It's actually not required for signup. You would still receive coupons for free up to a face value of $5 (which is the vast majority in volume).
That was an incentive to foster virality, but your comments are very much appreciated.
Oh wait, I also did the stalker ads idea, or sort of. I believe that someone will come up with a successful solution for location-based mobile coupons. What we have seen with our project is that this idea clicks with customers, but it is hard to develop a scalable model to acquire local advertisers. Local business owners seems extremely reluctant to embrace the internet medium for some reason (even with some free limited service, free pilot programs, etc.).
In a weekend I coded the virtual business card idea a few months ago, but it didn't catch up at all. Basically the click-through rate of the tiny link in email signatures is below 0.1% so its virality is basically none.
http://www.tinyvcard.com i thought it was a brilliant name :-)
Google App Engine represent one more step towards lowering the barrier to entry to web applications and services.
Any small team of developers can deploy a successful web application with no system administrators and no VP of operations. GAE takes away all the complexity of databases, replication, redundancy, monitoring.
For my last project (http://www.btexty.com , an open mobile messaging platform), we switched to Python and GAE, moving away from a Ruby On Rails setup on dedicated hosting, that we used from a previous project (http://www.moqpon.com mobile coupons).
I'm very happy with that decision. For a duo of developers, forgetting about the hosting platform allows to focus on product development and dramatically increases productivity.
The revenue sharing is quite surprising to me:
"As publisher, you will receive 35% of the list price when someone buys your content from the Kindle Store."
I think you might run into breach of the guidelines of the mobile marketing association. All messages application to mobile should be sent from a short code, to make it easy to opt-out. See http://www.mmaglobal.com/policies/code-of-conduct
I think a transition model can be envisaged where the smartphone client or mobile website interacts with the legacy SMS system. As more smartphones access the dedicated client (maybe with an open push notification technology) or the mobile website, the mobile messaging platform will slowly substitute the original proprietary SMS model.
That's what happened to PayPal which started by piggy-backing on credit cards and now makes money on paypal-to-paypal money transfers.
I agree with you on this. The fact that sending a message costs strictly more than 0 reduces noise of the communication channel. I think you can achieve the noise reduction with 1 or 2 cents per message, the rest is profit to telecom carriers.