Recess Mobile

We’ve recently come out of beta and Recess is now available to the public. We’ve updated the website to reflect these changes. We’ve added more information to the homepage and made some small aesthetic modifications to the subpages. Also, check out the top signup tab, we’re pretty proud of it You can actually sign up for an account now!

Coming soon — brand new demo that will knock your socks off.

1. 51% of women aged 35-44 and 42% of women aged 45-54 use text messaging (Mobile Marketing Association, 2007 Mobile Attitude & Usage Study)
2. 35-44 year olds send an average of 236 texts per month, compared to making 223 calls during the same time period (Nielsen Mobile 2008)
3. 26% of those who saw an ad responded at least once by sending an SMS text-message, the most popular ad response (Nielsen Mobile, March 2008)
4. One in five US households are cell phone only Source
5. US texters sent 1 trillion SMS messages in 2008, up from 363 billion in 2007 Source
6. Text messaging is more popular than IM, Email, and Voice among college mobile users Source
7. SMS advertising experiences some of the highest response rates among other advertising mediums.
8. Restaurants can expect a 15.5% response rate to SMS advertising Source

Recess is off and running!

Since our application approval on August 1st, 2009, we’ve had over 150 new beta users sign up to use the Recess paging system. Thank you all for the great feedback that you have been providing us with!

Here are some examples of how our beta testers are using Recess:

• A cycling group in California that would like to have cyclists check in and then notify them when it’s time to launch
• A watch repair business in New Orleans that would like to notify their customers when their watch is ready for pickup
• A University medical Skills Center, an advisory office, in Ohio would like to notify students when their advisor is ready to see them
• Automotive repair shops and quick service oil change businesses
• Several restaurant groups throughout the U.S.

It’s official! Recess has been approved by Apple and is available for immediate download on the App Store.

Click here to launch iTunes and check out the application.

Thanks to all those that have made this possible and has helped take it this far, including inZania and Aleksey Gureiev!

Sorry I haven’t posted in a while, been super busy working on Recess. Here’s a video of the Recess application in action.

Check out http://recessapp.com for more info and follow us on Twitter @recessapp.

Recess is almost here! The team and I are super excited to get our first couple of demo units out in live environments for testing. Looks like this is going to be a really busy next couple of months.

What is Recess App?

Recess App is an application that runs on a handheld touch screen device (iPod Touch, iPhone, Nokia N800, etc.) that allows you to manage a waitlist and send out text message (SMS) pages. We’ve thought of a couple really cool use cases for this application –

Restaurants

Instead of getting one of those buzzer pagers at your favorite restaurant, just plug your phone number in and you’ll get a text message when your table is ready. You don’t have to be within any particular distance to the restaurant and you can reply back to the hostess if you need more time.

Amusement Parks

We are actively working to launch our new product, Recess.

Recess is an iPhone app that replaces pagers in restaurants.  Customers can now receive notification via their cell phone when their table is ready.  We like to say,

“We’ll let you know when it’s time to come in.”

The cool part is that it’s not just for restaurants.  We’ll let you know when your car is ready, if your doctor is running late or if you have to pick the kids up early from daycare.  Re-capture your free time and make the most of your day.

You can find more by visiting recessapp.com or following us on Twitter @recessapp.

Link building can be one of the most tedious and annoying chores an SEO will face. Here’s a little shortcut for those of you who dislike this task as much as I do.

Webconfs has a tool called Backlink Builder that can be used to easily build backlinks and reciprocal links. This tool searches for websites of the keyword you specify that contain keyphrases like “Add link”, “Add site”, “Add URL”, “Add URL”, “Submit URL”, “Add Article” etc.

What I’ve developed to be one of the most efficient methods of handling this tool and implementing it to work for me:

1. Open the backlink builder page
2. Insert the keyword or keyphrase that you’re looking for
   1. It’s possible to build this list to as many potential submission pages as needed using different keywords/keyphrases
      1. E.g. cheesecakes, “blueberry cheesecakes”, “new york style cheesecake”, etc.

A couple friends and I are working on a new SMS application – street sweeping alerts.

It’s going to be a free service for anyone living in the street sweeping area around Columbus. You subscribe to the alerts and we’ll send you a text message reminder to move your car before you get towed!

2-seconds to subscribe to a text message reminder is probably cheaper than $115 and half your day to get your car out of the tow lot.

The service is going to be ad supported, but the ads will likely be appended to the bottom of the alert, so you won’t be receiving a bunch of spam text messages – we hate spam, too.

What do you think? If you have any ideas on how to make the service better or any suggestions in general, leave a comment.

What Is RSS?

If you’re not familiar with RSS (really simple syndication), you’re missing out on a massive technological advancement in the web. This is probably one of the coolest, most simple, little pieces of technology on the web.

So basically what RSS allows you to do is subscribe to a blog, or any other site that gets updated with new content, and be automatically notified every time it is updated. There is a multitude of things you can do with this.

For example, if you download movies or music from a select few sites, they allow you to subscribe to their updates so you will get notified every time a new artist comes out with a new CD/Single. If you subscribe to a blog, this one for instance, you will get updated every time I post a new entry. So if you use Firefox as your browser, all you have to do is click on the link and it will add the subscription automatically for you in your bookmarks.