Like many Canadians, Derek Ting and Jon Lerner were frustrated by their high cellphone bills. As computer engineering students at the University of Waterloo, however, they had the skills to do something about it.
The duo cobbled together an app that duplicated the text messaging function found on smartphones, allowing them to send and receive short messages via their phones’ data connections, thereby bypassing their carriers’ texting charges. At the time, 2009, those fees were substantial.
The app, which they released publicly as TextNow, quickly went viral. Millions of users downloaded and installed it, providing the friends with a base for a larger operation that would ultimately become TextNow Inc., one of Canada’s more ambitious – but least known – startup success stories.
The Waterloo, Ont.-based company has since grown to 10 million monthly users, 100 staff and an office in San Francisco, with an eye to becoming bigger still.
Peter Nowak – Globe and Mail – June 30, 2017.
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