Still have the habit of searching through Classifieds section of the newspaper when you’re in need of a product/service? Well; it’s obsolete now, to say the least. The service has gone mobile and trust me; this could get really big. Now you can post/get classified ads through text messages right in your mobile phone, that is, if you are in London.

Upingme is a free mobile advertising service which lets you post and receive classified ads in your mobile phone. If you have something to sell, a product or service, you can simply post a classified ad on Upingme. Upingme will send it to people who are interested in buying the product/service you have on offer, without revealing your mobile number. When people respond to your ad, it will be sent to you, without revealing their mobile numbers. In short, Upingme acts as a mediator between the buyer and seller.

The interesting point is, your ad is sent only to people who want to receive it. In other words, Upingme lets people choose their ads. They can subscribe for a particular type of ads and be notified only of those ads. For example, if you are a used car dealer, you can subscribe to ads related to used car selling/buying and be notified whenever someone wants to buy or sell a used car in the city. Now, here’s the most important part – it’s a FREE service.

The service is now available only in London, though I can sense it striking the right chord big time. This will simply replace the need for classifieds in newspapers and can actually be far more effective and quicker. If you are from London, make sure you give it a try and let me know. Search…

[…]

http://www.cellphone-advertising.com/tag/upingme/

This is a great article, of course Upingme is available to all mobile users world-wide right now, but that does not detract from the author understanding the coolness of Upingme.

You can build applications around it and add Frenzy to your existing offerings by using this RESTful URI:

http://www.upingme.com/api/frenzy/00444123456789

and the server will return the user’s Frenzy code, their Frenzy balance and their currency like this:

<upingme_package>
<upingme_package mode=”frenzy”>
<frenzy_code>lmw94</frenzy_code>
<frenzy_balance>0</frenzy_balance>
<currency>£</currency>
</upingme_package>

Uät is a location service, it is not a surveillance service. The Uät user has complete control over the voluntary disclosure of his location, unlike services that work by triangulation, where users are under surveillance wether they like it or not.

People are becoming (rightly) more sensitive about privacy and Uät is a service that respects the privacy of its users, giving them absolute control over the manner in which they disclose their location. There is no need to have a surveillance system in order to create a very useful location service; not only are we able to deliver precise locations thanks to the way that the system works, but we are also able to give the user control over who gets to see where they are at the level of our service.

During this party season, there are many events on where the location of the party is kept secret until the last minute. It was suggested to us today that someone could use Uät to organize the distribution of a party location. The party organizer would publish his nickname in every advertisement and flyer for the party, along with instruction on how to become his ‘friend’ (U @ chum raveup). Uät would be used to collect party goers as friends to the organizer’s nickname, and when he is ready to divulge the secret location, all he has to do is set his location on the night of the party with a single text and all the revellers will be texted with the address. The organizer gets an added benefit of a ‘control panel’ listing all of his new friends….hmmmmm can you say “Enterprise Version”?!!!

We are really looking forward to the ways that our API is going to be used. We have just cleaned it up and added some new calls. There are at least three applications in development for it that should be out in January.

http://www.upingme.com/api/location/00121234567891

where ‘00121234567891′ is a user’s number. The system returns your client an XML package that reads like this:

<upingme_package mode=”location”>
<location>727 5th ave new York by 10022</location>
<timestamp>1196876518</timestamp>
<icon>http://www.upingme.com/thumbnails/1.jpg</icon>
</upingme_package>

or, you are returned a ‘nowhere’ package if the user is set to ‘private’ or an error ‘404′ package if the user was not found.

You can also retrieve the five most recent messages by calling:

http://www.upingme.com/api/simple.xml

which will return your client a neat XML package of the five most recent messages.

Check out the API documentation for the details and let us know how you are using the API and what you would like to see in it.

There’s more to come!

When you set your location with a text, we tell all your friends where you are so that you can swarm around all the places you like to have fun. You can also see where your friends are on a Google Map via the Uät home page.

Let us know how you are using Uät so that we can tweak the service to make it better!

Everything is back up and running normally.

We are busy working on a new Upingme service which will dovetail nicely with our offerings…and maybe with other sites too. More on this when we are ready to take it live.

The obvious next step is to allow access to our Upingme QR-Code engine via the API; the images would be available for print and the web, and all sorts of cool things could be done with them.

Check out this YouTube video on QR-Codes, by Marcello Di Pietro if your phone cannot do QR-Codes.

And thanks to GiaGia for the reminder and inspiration…

In its current incarnation, you can send a single message and reflect it to an unlimited number of recipients. This could be used for an unlimited number of purposes, some of which we touch on in the ‘about’ page for Grüps. Do let us know if you have any suggestions or find and unexpected features.