Uboot.com

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

~ the obituary ~

Free SMS from a web page is not a software feature. It is a contract with somebody's mobile operator, and Uboot had those contracts in Austria first, then across the border in Germany, and later in Britain and Switzerland. Turkcell was never on that list. What I had in the same window was a modem and MSN, and the phone on the desk was for phone calls.

The company was ucp.ag, Universal Communication Platform AG, founded in Vienna in august 1999 by Christian Lutz and Marwan Saba with four developers. uboot.com went live on 14 february 2000 and the Austrian press of the period was calling it the fastest growing youth community in the country within months. The pitch was the nickpage, your own corner of the site with a guestbook and photo albums, and bolted to it a box that would push a text message onto a real handset at no cost.

The free part lasted about two years. From 2002 the SMS cost money, paid out of a balance you loaded onto your account by credit card in five euro steps. There was no way to get that money back out again. You could spend it on messages or you could leave it sitting there.

At its widest the company claimed six million registered accounts. Ownership moved twice. The foreign offices became wholly owned subsidiaries of ucp.ag in the summer of 2002, and at the end of 2003 the whole thing was sold to a Swiss company, penuntia.ag, which parked it inside a Vienna GmbH and left it there.

~ the case file ~

~ the slide ~

By 2011 the numbers were bad enough that the operators rebuilt the concept, and the rebuild is the part that reads worst now. The discussion forums were closed. The SMS box, the thing the entire site had been assembled around, was removed. In their place the front page started offering bets. A youth community carrying a decade of guestbooks turned into a gambling page with a login, and nobody involved could say out loud what the site was supposed to be for.

~ the day it died ~

uboot.com stopped serving on 15 december 2013. Any credit still on a user account expired that day, with no refund offered and no mechanism to ask for one. Money that had gone in five euros at a time, into accounts opened by teenagers a decade earlier, ended as a line item in somebody's wind-down.

~ what got buried with it ~

Uboot also ran a prepaid mobile business, under the name schwarzfunk in Austria and weissfunk in Germany. Schwarzfunk closed in 2008 and weissfunk appears to have gone in 2011, which means the mobile half of the company died before the website did. That order matters. The carrier deal is what brings you the users and it is also the thing you do not control, and once it lapses you are left holding a profile page nobody has a reason to open.

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