Poll Everywhere (YC Summer 08) Asks The Crowd To Spice Up PowerPoint Presentations

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14 pointsdrm2374 comments

Can be very interesting for fund raisers. As people send donation through premium SMS, anyone can see the amount raised live.

Now, using an area code database they can integrate SMS polls with a map. "Text Iphone or whatever to 41411..." and we can see live the number of people who have Iphones or a certain product and where they live.

Premium SMS is a shady armpit of telecom. Non-profits actually can't do fundraising over premium SMS because the carriers take a 55% cut of revenues and are ashamed of it (they say they don't have a reliable process for certifying non-profit campaigns). They made an exception during Katrina. Our answer is to let people send a text message to pledge a donation at a live event, and process payment a different way later.

For the founders: what's the going rate on a short code these days?

$2000/month minimum from the best service provider, mBlox. MO (from a cell phone) is free and actually pays you revenue share from carriers at volumes above 50K/mo. MT (the "spam direction") is 2.5-4 cents each.

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