01.31.2007
Catchwind named a finalist for the Technology Association of Iowa's annual Prometheus Awards. More

01.25.2007
Catchwind Co-Founder and COO to address AMA chapters.

12.18.2006
Catchwind launches Mobellie - a simple, affordable SMS appointment reminder service. More

11.09.2006
is proud to sponsor the MMA's Mobile Marketing Forum on November 28th in Los Angeles. 

10.01.2006
Catchwind's TextPromoter product featured in Nightclub & Bar Magazine. Read Article

07.22.06
Catchwind featured on NBC affiliate for mobile marketing initiatives. See Video.

06.01.2006
Catchwind's TextPromoter product featured in International edition of Bowling Industry Magazine. Read Article

T – E – X – T  Spells money
Bowling Industry Magazine, June 2006

Its cool.  It’s also hot.  It may be the most powerful way yet to bring in teens and younger adults. “Three or four years from now? Who knows?” Bruce Davis asks rhetorically.  “We may have a chip in our heads and it may be passeì, but in the short run it’s certainly hot.”

Davis was talking about text messaging, in which users send brief communiques using their dial buttons and read messages on the phone screen.  He heads Team UP Associates, based in Florida and Ohio, a provider of marketing assistance programs, tools, and tips to the bowling industry.

Davis calls text messaging “the language of young America now.  That’s how they exchange ideas, where they’re going and what they’re doing, how they make their social circles interact.  Anyone who is around young adults knows.  They communicate by text.”

U.S customers sent 7.3 billion text messages on their cell phones in June 2005
alone, an average of 25 per U.S. resident.  The figure was growing about 150% a month then, according to various business sources.  Most of the messages – no one sems to know the exact percentage – were contributed by teens and young adults.  More than 80% of ages 18-28 text message on a daily basis, according to Scot Talcott, co-founder and COO of TextPromoter, a text messaging service in Des Moines, Iowa.

What’s the attraction? Mike Caudle, national account executive for TextPromoter, sometimes traffics as many as 7,000 text messages a month.  “No matter where I am, I can have a conversation,” Caudle explains.  “Let’s say in a busy restaurant.  I can pick up my phone and talk to my girlfriend and nobody know what [we’re] talking about.  You call me in a busy bar.  I can’t even hear you, so what’s the point of me taking a phone call?”

With more than 200 million cell phones in use in this country, and 99% of all cell phones now equipped with text messaging capability, according to major U.S. network carriers, there seems to be plenty of room for growth in text communication via phone.

American business has moved into the craze with the launch of companies like
TextPromoter that dispatch short advertising messages to selected cell phone us
ers.  Couriers, mechanics and body shops, doctors and hair salons are among
the businesses and professions that now use text messaging.  For bowling center operators, Bruce Davis points out, text messaging provides an easy way to plump up the customer database and deliver promotional messages – especially to young people – in hip, cool terms.

Davis notes the difficulty of gathering database information at a bowling center.

Customers may not want to take the time to fill out a form; employees get busy,are untrained, or too shy to ask for the data. Instead, a proprietor can announce, say via PA announcement or in a direct-mail piece, a special offer available by text messaging. “2 for 1 games this Friday night! Text 12345.” On his phone dial, the customer keys the code number – called a short code – given in the announcement.

A few seconds later, he receives a text message that he takes to the center to get the special: “Good for 2 games of bowling for the price of one at ABC Lanes, Friday Oct. 1.” Meanwhile, the computer that received the short code grabbed the caller’s cell phone number. That number is added to a secure database for the bowling center.

On the bowling operator’s side, the procedure is just as simple. To send a message to the people in his cell phone database via the text messaging service, the operator logs into a website, enters the code that identifies him and his center, and the message he wants to transmit. He hits “Send.” The text messaging service does the rest – or rather, its computer does – and in a matter of seconds, the user’s cell phone rings or chimes or squawks to tell him he’s got a message.

Andy Young is president of Private Display Network, a Virginia Beach, Virginia based supplier of electronic, Internet-connected menu/advertising boards for bowling centers and other facilities. Young sees text messaging as a cost effective element for a customer rewards program. If the special is announced at the bowling center and customers there respond to it, the database expands with paying customers, not merely prospects. Young recently added a text messaging service, Tag 121, to complement his menu/advertising boards.

For text messaging service, operators usually pay a monthly fee plus a charge for each message they send to their database. What cell phone users pay depends on the plan they have; many plans include unlimited text messaging.