Summer Romasco
Everything you need to know about Burner’s ...

We’ve been working behind the scenes to collect user feedback and perform user testing to see how we can improve Burner for you.

Slack Integration for Mobile and a Dialer That Will Make You Say “WOW.”

The Slack Connection is one of our most popular, so we’ve included two small but important updates in this release (3.2.7).  As before, you can connect any Burner line to Slack, and inbound texts, pictures, and voicemails to that Burner will appear in the selected channel for everyone on the team to see and reply to. As a new option outbound texts sent from the mobile app, can now also be sent to Slack.  

Visiting the settings screen of your Burner number (click the gear icon). After you have connected Slack to your phone number the  above options will appear.

Visiting the settings screen of your Burner number (click the gear icon). After you have connected Slack to your phone number the  above options will appear.

We’ve also improved our handling of links emojis, and other formatted elements on outbound texts sent from Slack to another phone number. Yes, that is correct:  you can text people directly from slack, and you, or you and your team can see the results (choose wisely).

We’re also excited to announce the first in a series of updates centered around enhancing the way inbound and outbound calls work in Burner. The most noticeable change in 3.2.7 is a completely redesigned dialer, which we love the look of, and should be easier for those of you with small hands or big phones (or both!) to use, as we’ve positioned the keypad towards the bottom of the screen.  One beta tester’s response to the dialer was “wow,” and the whole Burner team loves a wow factor, so we are pretty happy. Try it out and have a guaranteed “wow” moment.

Underlying the new design of the Dialer is another big change that we’re keeping under wraps for now, but will start rolling out over the next few weeks. Stay tuned for more!

 

 

Revolution and Evolution in Mobile Messaging

 

At Burner we are always releasing features and bug fixes, but we don’t always talk about it. We tend to alternate between revolution and evolution. Today we are launching a new interface for texting, and one of its key features is the ability to view multiple lines when composing texts.  It is always feels good to make the product a little better, and to know that our customer experience is always improving.  


In all we will be releasing five new features (some are obvious and others harder to see) and nine bug fixes.  Improving Burner is a never-ending experience, and that is the way we like it.  Expect some significant new features in the coming months, but also relax and enjoy the little improvements that are being released regularly.

Click Here to Download Burner Today!

Fun with Webhooks: Text Us for A Chance to Win a Blink(1) Indicator

 

We decided to have a little fun with our Burner Developer Connection webhooks and the internet of things! We purchased some of ThingM's new blink(1) LED indicators for our team to play around with and test with phone numbers. These open-source lights were designed to give you glance-able notice of anything on your computer, the internet, and now: A PHONE NUMBER! It packs three dimensions of information (color, brightness, and pattern) into a single tiny package that fits into any USB port on nearly every device. So... Text us and tell us why you want one!

 

(310) 879-1899
All texts automated to a Google Sheet.
Winner selected noon PST Wednesday, December 23rd!

 

We won’t delve too deep into the specifics of our telephonic sorcery but it involves some basic online tools to put the internet (and phone numbers) to work for you!

Using IFTTT we created a Maker recipe for our blink(1). In doing so we created a webhook where our light flashed a certain color pattern based on a “triggered event.”

Burner_IFTTT_Blink1

 

Next, we used Zapier’s webhooks to automate entries on a Google Sheet. Zapier matches the data sent from my Burner phone numer to the corresponding fields in our Google sheet:

Burner_Zapier_Sheets

So we have now created two separate webhooks (one on IFTTT and one on Zapier) that we want to work simultaneously through a single triggered event (an inbound text to our Burner). Using Reflector.io, we are able to power multiple pass-thrus with a single webhook: 

Burner_Reflector_Blink1

Final step is to add the Reflector webhook URL to our Burner phone number's Developer Connection

And VOILA! So send us a text at (310) 879-1899 to add your entry to our random drawing. Good luck!

Burner_Blink1_Animated

Introducing Burner 3.0 for Android

We’re excited to announce that we’re launching a brand new look and feel for Burner on Android! This is our biggest design update for Android and builds upon a ton of feedback that we’ve heard from customers. The goal is always to make Burner the easiest way to stay in touch with people without compromising your personal information or phone number, and we think Burner 3.0 does just that. Here are some of the highlights:

Unified Inbox

Managing more than one number in Burner just got much easier! With the unified inbox you can view and respond to all of your recent conversations from different Burner numbers in one place. To help you stay organized, we now give each of your Burners a unique color, so when you’re viewing conversations quickly in the inbox, you know exactly which Burner someone is contacting you through. If you ever need to go through your older messages, or you only want to view the messages on one of your Burners you can easily filter by that Burner and view your entire history.

Material Design

Again, this is our biggest design update for Burner. You’ll see the use of colors, animations and transitions throughout the app, fully embracing material design principles. Navigation and design patterns should feel familiar and blend right into your workflow with all the apps you love!

Android Wear

We know that our customers are busy, managing work and personal lives and anything we can do to make Burner more accessible when you’re on the go is huge win! Burner now supports use with your smartwatch so you can quickly view your notifications and messages and respond in an instant with voice commands.

