Thu

Oct 5
2006

Brady Forrest

Brady Forrest

Jumpword, a Mobile Tool Kit

jword.jpg

Last week I spoke with Jason Kaufman, one of the brains behind Tada Inc and GumSpots (featured at Where 2.0 2006), about his new project Jumpword. An alpha service, Jumpword provides a set of publishing tools that can be used to send pictures, conduct polls or blog to someone's phone via MMC or email account.

It debuted two weeks ago at the Come Out and Play festival where some of its tools were used throughout the weekend to handle registration and communication to attendees. It was also used during gameplay for Insider. When we spoke there were 700 users.

jumpword5bar.gif

There are 7 discrete tools that are offered for free through their website. To use them go to Jumpword.com, sign-up and pick your Jumpword (mine is "brady"). As you create instances of these tools each one has their own word so that they can be addressed individually. These are the currently available tools:


jDeliver - You can use this to send a piece of content (wallpaper, text, sound, or video). The owner can publish this content to the web. It can be updated from your phone. Here is an example module. If you send a note to brady.responsible@jumpword.com then this picture will be sent to your phone or email account.

jVote - You can use this tool to host polls. The poll and results can be published to the web. Here is another example.Send your vote to brady.bestcoffee@jumpword.com.

jHoller - You can use this as an announce list. The person who creates it is able to send out messages to everyone else. jDiscuss - This is a discussion list. This is just like jHoller, but anybody can post to it.

jMbox - This will store messages for you. It's an alternative way for you to provide contact info for yourself. Mine is brady.mbox@jumpword.com.

jBlog - This tool is still in development. It will allow your friends to subscribe to your blog via their phone. They just write to this module with the word "join" to subscribe to your thoughts.


Jumpword is a powerful set of tools for use with your phone. I really like the strong tie-in to the web. They are currently working to make the modules MySpace compliant (the script tags cause them to be blocked). They also aim to provide you with more control over the look of the modules -- a necessary improvement.

I think that most people will not grok how to use these tools or how to set them up on the Jumpword website. I think that Jumpword is going to have to build some applications with their tools or get more games to use them (or become the next MySpace fad!). They are still looking for business models, but are currently considering offering the service to corporations in need of a mobile toolkit for events.


tags:   | comments: 0   | Sphere It
submit:

 
Previous  |  Next

0 TrackBacks

TrackBack URL for this entry: http://blogs.oreilly.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-t.cgi/4975

Post A Comment:

 (please be patient, comments may take awhile to post)






Type the characters you see in the picture above.