrate GupShup with anything else you are working on. Remember, SMS GupShup is one nice way to reach out to users instantly!

Phew, we think that’s all of the big features, but there are loads of tiny useful things which you’ll discover as you use the new website.

Go on, give it a try, and leave some love and feedback!