About Sugarcandy

Sugarcandy lets you make groups on-the-fly from your phone or via email. Once you make a new group anyone can join it and send messages to a single address named after the group (i.e., "bowling@sgrcndy.com"). These messages are then distributed to everyone else in the group, allowing you to coordinate with people, distribute information, and manage events.

Details

More and more, people are using their mobile devices to communicate. Group coordination costs are high, however, with always-on availability being more of a hindrance for voice calls than a benefit. More and more people are using text messaging to manage both their own and others' schedules, but given its one-to-one nature this takes a lot of work! That's where Sugarcandy comes in; by providing an easy-to-use, on-the-fly means for creating groups and communicating between them it removes the tedium of using text messaging as a one-to-many means of communication. Now you can simply make (or join) a group and everyone can weigh in at once. Additional features include subscribing an RSS feed to a group, live mapping, broadcasting emails (for opt-in advertising, notifications, etc.), sending scheduled messages, viewing message archives, and more.

Sugarcandy offers a feature-rich web interface as well as a carefully-designed SMS command system to make accessing and creating groups as simple as possible. Users can subscribe to a group by sending a text message saying "!join" to "<groupname>@sgrcndy.com" (where "<groupname>" is the name of the group). Making, blocking, or leaving groups is just as simple; the use of "!" prefacing commands is common and consistent throughout the Sugarcandy system.

One of the benefits of this is that each user automatically gets a Sugarcandy email address when they make an account; if you registered as "batcat" people could reach you on your phone by sending a message to "batcat@sgrcndy.com". This allows users a layer of mediation that many users have found helpful; rather than giving someone your daytime email or actual phone number, you can give them your Sugarcandy address. Then, if you decide later that you don't care for their company you can simply block them and their messages won't reach you ever again. And because groups can be made private, you don't have to worry about anyone finding your account page unless you want them to!

Finally, by using technologies available in all cell phones and internet-connected machines we allow for maximal flexibility in creating groups, managing memberships, and moving content. Because of this design, Sugarcandy should be globally exportable to any cellular carrier that supports email-to-sms gateways. If it isn't working in your area, let us know and we'll set it up!

Bios

Joshua Klein has ten years of mobile technology development experience behind him, including such projects as the American Idol SMS Voting campaign and running the Mobile Technology department for a national consulting firm.

Joshua Knowles has a decade of experience developing web-based applications and social software tools. Before attending ITP, he worked for the Texas Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas and was a founder of the Common User Interface group at BMC Software in Austin, Texas.

Press

Most recently Sugarcandy was featured in TrendCentral — check it out!

Get in Touch

contact@sgrcndy.com.

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