Information Madness

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Many of you might know about the Mobile Social Networking, a group SMS service called Twitter.

How it works? Basically you create an account and your own Twitter channel. You then send updates via SMS / IM to your Twitter channel. These updates are displayed on your profile on Twitter. Moreover, people can also subscribe to your channel and receive the updates via the website, SMS, RSS or IM.

Indian mobile industry is one of the fastest growing industry in the world. There are about 100 million + mobile subscribers in India with thousands new subscribers being added each month. So do you think these kind of service would have a future in India ?

Well there is one group of young people in Karnataka who started a similar service for Mobile Social Networking. The site is called www.inactiv.com. They call it as "Active Mobs".

So what is Activ Mobs?

Mobs is a free SMS based group chat service available to mobile users in Karnataka. Quite simply, it’s conference calls for SMS. If you are part of a group of people who need to communicate with each other (your car-pool, your project team, your circle of friends, your family...), Mobs is for you. One person no longer needs to co-ordinate in order to inform all members of the group, organize something or reach a decision – everyone in the mob talks to everyone else.

The concept is really nice. Activ Mobs allows you to create SMS groups to which you can send your messages and have them forwarded to everyone who is part of the group. It allows you to have a conversation, keeping everyone in the group involved and in the loop.

So whether you're planning a trip to the movies, discussing your studies or just chatting with your friends during a boring hour in class - Activ Mobs is the way to go!

Over 10,000 people in Karnataka are already using Mobs and more join them every day. 

So after looking at their website and number of people using this service, I thought contacting them and ask them few questions about their future plan. Below is my conversation with them.

Are you planning to expand to other states? 

At the moment, no. Active requires a certain amount of infrastructure and hardware which we have to maintain ourselves. It is difficult for us at the moment to setup and maintain this hardware in a city where we don't live. But the moment we have enough resources, we would certainly consider expanding.

Do you have any future plans?

Yes, several. Active mobs is actually the second product from Active which is live (Mobs was launched during end-November 2006) and we have several concepts in the pipeline. The first service we launched (in August 2006) was Active Money, an SMS based accounting system (for example, if you go out for lunch, sms 'pay food 200' and its noted - you can get a listing of your transactions at any time). However Active Mobs is our number one priority right now because of the continuously expanding user base and rising message volumes. Active Mobs currently has over 10,000 registered users, receives 2000 messages and broadcasts over 20,000 messages every day - and this is after filtering for spam. We have put Active Money and our other product concepts on hold until we are satisfied that we can deliver top notch service for users of Active Mobs.

So Karnataka users, give it a try. 10,000 registered users can't be wrong. ;-)

I wish good luck to Active Mobs and hope that they come up with such innovative ideas and help the Indian Mobile users.