Profile: Jamari Johnson, High School Freshman

Garrett’s nephew is on spring break this week and convinced his uncle to fly him out to California for a few days. Since SendHub was originally created to help Jamari’s school, we are featuring a special post from him. The words expressed are his alone, but we support the underlying message.

spacer “Part of the reason why some Black males don’t like school is because of the culture and music they are surrounded by. The messages that are being sent by the music artists in a lot of songs are all about money, weed and women. Because of this, some Black males think that going to school is boring, a waste of time and not hot.

Money and fame is what most kids want now. Sports or rapping is believed to be the easiest way to achieve these goals.  School is seen as lame.

I’m 14 years old and I have many friends that will be the first in their family to go to college. Black males need role models they can look up to. Hearing or reading about what someone has achieved is very different from having a mentor around that you can touch and talk to.

More incentives could help. Nothing that cost a lot of money, but there should be more creative things done to offer immediate rewards to students who improve in school and graduate. We could create incentives that would help get more Black males to become teachers or to volunteer in their community.

Even these small things could possibly make a big impact on the lives of Black males. ”

The following are a few special organizations that are using SendHub to communicate and/or that the founders personally support. They each do incredible work and are positively shaping young lives of all backgrounds.

Computer Mentor Group, www.computermentors.org/
Distinguished Young Gentlemen of America, www.dygofamerica.org/
All Sports Community Service, www.allsportscommunity.org/
Big Brothers Big Sisters, www.bbbs.org/site/c.9iILI3NGKhK6F/b.5962335/k.BE16/Home.htm

A 2010 New York Times Bestseller, The Other Wes Moore, describes the journey of two young Black males, both named Wes Moore, from inner-city Maryland. One becomes a Rhodes Scholar and the other is serving a life sentence in prison for murder. In addition to a gripping story, included at the end is an extensive list of national and local organizations with resources to assist youth and their families.

The Other Wes Moore, theotherwesmoore.com/

  • 20 hours ago
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Profile: Michael West, High School Senior

Michael West is a senior in high school and among our most active users. Since reading our February launch article in TechCrunch, his database has grown to over 100 contacts. Michael explained, “I’ve been looking around for a way to text all the students in my school’s National Honor Society (NHS). When I saw your TechCrunch article I was like ‘whoa, this is great’.”

spacer Before discovering SendHub, he was using an app to text groups. But, like most texting apps, it is not designed for large group texting and capped the number of contacts at 25 students per message. With more than 120 students to reach throughout the week, the process of juggling all those groups became a hassle. According to Michael, “students have short attention spans, so a text is the only thing they will read. NHS is all high school students, which means I have to use text.”

Students have short attention spans, so a text is the only thing they will read.

Michael mentioned that his school district gives each teacher their own website and encourages technology in the classroom, but he noted that most teachers seem to feel overwhelmed and avoid using a lot of the systems. “Teacher’s communicate almost always in the classroom, because it looks like they get frustrated with how complicated some of the things are”, he argued.

If teachers are interested in information on best practices for using technology in the classroom, check out the cool site Digital Learning Now has created.

  • 4 days ago
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The SendHub API: Heroku for Twilio

Today we are excited to launch our API - the easiest and fastest way to integrate text messaging into your app. You can be up and running in minutes not days, so head over to our developer page to get started.

We’ve been working on Twilio’s superb platform since we started SendHub last year. It’s extremely powerful and we think it’s going to be as important to the Web as Amazon’s AWS. However, we know most developers don’t have enough time to make a pot of coffee, let alone build their own Twilio app to integrate texting. The developer community is important to us; many friends have lent us a hand with SendHub when we needed it, so we decided to open up our API for all of you.

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We want developers to spend 100% of their time working on their apps and not have to worry about building and managing an additional SMS app. The SendHub API has everything you need to integrate SMS today:

Powerful Inbox:
  • Sending and receive messages with no setup 
  • Keep your conversations in context with message threads 
Send to individuals and groups:
  • Fully functional contact database out of the box 
  • Organize your contacts easily with groups 
Value add features:
  • Schedule messages to be sent later 
  • Let contacts join your groups via Text to Join 
  • Get realtime feedback on your messages 

Heroku changed things when they made Amazon’s AWS accessible to every developer, and we hope our API can do the same for you with Twilio.

As always, if you have any feedback, please let us know - we love hearing from our users.

    • #API
    • #Launch
    • #SMS
    • #SendHub
    • #Texting
    • #newfeatures
    • #engineering
  • 5 days ago
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Who could resist a good BBQ, right?

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The weather in Mountain View over the weekend was perfect, so we invited friends to the house and threw down on the grill.

When you plan something last minute, text message is always the way to go - so as you might suspect, we used SendHub to spread the word. This is how it went:

  1. I told everyone in the office to text “SH” to my SendHub number if they could make it.
  2. People told a few more people and before I new it, the RSVPs just started to roll in via Text-to-Join.
  3. All the details - from extra guest to dietary issues - as well as directions to our place were exchanged via text.
From the smiles on these beautiful faces, looks like everyone had a blast. There’s a lot more Sunshine in store and we plan to make these BBQs a regular deal. Anyone with a SendHub number is always welcome to join us ;-)

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    • #BBQ
    • #SendHub
    • #Team
    • #Texting
    • #TumblrTuesday
  • 1 week ago
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American Education is failing Black Males. Here’s how we fix it.

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