and may remain so for next 30 mins. More later.

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!

We have just launched the Vakow! application for Facebook which allows you to share SMSes with your Facebook friends. The way it works is fairly simple - you add the application (by visiting this link) and start sharing cool SMSes with your friends (look for the red “forward it” link).

When you share an SMS it goes as a facebook notification, email or SMS depending on if the recipient has not installed the application, installed the application or installed the application and configured his or her account with Vakow!.

If you want to receive the SMSes on your phone, please do sign up with Vakow! after you add the application. It’s FREE and takes like 30 seconds.

The application also displays featured SMSes on your profile which your friends can read and share with their friends.

You could already share SMSes with your Orkut friends through Vakow!, with this Facebook application SMS Forwards have become even more “social”.

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!

We almost forgot to tell you about this.

If you have not already bought the December issue of i.t. mag we should tell you that they have published a huge article on your favorite startup (thank you!). It’s called Vakow! - the SMS Store and it’s written by Nilesh Kakade.

And, in case, you’re not planning to purchase the whole magazine (we understand), you can always download the article from here.

We have started to sort SMSes in a tag on the basis of their popularity by default. We are calculating popularity using Score, Number of Forwards, Favorites and Comments.

Now you know what to do when you need to find the most popular Christmas or Newyear SMS.

Also, Featured SMSes is a selection of some of the choicest SMSes that we receive from our very Vakow! users. Earlier it was not possible to browse through the old featured SMSes (apparently) which has been fixed now.

Have fun!

Now you can display links to your profiles on various social networks (Orkut, Facebook, Hi5 et al) or your personal blogs or websites along with your SMS Forwards collection on Vakow!

Let your Vakow! friends know of your presence on the other places on the web.

If you’re already a member visit your Settings page now.

Also, there is a one more way to browse SMSes now - Most Forwarded this Week. These are the SMSes that our users have shared the most with their friends in last 7 days. It’s like those music charts.

Check it out here >>

Because now our users can send SMS Forwards to their Orkut Friends right from Vakow!

The way it works is fairly simple: If you come across this supercool SMS on Vakow! (which is not a very rare occurrence) and you feel the urge to immediately share it with tons (or a selected few) of your Orkut friends (which is only fair), you just have to click on ‘Post as Scrap’ link present right below that SMS.

We’ll do the hard work of fetching your friends list and posting the SMS to the scrapbooks of all the friends selected by you. Learn more about this feature here >>

We are, as always but slightly more this time, super excited about this feature.

This one clearly goes in Why-Didn’t-We-Do-This-Earlier dept.

This has been our most requested feature so far.

Now when you use ‘Forward this SMS’, you’ll also see all the contacts (phone numbers and email addresses) you have forwarded an SMS to.

You can assign name to them by clicking on ‘edit’. Give same name to multiple contacts (phone number and email address of the same person) to club them together.

Sharing SMSes is even easier now!

See the screenshot:

To see what’s new at Vakow, visit http://www.vakow.com/new-features/