Coffee with Rex Dixon #3 – now online!

Coffee with Rex Dixon #3 is now online. The show rundown is below:

* The Future of the Internet and Venture Capitalist’s

This podcast is sponsored by – The College Voice – http://www.thecollegevoice.com

- re-launching – November 12th, 2006!

Meebo IM skips beta – goes full on release

Meebo just came out of Alpha, and instead of going Beta like most software, it is now rocking on the 1.0 release. Technically Speaking, I haven’t done Meebo yet. ** Update ** – I’m now on there as RexDixon – if you see me on, you can hit me up there, or by any of my other IM accounts **

Interview with Howard Tager, CSO/EVP TeleFlip Inc.

Teleflip was a company that I blogged about on Thursday. I think they have a unique service to offer, and I encourage all my readers that are into text messaging to give them a try. Their service seems to be very popular, and gaining.

Lucky for Rex Dixon, I caught up for a quick 5 question interview with Howard Tager, the CSO/EVP of Teleflip, Inc. Here is what he had to say:

Q: How did you become part of the company – Teleflip?

A: Well, I am a serial entrepreneur and last summer had been discussing a number of new ventures with the current CEO, Tony Davis, who I have known for quite some time. He mentioned Teleflip as one compelling opportunity that had been brought to him.

I didn’t think too much of it at the time, but when I was coming back from a wireless conference in Berlin, and needed to make a last minute hotel reservation in Amsterdam, the Amex agent asked if she could email or fax me the confirmation and details of where I was staying. Since I was using a regular cell phone and was traveling, I told her that neither option would work.

Then, I remembered Tony’s explanation of the Teleflip service and told her to email me my confirmation to mycell#@teleflip.com. As soon as I landed in Amsterdam, I had everything I needed sitting right on my cell phone as a text message. I could then direct the cab driver to my hotel and felt comfortable that I was walking into the hotel with a confirmation in hand.

I got really intrigued at that point and spent the entire plane ride back to LA brainstorming ideas for Teleflip and both consumer and business applications of the technology.

Q: Your site states 3 million flips and 100,000 return users, do you see an actual trend of numbers steadily climbing, or are they leveling off?

A: The service has been around for a while as a free technology and quite honestly not that many people had heard about it. In just the last couple of months the company has been funded and a great management team has been assembled. We are in the midst of an incredible three-month technology build-out which we believe will make Teleflip a ubiquitous form of communication and a household brand name.

The new company has not yet done a stitch of PR or marketing, yet everyday new businesses inquire about and purhcase our services. We are having our “coming out” party at Ad:Tech this coming Monday and do not expect to look back after that. So, although the numbers of Teleflippers has been steadily rising, we expect an incredible spike up in the use of Teleflip in the coming months.

Q: What is the best thing you could tell someone that has never heard of you about the company Teleflip?

A: Don’t make things too complicated. We are simply the ability to send an email, from any email program to any cell phone. It’s easier than typing out a text message on a phone, but has the speed and reach of a sms (text) message. Try it out for free for a while and you’ll see how habit forming it will become.

Q: How many employees does the company Teleflip currently have? Are you hiring more people and what currently are your companies needs?

A: We are small in terms of the number of employees and don’t ever expect to get too big. Yes, we are hiring, but at a slow and steady pace.

Q: Do you have any final words for my readers on Technically Speaking?

A: Keep a close eye on us! We have some incredible enhancements (plug-ins, aliases, report functionality, longer message lengths, etc.) coming in the very near future and one killer application which is really going to put us on the map and piss off a lot of really big companies. I can’t wait!

In the mean time, enjoy Teleflip for free (currently up to 500 messages per month) and I know you will find it to be an incredibly valuable, and irreplaceable new way to communicate.

Rex, I’d like to thank you again for taking some time with Teleflip and I’m always available to answer your or your reader’s questions.

Technically Speaking, I want to thank Howard Tager for taking the time out of his busy day to answer the questions I sent to him. I encourage any company that I have posted about to contact me if you’d like to be interviewed by Rex Dixon. Interviews are a great way to spread your message to the masses!

Digg and Netscape, Sequoia Voting “feature”, Oracle and Red Hat

Digg users are feeling snubbed according to Mike. I have to agree with him, and Kevin Rose should know better, as look what happened to TechTV when it was turned into G4.

Netscape along the same lines now, has been experimenting with a Digg Clone experiment.

Vote Early, Vote Often. When I was a kid and lived down in Georgia, that was the big joke amongst allot of the old school guys my dad would meet. Whenever there was an election, that was their catch phrase,”You gotta vote son. Vote Early, Vote Often.” Apparently Sequoia took this to heart in building their voting machines.

I really hate to push this issue, but the only fair vote is the Write In vote. Write In – Rex Dixon next Tuesday, let’s see how “fair” these voting machines really are! This all started as a joke basically when I saw that the voting machines would make it easier to write in candidates with a nice keyboard touch function. No accidental miss-spelling of write in candidates, and no issues on is “Jim Simpson” really “James Simpson” and possibly “Jimbo Simpson“.

Make no mistake about it, if you are having issues on Tuesday November 7th – the election workers are volunteers and can NOT help you! The only help is to sigh, and go,”Well my choice is have the vote go to the other candidate — OR— WRITE IN – REX DIXON — can’t mess that up, right? R-E-X D-I-X-O-N — 8 letters… I don’t go by “Rexy” nor do I go by “Robert or Rob or Joe, Jim, James, or RexFeller, RockingRex, etc.. ” — it’s simple – WRITE IN – REX DIXON.

Oracle and Red Hat. The main reason I feel we have Microsoft and Novell (SUSE).

Technically Speaking, I have a great interview coming up in my next post!