Teleflip

» see teleflip.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

The problem Teleflip existed to fix was an American one. Every US carrier ran its own email-to-text gateway on its own domain, so sending a message from a computer to somebody's phone meant knowing which company that person paid every month and remembering the right suffix. Get it wrong and the message went nowhere with no bounce. Teleflip's answer, out of Santa Monica in 2004, was to take the carrier out of the address entirely: write to the ten digits followed by @teleflip.com and they worked out the rest. I was a student in Turkey that year with a Turkish number, so none of this was a gap I could feel.

That was the whole product and it was genuinely useful for about three years. The service was free for the first hundred messages a month with paid tiers starting around five dollars, which is the pricing of a company that expects volume from a few people and goodwill from everybody else. It grew to roughly twenty-five employees and shipped side products under the same prefix, Flipmail and Flipout, which is usually the sign of a startup looking for the second thing to sell.

The second thing never arrived, and the first thing stopped being a problem. The iPhone shipped in June 2007 and everything that followed it carried a mail client, so the reason to route a desktop message through a stranger's server evaporated within about eighteen months.

Tony Davis, the chief executive, emailed subscribers on 12 August 2008 to say the service was ending and the company would look for a buyer for the technology. The Washington Post carried it the next day. The line everybody quoted was about the piggy bank.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the address was the product ~

There was no client to install and no account you strictly needed. You typed a phone number where an email address goes, and a lookup table on somebody else's machine decided whether that number belonged to Verizon or Sprint or Cingular and rewrote the envelope accordingly. All the engineering was in keeping that table current across an industry that kept merging, and none of it was visible to the person typing.

~ the last week ~

Nothing dramatic closed it. There was no lawsuit and no acquisition that soured, only a company that had built a bridge across a gap the market then filled in on its own. Twenty-five people at the top, a freemium ladder that never converted hard enough, and four years of runway ending on a Tuesday in August.

~ after the lights ~

The archive kept the aftermath. By 1 September 2008, three weeks after the email went out, teleflip.com was two words wide: Contact and Blog, on a pale blue background, with nothing behind them. The domain stayed up in that condition for years, which is how a lot of small services actually end. Not a shutdown notice, just a page that stops offering to do anything.

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