Kik Chat app allows free texting on smartphones
Waterloo company launches service that lets users bypass providers
Last Updated: Tuesday, April 13, 2010 | 2:51 PM ET
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A 23-year-old entrepreneur from Waterloo, Ont., has launched an application that allows Blackberry and iPhone users to bypass their service providers and send text messages for free.
Ted Livingston said he hopes the chat application will be the start of a business that will eventually dominate the burgeoning world of smartphone networking.
"I'm hoping to have a lifetime of this stuff, which would be awesome," he said in an interview with CBC News.
Livingston runs a 10-person company named Kik that has created an application that allows users of Blackberrys and iPhones to exchange text messages for free with other users who have the app.
Sending text messages to those without the Kik Chat app will cost $0.009 per text, but only after users exhaust their allotment of 50 free texts a month.
Building a social network
Livingston says his objective is to have Kik become the Facebook of handheld technology.
"Chat is just the beginning of a community that will be used to share music and pictures," he said. "Chat is definitely not the end goal for us. The end goal is using chat to distribute content."
Kik is currently negotiating with major content providers to allow legal streaming of music and videos without incurring the usual data fees cellphone service providers charge for downloading content.
Livingston began the business with three university pals after an internship at Research in Motion, makers of the Blackberry. It was there he realized the smartphone technology could be used to deliver more content to a handheld device at far less cost than service providers are charging.
"You had your SMS costs, your voice costs and you had your data costs. But now that these smartphones … have such powerful data capabilities on them, there's no reason why you should be paying all these separate costs," Livingston said.
The Kik chat app is now available through the Kik website. It is free for Blackberry users, but iPhone users must pay a one-time fee of 99 cents.
Livingston said he expects to add an app for streaming content to his service by summer.
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