SMS is an extremely popular mode of communication in India but is currently limited to people who can read (or write) English. There are SMSes being written in Punjabi, Tamil, Gujarati and many other Indian languages using Roman script so that they can be delivered over SMS.

A lot people I know started using the Internet when they discovered that there is so much content available in Hindi. I believe that there’ll be many many more people who would discover SMS when it’s available in their language.

Vakow! now supports Unicode which means that you can post SMSes in your language. You can type in any of the transliteration tools available (like this one) and copy-paste the text on Vakow! SMSes can be tagged in your language (http://www.vakow.com/tag/हिन्दी/sms/) and shared on email, Orkut or Facebook.

Though, we don’t yet support delivery of non-english SMSes over mobile (it’s being worked upon), we believe that users will find currently available sharing options useful and fun.

तो फ़िर देर किस बात की है. आइये अपनी अपनी भाषा में थोड़े बहुत SMS शेयर करें और इस सर्विस का मज़ा उठाये.

This could have easily been called Version 2.0 of Vakow! but it sounded too lame. Even with a ”2.0″.

Having struggled with the nomenclature for about 30 seconds and rejecting every suggestion that came up, we decided to cut corners and give you the real gravy - quick and fast.

Here’s what you’ll see in Vakow! now:

No requirement of +2 score to send SMS to your subscribers followers

Now we’ll send out SMSes to all your subscribers followers as soon as you post them. This will enable our users to post a variety of content ranging from a random thought, a movie review, a stock update or an sms forward that will be forwarded to his or her subscribers followers.

Go on, post something to your blog >>

Free Personal SMS to any phone in India

You can send personal SMSes (upto 140 chars) to any mobile phone in India, for FREE! All the SMSes that you send or receive through Vakow! are stored in your Personal Messages Inbox, and when you use it, the phone numbers get added to your address book automatically.

Send a free personal SMS >>

Receive up to 100 SMSes per day now

Now you can receive upto 100 SMSes from Vakow! per day - upto 50 SMSes from the people and tags that you are subscribed to follow and upto 50 personal SMSes from your friends.

Of course, if you don’t want to receive or want to receive less SMSes, appropriate controls are provided in your SMS Settings section.

Non-registered users can receive upto 5 SMSes per day. This should be great for sending those “how you doing mom?” messages (you know moms don’t sign up very easily).

Comment from mobile

Now you can also comment on any SMS that you receive from your friend from your mobile phone the moment you receive it.

Here’s the format: Send c username your comment to 99015 54321

e.g. To comment on kowboy’s latest sms, I’ll send c kowboy i like ur sms to 99015 54321

Simplified Mobile Commands

To post an SMS now you can just send it to our 10 digit non-premium number: 99015 54321 (without adding ‘p’ to it).

Earlier, to post: p i love vakow to 99015 54321
Now, to post: i love vakow to 99015 54321

Also, instead of “Subscribe/Sub”, we’ll be using “Follow”, which has become a sort of worldwide acceptable term for the action.

For other mobile commands, please have a look at the mobile cheat sheet.

PS: All previous mobile commands will continue to work as well.

And, we have made a bunch of design and usability improvements that we sincerely hope you’ll notice and appreciate.

Like always, our email line is open to you, please please please do write to us at feedback at vakow dot com with your feedback, suggestions, queries and complaints.

Have fun!

The website should be working fine now. If you find something strange, please do send a mail at support [at] vakow [dot] com.
Thanks.

STUPID! STUPID! STUPID!

In an act of EXTREME stupidity, we had our admin site behind the default admin login name and password - you know - root/root (of course, we have changed it now). It happened only a couple of days ago when we updated our database.

Many many thanks to Arpan (who mailed us immediately after discovering the problem) and Ashish (who called us up). We love you, Arpan & Ashish.

We are really embarrassed about the incident. But would like to tell you that NOTHING was hacked and all of your personal information is safe and behind secure passwords.

We also PROMISE that this will never NEVER happen again and THANK YOU for your patience and your trust in us.

Sincerely
Very Silly RG and Amitu

Do you know that there exists a very old-skool way of sending images on regular mobile phones? Of course you know and you still don’t use it because it’s sort of expensive and only so many images are available to you.

But what if it was free and what if there was a very large and constantly growing collection of such images?

That’s what we just did - we mashed up Picture SMS with Web 2.0!

On Vakow!, now you can post not just text but also these tiny little b&w pictures to your collection and share it with your friends for free.

You can find these pictures on the Internet but we’d rather like it more interesting and have you create them yourself. Please unleash your creativity such that it’s not larger than 72 X 28 (or 78 X 21) pixels and is black and white in colour.

As someone very wisely said: A picture SMS is worth a thousand text SMSes!

Oh my Dear, Forget ur Fear,
Let all ur Dreams be Clear,
Never put Tear, Please Hear,
I want to tell one thing in ur Ear
Wishing u a very Happy “NEW YEAR”!
posted by rahul88

Don’t forget to send your friends and loved ones free SMS greetings from Vakow! They are all neatly arranged under the tag newyear and you can send them to your friends’ mobile phone, email or Orkut Scrapbook.

To visit, click the following link: http://www.vakow.com/tag/newyear/

See you in 2008!

This one is going to be a quickie and is mostly for posterity:

Vakow! - the community of ppl who luv SMS Forwards is officially launching today.

See you there!

We are slowly starting to open up Vakow! to users.

Now all registered members can send any number of pre-approved invites to their friends using the ‘Invite your Friends’ feature and let their friends also be part of the awesomeness.

If you want an invite, find a friend who is already doing it or leave your name and email address at www.vakow.com.

Almost.

As we speak, at this precise moment, Vakow! is being tested by a group of undercover secret beta users. And, may I gloat, reviews have been fantastic. (Thank you, users - Icecream for all)

If you want to bring some excitement to your life, I suggest you leave your name and email address at http://www.vakow.com.

We hope that we’ll be publicly launching in a week’s time. In the meanwhile, may I ask you to store +91 99015 54321 in your address book as Vakow!

See you soon.

ssup?