SMS GupShup is creating a buzz all over and is apparently being called India’s Twitter! Webaroo’s SMS GupShup is India’s mobile group SMS service that allows users to create mobile communities and broadcast messages to them. SMS GupShup accounts for some 400 million monthly text messages, which is around 5 to 6% of the total Indian market.
Three months back they added advertising to their text messages and today are making $150,000 per month in revenue. Wow!
A user is limited to 100 characters, and each SMS is paid for by Advertising. The ad appears as text of 40 characters after the main message.
How does SMS GupShup work?
- Create your group
- Invite your friends to join it
- Forward an SMS to your group
- Any SMS you send to the group will be automatically forwarded to all those subscribed to it
- You have the option to maintain your privacy by keeping your group and its messages “private”.
- The SMS sent to non-private groups reflect on their website
- Users can create polls, quizzes and also solicit ratings from the group members.
SMS GupShup now has 20 million users and is growing rapidly with thousands of groups like:
- Finance
- Entertainment
- Lifestyle
- Health
- Sports
- Technology, and so on!
How could you use this service?
Only via SMS!
CEO Beerud Sheth says that the service can only be accessed via SMS, which works just fine for India’s 400 million mobile phone users. Users sign up and use the service all via text messages. They never need to visit the website at all.
This service is a low cost way to keep in touch, that too, without an internet connection.
I’d say, “Great Going”!
Link: SMSGupShup
(Source: TechCrunch)
Unicode support is not available in smsgupshup and their are many things with twitter are not available on smsgupshup like twitterfeed. Sky will fall on you if you compare