A Letter to Parents from Celly Cofounder Russell Okamoto

Dear Parents,

First and foremost, as cofounder of Celly, I want to let you know Celly is designed from the perspective of parents:

Updates from last week — Search and more privacy controls

We recently updated our service with some cool new features. We added search, privacy control for allowing people to private message you, “connections” to keep track of the people important to you, new easier ways to invite people…

Down in it! The State of the Cellyverse

We’re down in it! We’ve signed stacks of paperwork, and we’re finally grinding in our first full week of our dream to create a socially responsible technology company focused on transforming Education and Community with cellphones and cloud computing.

New Features! Moderated Chat and a New Privacy Option

We have introduced a couple of new features that make Celly Channels even better. The first one is moderation. When a channel owner turns moderation mode on, messages from other members are sent privately to the channel owner, instead of…

New Celly Features: RSS and Twitter Receptors, Public Cell Directory, Hashtags, and more

Last night we launched an update that makes Cells much more powerful with Receptors, Hashtag support, and a Public Cell Directory. We also added a time length setting to polls…

Curation just got more awesome

Today we deployed our #1 requested feature: multiple curators for a cell.

To understand why this is a big deal, let’s just review what curation is and why it is important. First, each cell is owned by an administrator. The administrator can set the…

Cool new polling feature!

We just rolled out polling on Celly!

You can create a poll using SMS or the Celly website. For SMS, just text poll and then Celly will ask you for your questions and answers (for super users, you can create a poll in one shot with !poll What is your favorite…

@ is the new #, a new SMS app, and other improvements

We just deployed a tiny change that we think will have a big effect on user experience:

We changed Celly Channel syntax from # to the @ symbol. That is, channels are now prefixed like @mychannel (instead of the…

More New Avatars, Schedule Messages for Later, and Support for Time Zones

Punctuated Evolution

Celly’s image and website is evolving fast. Today we have made some naming changes, made our website realtime, and have filled out some of the web features that were missing.

To begin with, we’re now embracing the word cell in place of channel as the foundational…

Polling Upgrades: Live Updates on Web, More Options

Tonight we deployed some more upgrades to polls on Celly. The coolest one is that polls now update live on the website, so you don’t have to refresh to see the results refresh.

Celly is here to reinvent your phone

We want to help schools, neighbors, and texting ninjas like you. We think your phones can do more for you, even if you don’t have a fancy touch screen.

Our first service is simple group text messaging. You create channels for the real…

Celly is “occupied”

OccupyYourCity movements are mobilizing with Celly.

This is an ideal use case for mobile communication. With many volunteers gathered at one site, there’s a fundamental need to quickly organize feet-on-the-street into ad-hoc working groups. For example, in Portland…