While going through my unread feeds in Google Reader yesterday, I was pretty intrigued by a VentureBeat story on a US startup called SMaShcode.
What is SMaShcode ?
Briefly put, SMaShcode makes SMS texting transactional.
A simple glance of the above line probably might not do justice to how amazing and impactful this might be. But once you understand what it really means, it might sink in as to how successful this could become. SMS texting, in its current form, is not transactional. In other words, there’s no means to store / access sessions or cookies. Consequently, you cant successfully submit a form or carry out an ecommerce transaction or have personalization features based simply on SMS. Current forms of SMS are able to handle only a one time interaction between the service and the user. For example, voting via SMS or getting score updates or stock alerts via SMS. But SMS cant handle for instance a scenario, where you not only provide stock alerts to the user via SMS but also allow the user to change his portfolio in the same transaction. In other words, SMaSh enables stateful session handling between the app and the user.
They provide this by a proprietary mobile Application Server that sits between the user and the service and does the session handling logic. As per their technical docs, this does not involve any siginficant overhead on part of the service developer who can simply expose their existing app to SMS users following a particular HTML format.
The startup just secured their first round of funding of $1.35 million led by Mark Cuban.
Considering how popular SMS texting is across the world, this just opens up a huge possible market for the service.
What do you think ?
Nothing super exciting about this one. Many other’s have provide ‘more’ functionality before. People like SMS GupShup and ACL Wireless have implemented group chat in a similar manner though session handling is more obvious in this case.
I agree that not all ‘publicly available to developers’ platforms provide this. Infact right now in India there are only two – mocolife and smsmenow that will allow ‘any developer’ to access the short code. But there are many other systems being operated using simple HTTP/REST or XML interfaces.
jeet,
SMaSh is providing a platform to other service providers — and that is the single reason why this is much bigger than sms gupshup or acl or whatever.
a whole lot of apps can leverage their technology and reach out to customers via sms.
http://www.sms.indiaonapage.com/
Send FREE SMS to any mobile number in India.
Also Lots of good SMS quotes are available for FREE.