Skip navigation
Blog
Blog

What we’ve been up to at Ting

Ting Staff • June 12, 2014

Things move pretty quickly here at Ting. Every two weeks, our talented dev team commits what we’ve all been working on. Everything from minor bug fixes to major new additions to the Ting site or to Ting service are included in these two-week “sprints.” Here are a few of the things we’ve gotten up to.

Giftcard_large

Ting gift cards

We’re launching Ting gift cards, just in time for the holiday season! These easily-giftable electronic stocking stuffers will make it simpler than ever for you to give the gift of Ting to your friends, family, colleagues, or newspaper delivery personnel. We’ll be launching a little promotion tomorrow to celebrate our new gift cards so watch the Ting blog for that. If you opt to buy a card today, you’ll be in the running though, so don’t let that stop you.

Improved SIM card shipping

The next time you order a Ting micro SIM or nano SIM card and go with our free shipping option, you’ll find your subscriber identity module integrated circuit swiftly delivered from Starkville, Mississippi to you via Priority Mail, thanks to our new integration with stamps.com and the USPS. The Postal Service guarantees delivery in one, two, or three days for Priority Mail, depending on where you are in the country.

Pushing the Ting iOS app

We’ll now be giving our Grand Blanc, Michigan-made Ting app for iOS a shoutout from more places on our website. If you haven’t already installed it, what on earth are you waiting for? You can grab it from the App Store right here, right now. (And, of course, you can also find it on Google Play if that’s how you roll.)

In both cases, we’ve added push notification support for important news and updates to the Ting app on iOS and Android. We can now share breaking Ting news in real-time (if you opt-in), even if you’re busy Snapchatting.

Clarifying some technical stuff in the BYOD flow

If you happen to enter an IMEI or other non-decimal MEID during the BYOD process, we’ll show you that original number, along with the converted decimal MEID, at the activation confirmation screen. Hopefully that’ll be a little less jarring than just seeing the number change and not knowing how (wizardry) or why (to make the robot overlords happy).

On a related note, we’ve been converting IMEIs for the Nexus 5 and iPhone 5 for a little while, but just in case you happen to use an IMEI instead of an MEID for an iPhone 4s or other devices, we’ll do our best to convert those now, too. How’s that for magical and revolutionary?

If none of that meant anything to you, don’t worry about it too much. The abridged version: We’re always working to make highly technical processes simpler.

Friendly contract / ETF reminders

You can now sign up to have us gently remind you when your current wireless contract is up. You could already do that after using our Savings Calculator but for those of you who want to live on the edge, you can now skip that step.

General fixes and simplifications

    • There was a small fix to how ESNs and MEIDs were being presented during activation when accompanying a particularly long device name (we’re looking at you, Samsung Galaxy SIII Sapphire Black Refurbished 16GB).

 

    • We’ll automatically strip spaces and hyphens from the account number field when you’re creating a new number port request, so as to save everyone in the world from that particular brand of craziness. In the past, if you entered an account number with spaces or hyphens, we would have to manually edit out the non-alphanumeric characters, which created a short delay. Now, Skynet will do it for us. If only everyone in North America could decide on one, standard telephone number format, we’d be golden.

 

    • We’ve tried (in as much as possible) to make the two separate international long distance features a little clearer on your dashboard. We’re still trying to get a trip to the Bahamas approved by our finance department, just to make sure this is as accurate as it possibly can be, so stay tuned.

 

    • You might notice that we now say what we do with the address you enter on the “service address” step when activating. Basically, it’s for Uncle Sam (to make sure we collect the correct taxes) and to make sure we can get a local number for you. We’ll let the automatic singing telegram we also send out for all new customers continue to be a surprise — for now.

 

    • If you happen to be activating a BYOD iPhone 5, HTC One, Galaxy S4, or Nexus 5, you’ll now see a brief reminder that you’ll need a Ting micro or nano SIM card (and we’ll guide you through ordering one if you don’t already have one handy).

 

    • Last but not least, our Canadian roots were inadvertently showing on our international roaming and rates pages, since we used the British-heritage “travelling” instead of the Yankee “traveling” spelling. We apologise. Err, apologize. Sorry.

 

We’ll be back in a couple of weeks with more!