When I was in The Valley last week, I met the charming veteran entrepreneur and angel investor, Ariel Poler, who gave me a demo of his new venture, TextMarks. He asked me to keep schtum for the time being, but he’s just dropped me an email giving me the OK, so here’s my thoughts.
To be honest, my first reaction was “Oh no, not another American Company offering sms short codes to advertisers and thinking that 1. This is new 2. Advertisers were going to fall over themselves to integrate this into their advertisements 3. that similar products have been around for 2 or 3 years in Europe and haven’t worked there either, can be ignored. But having spent a few minutes on the site and chatting to Ariel, this is far from the case and I think what they’re doing is very cool indeed.
Mechanically, TextMarks allows you to go to their site and reserve a keyword or words. You also type in the response you want to send out when people send that word in. Then, when that word is sms’d to 41411, the sender gets back the message you want them to. Very simple - and it’s all free for the time being.
So, as an example, if I want to point you to a post I wrote yesterday on your mobile phone, I could ask you to key in this rather long URL http://mobhappy.com/blog1/2006/08/22/what-should-friendster-do-now/. Or I could ask you to sms MOBH to 41411 and get the link sent to your phone.
One of the neat things about it is that when you’re setting up your keyword/s, the platform allows you to instantly see if the word is available. So, while I type M then O then B, the message says that the word is too short. Then with the H, it suddenly says it’s available. If I was to continue with A, P, P, Y, it then becomes unavailable (I bagged the MobHappy key word too). This is a nice usability feature.
So far, it’s a nice, usable site, but there are other players on both sides of the pond doing similar things. But what sets TextMarks apart is that they are squarely aimed at the consumer User Generated Content angle - not the more obvious B2B advertiser route that everyone else goes after. Their thinking is that they don’t know how people might find this useful, so let’s launch the tool into the wild, give people a few ideas and then sit back and see what they come up with. This strikes me as being a very wise approach, as I’d bet good money that what people end up using this for, won’t be what we might think.
How would you use it? Leave a comment below if you come up with something interesting.
So far (and it is only a few weeks old) people have used it in some cool ways. This blogger is currently travelling in the Arctic Circle and her readers can find out where she is every day by texting wheresdiana to 41411. There’s a restaurant where regulars can subscribe (the site allows subscription, as well as one off responses) to get details of daily specials, or you can get Amazon’s price for a book by sending in the ISBN.
If you’re selling a car, you could put eg FordFocus as a keyword and send people pricing and mileage details. Or put a key word of the address of the house you’re selling on the For Sale board, so people can text for further details, including pictures, available on a wapsite you create.
Potentially the list is endless and we’re only bound by the limits of our imagination.
One of the aspects that fascinates me about mobile is where the phone becomes the link between the real world and the digital one - a virtual mouse, if you like. This application is one way of realising that idea today, in a very practical, simple and usable way, which is available to everyone - or US mobile users for now, anyway.
I think we’ll see some really interesting use cases come out of this, from both “real” users, as well as when the art community starts experimenting and it’s certainly worth keeping an eye on.
[tags] textmarks, shortcodes, 41411, amazon [/tags]
hmmm
your right, lots of people in this market… even in the area textmarks seems to be. Mozes has been in this game for a while now and has great success.
http://www.mopocket.com/2006/03/mozes_parting_the_red_sea_of_s.php
http://www.mopocket.com/2006/06/mozes_defining_the_ubiquitous.php
Russell,
Shouldn’t this be titled “User Generated Keywords”? (for use on a common shared short code).
Cheers,
Reno
We are doing the similar things with the voice here in Russia. Customer can rent a short code, record message ( upload voice file) associated with it and tell/publish that short code. So as soon as you dial the common number and type that code you can listen the message (messages).
Hmmm Justin. I’m aware of your “excitement” about Mozes and good luck to them. Mozes may have the capability to do this, but that’s not how they’re positioned. Today they’re focused on bands and previously they were tilting at enabling advertising. I don’t find either of these two use cases very compelling for different reasons, but that’s just my opinion.
Go to their home page and where do I get the idea that it’s for me, the ordinary user, to generate my own messages that I can attach to short codes?
In my experience, a start up has to be deeply focused and build a reputation and revenue in one sector before moving on to another. Read your Moore http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossing_the_Chasm. The difference between Mozes and TextMarks is that they’ve chosen different niches and that’s the point you seem to be missing. It’s like if I wrote something about Amazon and you pointed out that since you could sell books from your blog, you were the same.
I think not.
