We used the service in conjunction with a little PHP script, and Flash as the presentation. Worked Flawlessly, and the audience loved it. Since then, my work has been wanting this in every application we can think of!

CEO of 4INFO, Zaw Thet, posted some interesting thoughts on an article published by TechCrunch about a new product from TextMarks that allows publishers to charge readers to receive breaking news, newly published content and other information via text …

My view is that the premium lies in the little beep and noise that an SMS makes. We believe it makes a difference to be alerted to a news item as opposed to 15 to 30 minutes, or 3 hours later, browsing the web to find out the same.

The fact that a news item is out there doesn’t necessarily mean we know it. On an off day when we are traveling, or been locked in meetings etc, our normal practices for monitoring news break down and we are vulnerable to not knowing whats going on. Well I am anyway : )

And many of us do care about certain news items to the extent that we would like to have it the moment its published, as opposed to finding out 1 hour later or even run the risk of not knowing it for a day or two.

But its a grey area and the margins are still in question like many have pointed out. Feel free to contact us to discuss this further.

best regds

SMS, and premium SMS is huge in Germany / Europe. SMS alerts have been around for a while and people are paying for it. But in regards to premium content most of the money made today is made through subscription models that everyone is trying to pull the users in to. In a result a lot of abuse happened in the last years and people got more and more skeptical about SMS / premium SMS service.

I can only advise you to offer the news at a cheaper price. A few SMS are just not worth 4.99$ or 9.99$, not even with the hottest news.

I assume that a lower subscription model is not attractive due to the poor payouts and the fact that you have to share the revenues with a third party, i.e. the content owner.

One good reason i like the service is because it feeds the long tail.

Maybe you should think about different pricing models or, and this has also been successfully tested in Europe, add some advertising at the end of every SMS.

Or what about if you let the content owner pay for the SMS alerts?

Or you guys collect the content through-out the day, just send one SMS alert at the end of the day and push the user to personalized WAP site?

You will figure it out.

And, to reiterate what I said before: if anyone wants to handle payments themselves, or simply not charge, we have a similar service that is absolutely free. This premium service is meant for bloggers who want to charge for premium content and want to do so through the premium SMS functionality that wireless carriers offer.

David: if you have good content that can realistically produce a large volume of sales, there is absolutely no need to give up two-thirds of your revenue to TextMark. If you have development resources at your disposal (or can afford them), you can build your own SMS delivery platform (it’s not rocket science) and the money you save by working with an SMS gateway will very quickly make up for the difference over giving away two-thirds of the revenue you give away with TextMark, especially the higher your sales volume. Or you can partner up with a mobile distribution company that can not only provide a delivery platform, but provide marketing assistance as well. If your content is good enough to drive volume, you’ll get a much better deal and much better service than you will through a pure one-size-fits-all solutions provider like TextMark.

- Timely access to select information.

Again, I’d ask everyone to really consider the user profile of a prospective customer here.

My conjecture has been that the customers with enough “need” to pay for realtime subscriptions of this sort are going to be either:

(a) tech savvy, in which case the product misses the mark, or
(b) a special niche user (refer to my original comment)

Your point about Jamster/etc highlights the user-profile disconnect: what added value is delivered by paying for realtime notification about content of the sort that the mainstream consumes? What need do the consumers of content like that have for paid, realtime notification? i.e.: timeliness is not part of purchasing decision.

Anyway, I think we can agree to disagree on this one, David, and let the market decide which of us was right!

Second, the Textmarks widget doesn’t actually send blog updates or anything via SMS – the publisher can send whatever they want as a text message. The widget just makes it really easy to sign up.

People already subscribe to a bunch of crappy joke-of the day, pick up line of the day, and astrology services provided by companies like Jamster. This should make it easier for people who actually have good content to get it out there.

i.e.:
- The target market for this is Jane & Joe public that downloads ringtones b/c they lack the technical sophistication / time / etc. to do otherwise.

- TextMarks is a premium product connecting blogs to cellphones for a fee (value proposition = timeliness) – which is a niche / early adopter product description if I’ve ever seen one.

So – while I agree that “successful” publishers may become visible by emergent usage patterns once the service is live, I would suggest that the disconnect between product positioning and target market described above will prevent the service from achieving enough critical mass for those emergent successes to … er … emerge.

Premium != Mass Market

After 8 years in the mobile industry, it takes a lot to get me excited about a new service. This new SMS application from Textmarks, however, is very cool indeed.
In a nutshell, TextMarks allows anyone to set up and run an SMS alerts service. Here&#821…

TechCrunch readers: YOU ARE NOT THE MARKET FOR THIS. Geeks already have a million ways to rip, mix and crunch their information in whatever form and whatever device they choose.

My personal bet is that 90% of the people reading this thread do not buy ringtones, because there are lots of ways to get ringtones on your phone for free if you know what you are doing. Guess what? It’s still a multibillion dollar industry, because most people don’t have the time, expertise or the inclination to mess around figuring out how to do it. They’d rather just pay the few bucks.

This service is for those people.

Dreadsword, I partly agree with you: 99% of publishers will not have content that is good enough to make people subscribe. But the beauty of this system is that Textmarks don’t have identify those niches ahead of time – they just need to put it out into the market and let those niches identify themselves.

If I were textmarks, I’d work on identifying market segments for who this proposition has value, and tailor niche offerings to each.

For example: Fund Managers and Finance industry people would be a good target for a premium SMS stream of financial news. So – lock down some good content producers into exclusives, and rock & roll.

IMHO, skip the mass market paid product.

SLANTTed view of this story:
http://slantt.n...mark-sms-alerts

– alexa (http://www.textmarks.com/ALEXA): send alexa yoursite.com to 41411 and you get the latest stats for your website from alexa

- eyeos (http://www.textmarks.com/EYEOS): send eyeos to 41411 and you will get an update on how many users are registered until this very moment in the http://eyeOS.info free public server.

There are so many possibilities ….

4Info already does this for free. http://open.4info.net/ They’re UI isn’t quite as slick, but whatev. Free vs. Fee. Hmm…I think most people will choose Free. I believe 4Info’s plan is to share rev from ads that are syndicated across blog content, sort of like adwords via SMS. Of course, I don’t work at 4Info…so I’m just guessing. I’m sure they could tell you.

2.As more number of people are tending to access net through mobiles, it can came in handy may be not now but thats the future.Blogs being accessed from mobiles is closer. 5 or 10$ is not much if they are really intended towards it.

However with the ease of internet it might not get a boom now.It has to wait till the industry shifts more on mobiles.Its predicted one day Mobiles will replace laptops.Thats the Future

I think the other reason some people above are negative is that it was posted on TechCrunch and nobody can see themselves paying Mike’s posts