Stay tuned

This is just the beginning of a ton of new features that will be coming to Android so stay tuned and connect with us on Facebook and Twitter to get all the latest news!

 

Burner Profiles: The Tie Haberdashery

This week we caught up with Samantha Gold of The Tie Haberdashery, a local business in Los Angeles that specializes in vintage ties from the 1920s to the 1990s.

Samantha started using Burner as a business line to help keep her personal information private and to be able to control the amount of access her clients and customers have to her. She has not just one, but two business lines for The Tie Haberdashery: one is a customer service line that she posts on the website and online store; the other she uses as her personal business line that she can put on business cards and share with her contacts. She has six burners total. Like most entrepreneurs, she’s always hustling so she also works as an inside sales rep and has burners for that, along with a  Craigslist Burner and one for dating.

Burner Hack

One of the issues Samantha ran into after she started using Burner, was that customers began texting her. Some business owners like texting with customers, others like Samantha don’t. If you’re like Samantha, there are a couple of easy ways that Burner can help!

“On my business lines I wish I wasn’t able to get text messages...I don’t like getting text messages about business, I like getting phone calls and emails.”

First, you can always turn off text notifications in the settings menu. Notification settings are unique to each Burner, so you can have text notifications turned off on your business Burner, but leave them on for your Craigslist Burner.

Second, with the newest iOS version you also have the option to set up an auto-reply message on each of your Burners. The auto-reply feature is super handy when you’re on vacation or during non-business hours when you’re not going to respond immediately, or in Samantha’s case, setting a message that lets her customers know that she doesn’t respond to texts and that they should give her a call instead.

Check out the video for the full interview to hear more about The Tie Haberdashery and how Burner can help you run your small business.

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SMS apps, organized!

Recently there have been a number of services launched that primarily use an SMS interface.  I personally love checking these things out because they are typically easy to set up, and the text-only interface is very low overhead.  Product Hunt hosts a couple of decent collections of the more up-and-coming text-based apps.

I started using one of my Burner numbers to sign up for these services because I didn't really want to give my personal number out, but I found that by having my Burner linked, there was a cool side effect: all the new apps were put in one place, clearly separated from my increasingly messy Messages app.

Here are a couple of the services I've been using with my SMS Apps Burner:

Digit.  Digit is kinda this financial service thing that will automatically take money from a linked checking account and save it in a Digit account.  The idea here is to use a non-human thing (algorithm) to track how much you've been spending and earning, and dynamically transfer a sensible amount of cash into your human savings account so you can spend it later on something like a pair of skis, or your debilitating student loans.  Digit sends me a text message every day to my Burner number with my current checking balance and how much it's transferring to my savings.  Easy!  I can send the service commands like "Recent" to see recent transactions on my checking account, or "Withdraw" to transfer money back from my savings to checking.  Yes!

Sensay.  This is a new Los Angeles (!!!) based service that just recently launched.  It works a lot like the old Instant Messaging bot Aardvark.  In fact, it's exactly the same, but uses SMS instead of AOL or whatever.  I text Sensay with a question using my Burner, then the service sends the question out to another member of the Sensay community for a quick answer.  The answer comes back to Burner in a separate thread, so I can talk to the complete stranger on the other end with follow up questions or what they think of the Dodgers' pitching rotation.  That kind of thing.

GoButler.  Similar to Magic.  Much of the time I’m looking to buy craft beer, because I live in a hipster-friendly neighborhood of Los Angeles and I’m playing to type.  Even though I already know what the best beer store is (tie between Cap’n Cork Jr. Market and Bill’s), I wanted to test this service out by asking, via sms, what the best place to buy beer in LA was.  GoButler responded within a few seconds with a place called Remedy Liquor.  Being untrusting of Algorithms in general, I did some research into GoButler’s recommendation, and it seems totally wrong but hey, B+ for effort.  The GoButler bot Lisa seems like a nice person, but I’m happy to have the ability to sever ties completely if things start getting weird.

With so many texting-based apps out there, having the ability to partition these services in Burner is a pretty cool hack.  Most of the apps mask the phone number you are texting from, so from a privacy perspective, Burner isn’t the key value-add here (unless you believe these services are collecting the information, but I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt).  However, the ability to manage a Sensay thread outside of my messages app, for instance, is rad.  I’m increasingly wanting to keep my personal stuff in a tidy little place, protected from all the outside noise, and it’s a lot more fun to manage a conversation with a complete stranger in a separate place.  There’s also something cool about rolling these services up in one place and creating a little wrapper around each that makes them more compelling than they might be on their own.

 

Bringing SMS to a global audience is a challenging endeavor

As Burner becomes popular in the US, Canada and Australia, there's been a growing demand for our service in other countries. We get messages and requests from all over the world and we're excited by the interest from our international fans. If only we could just snap our fingers and be available worldwide, right? Providing SMS messaging services to new countries isn't easy, as this article by The Next Web explains:

The challenges of SMS on a global scale