OneTXT, a social media payment platform, has raised $2 million in Series A funding from Metamorphic Ventures with KPG Ventures, New York Angels Fund, and individual angel investors participating. Former iVillage CTO and COO Richard Caccappolo has joined oneTXT as president and COO.
OneTXT provides a payments processing alternative for social networks, online games to accept payments, create loyalty programs, and send marketing messages. Similar to PayPal, oneTXT takes a stored-value approach. Each account, which is filed under the user’s cellphone number, has funds sourced from a checking account, a credit card or Western Union.
OneTXT appears be everything combined into one. But considering the fall of other such Networks in the Past, Just time will tell how much people will try it out.
After all, people need quality in each object rather than a one-stop destination for everything.
I 100% agree with Freak stuff, it is quality that matters at most but having everything in one-stop center is an innovative idea too to try out things in a different approach.
http://www.nichea.info
There’s another 2 million down the drain
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This is proof that you don’t have to innovate, just do a successful business model better than your competitors. OneTXT is a pretty weak name.
People don’t like to SEND SMS to short numbers, period.
It’s highly improbable that this will change.
It’s actually a solid service and the costs make sense. Unfortunately in the US, the various carriers charge too much $ for small transactions but these guys have figured a way around it. It’s basically like using your mobile phone (and #) as an EZPass.
I for one am looking forward to being able to pay for coffee and MetroCards using my phone. About time the US get around the limitations of our sluggish mobile phone providers.
kudos to onetxt – most people don’t realize this, but ivillage was/is doing some very cutting edge work around custom content, cms development and content distribution across their multi-platform distribution, that cto is a score (hey, maybe they’ll pick up williams too
…as for folks harping on sms – are you kidding? forget the valley and metro smartphone users, the majority of users are still brand new to horoscopes, ringtones, wallpapers and sms in all you can eat plans – and this growth won’t stop for many years…sms is the killer app for mobile, just as email persists in the face of every attempt to evolve the utility (eg google wave today, or all of the other crap before, on up through twitter, people still use email just as they still use sms)
SMS can be killer app but then it is expensive. I should not be buying an additional plan for SMS. I rarely do SMS but then if I do is expensive.
With your monthly data plan , one should get free 50 or 100 SMS.
America seems to still be behind the rest of the world when it comes to mobile communications, not adopting the GSM standard when it came out., mind you the rest of the world seems to be behind Japan.
Text messaging on your phone rates with email on your laptop, goes beyond the level of the “killer app” and into essentials territory. Bundles of texts in your calling plan is nothing new in UK & Europe.
Regarding short-codes, its a non-geographic system that goes straight into a computer screen, for example in a radio studio, not a handset, and what I object to is some services charge one standard message (not a problem) but add 50p on top. I mention this because some radio stations in the UK already do this.
Investors don’t have a clue…another registration based system, another stored value system, one more place to give your credit card or bank number….how many more will get funding and fail?