Information Madness

Mobile internet is becoming more and more popular these days. India is also shifting towards 3G and smartphones are spreading their wings to reach to masses. But not everyone can afford those expensive smartphones. So for most of those people, they have good old phones that has calling and SMS feature.

Well, if you are one of those without smartphone and want to surf the internet, here is a neat solution for you. txtWeb is an SMS based browser. It is a platform where anyone with a mobile phone can discover and consume internet AND txtWeb-only content just by SMSing keywords or search terms to ONE national number, and receive back content free of cost.

So you just have to type keyword for the service you are looking for and SMS it to 92433 42000 in India and 917 300-0111 in US and Canada. For example, just SMS @CRICBUZZ to get the latest cricket scores. You can also SMS anything without the “@” sign, in which case it will default to search and provide you a list of relevant services.

txtWeb currently has 450 services which have been crowdsourced. These services are like apps for your SMS based browser. Developers build these apps so that users can find the information they are looking for. For e.g. @Wikipedia is an app developed by txtWeb, '@cricbuzz' is an app developed by Anand Patel. Check out the list of apps here.

If you are a website owner, you can create your own app to promote your site too using txtWeb.

One good thing about this SMS browser is that the number you send the txt messages to (access number) is not a short code, so the user does not pay any premium charges to access this service. Only standard SMS rates as per the carrier plan apply.

txtWeb claims that they are currently not making any revenue out of this service. So may be in future, they may introduce some kind of advertisements or paid channels of some sort.

Check out txtWeb.com