Russell
We developed a similar concept, on a campaign basis, for a brand here in the UK last year - “a short code for everyone” - but the brand paid for the the messages sent between ‘publisher’ and ‘reader’. I just don’t see how TextMarks business model will work long term Russel. As soon as they reach the significant volumes needed to classify it as a success they will be burning incredibly large gobs of cash covering the cost of SMS. If advertising is the end game then even then I can’t see a model - absolutely truck loads of green notes will be needed to pay for consumer’s SMS before the Textmarks ‘media’ reaches a size and frequency of impression that will interest advertisers. The only way I can see this working is if they charge a premium from the outset to cover the MT costs - they can’t start charging down the road or their user base will leave in droves. Am I missing something?
Best, Chris.
[...] Russell pointed out TextMarks in a recent post, and I poked around with a bit during the week. But it was just this evening that I had really dug in. The TextMark thing is interesting on it’s own, being able to generate a keyword assocated with an SMS request is interesting stuff. Be it shortcode + keyword + content management as delivered by Mozes or keyword to web query as delivered by 411sync. We actually find aspects of both in the TextMark setup. [...]
I’ll say this: If you’re calling yourself an ordinary user, I’m going to cut you off at the next mobilist cocktail hour
We do love bands and they will be a key part of what we do in the coming years (because it’s so compelling 
but you’ll also see us expand the positioning on the website in the coming months. We’ll really begin to open up the content and uses of Mozes that have emerged and are currently “hidden” out there in the real world. When we do so, we’ll do it in a unique and innovative way. Users who login and register do get a better sense of what they can do with a keyword on their own. I can also think of no better blog to let great readers know that Europeans and Asians can take a whirl of Mozes by using our UK number - 447781484550. I’ve been told it works in most countries. Now we don’t expect any bands to be shouting “Text our name to 447781484550″ at Wimbledon Stadium anytime soon, but it should allow your readers to register and see all features and functions of Mozes. They can also get a sense of how the various bands on our homepage use it at concerts etc.. Plus we’re releasing some stuff in a week that I think you’ll find cool! If you want a preview, let me know.
Welcome to the 42nd Carnival of the Mobilists!…
I’d like to start off by saying that everyone here at MobileActive is honored to host this week’s Carnival of the Mobilists. There is a lot of great reading ahead – 15 stories that run the gamut from SMS activism campaigns to mobile t…
What’s the business model. Sure sounds nice someone giving away services. But is this 1999 all over again?
Jonathan - or 2006. Don’t forget Skype, Google and MySpace, for completely different reasons all give their core services away free.
It can be done
Russell
Was this not the same play that upoc tried in 1999? total investement $27million, couple million registerd users, and then finally sold to dada for grand total of $7 million.
Jonathan - could be. But success is c 80% timing in my view.
It’s not about if anyone has done something before, but about is the timing for this idea right? In fact, give me a mediocre idea and a half-assed team with the right timing over a brilliant team, great idea and the wrong timing any day.
Russell
This is quite different from what Upoc tried, Jonathan. Upoc’s focus has been something slightly nebulous having to do with “mobile communities”, which generally seemed like SMS versions of email lists or Yahoo groups.
i’m a new comer to this area and maybe that means the ‘early majority’ is beginning to pay attention to these technologies. Lots of ideas on how to use something like textmarks: let’s begin with groups who want to coordinate volunteer activities, support messages and information for people trying to change behaviors like diet and exercise emergency contact points for a family.
I don’t see the revenue model here to drive a positive cash flow. But I agree that that was not a barrier for ICQ, Myspace, and Skype. Ultimately these businesses were bought for their sizable customer bases. If a free keyword provider can get quickly to 5 million users, then why not them too. Or is that number different.
As Chris points out above, that will take a lot of cash. Let’s say 5 million users * 100 messages per @ $0.02 per message, that’s $10 million. All hypothetical numbers could get hypothetical valuation of $100 million. Sound plausible?
Regardless of whatever “niche” is targeted by each service, I agree with previous commenters that the revenue model still seems risky. Unless you can convince consumers to pay fees to support the service, ultimately, large media advertisers will have to be sold on using these services in innovative ways. By innovative, I don’t mean by serving up outgoing SMS ads. I just used Mozes for an experimental project that might point to what those ways might be.
[...] Russell had already written up TextMarks so I was familiar with the service. I went to the TextMarks website and created an AdMob shortcode to return the total number of ad views so far. In some senses it’s a lot like 411Sync, but with a much lower barrier to experimentation. And of course having the 41411 shortcode is pretty sweet. It really makes the usage that Russell talks about of linking through a shortcode effective (much like Mozes does with their shortcodes). [...]
[...] When I mention TextMarks to people and say something like “so you can build applications that communicate via SMS”, to which the general response seems to be “why would you want to do that?” And I normally use the bookmarking example that Russell gave, or a group messaging example. But today while I was in the car I heard the Live105 folks encouraging people to text in their votes for different styles of music in a head to head faceoff. Looks like punk won, cool. Perfect example I thought. Doing a promotion also, something like “the 30th person to text in gets to punch me!” [...]