Ideas|Products|Startups|VCs

Wouldn’t be nice on sharing the experience of your favorite hangout place with your friends and get rewarded? also getting recommendation on new hangout places you may like all through SMS. Good news is Revu.in has arrived.

Revu.in is a customer engagement plus reward platform on mobile. Revu.in is an innovative way to publish reviews about anything you like in real time by just sending a SMS. The platform enables businesses to build and engage with their community.

Revu.in is a Bangalore based startup founded by Mayank Sharma, Ishwar Sundararaman, Jaishankar Jayaramakrishnan. Revu was started in June 2010 with an idea of using mobile phone as a platform where consumers can talk about places they have been to and immediately promote it within their social media.

Revu bridges the gap between businesses and consumers using an existing device that consumers anyway use today – Their Mobile phone. Businesses run their mobile loyalty, engagement and informational programs and consumers subscribe to them with just their mobile number.

For users Revu.in provides a platform for them to share their experience in a restaurant/pub/concert plays etc with their friends on twitter/facebook and also let them socialize with other people in platform with similar interests.

Revu.in monetizes from the business for deploying its customer reward platform. For businesses Revu provides platform to offer rewards and discounts to their customers.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

There was a strong buzz in the internet space that Facebook is going to launch its email service and most likely to compete with gmail aka gmail killer, Facebook put an end to all such speculations yesterday.

Facebook announced the launch of their new messaging service that envelopes  e-mail, instant messages, Facebook messages and SMS.

Salient Features of Facebook messaging service -

• New messaging system is designed to save all messages, meaning users will have a history of their communications.
• New messaging system will work with other e-mail systems, such as Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo mail.
• The new messaging system is platform agnostic, so users can send and receive messages via mobile, IM or Facebook.
• New messaging system doesn’t exclude non-Facebook users, If your friends aren’t on Facebook they will be able to send and receive messages.
• Introduction of Social Inbox which filters the messages you want, organized by the people you care about. It’s spam free and designed to highlight conversations with your real friends
• Users can have facebook.com email addresses but this won’t be the primary usage of this new messaging system.

ZipDial is a bangalore based startup that offers a service which enables viewers to participate in TV polls without spending any rupee on sms. ZipDial is an interactive mobile-based platform for marketing and customer relationships management. Objective is to get more participation from the audience without burdening them with high sms rates.

Zipdial is founded by Sanjay Swamy(ex CEO of mChek), Amiya Pathak(VP engg of Zapak.com), Valerie Rozycki (ex eBay). ZipDial is a toll -free service and the Call will disconnect after one ring and user will receive a SMS response, basically it is as good as miss call.

For a TV channel or enterprise to use their service it will cost Rs 1,000 per number per month, which means that a yes/no question that requires two phone numbers will cost Rs 2,000 per month. At present only concern is adoption, whether TV channels will embrace this system is a big question mark. TV channels make good revenue from SMS user sends and typically for any reality show revenue goes upto few crores and TV channels wouldn’t like to loose on this revenue.

USP -

• One vote per number  which means the system accepts only one vote from a particular number — you cannot inflate the votes by repeated dialing.
• Disruptive – Cutting down the revenue for TV channels but simultaneously encouraging wider participation from audience without charging them.
• Free for end users

Feeling bored at work and no mood to indulge in facebook, twitter etc here is a good news for you, 123timepass has been launched to kill your boredom. 123timepass is a bangalore based startup founded by ex Yahoo and MIcrosoft managers ( they would like to remain anonymous for sometime)

123timepass is meant for users who would like to kill their time diligently. 123timepass has features like Greetings, Games, Chat, SMS etc. Greetings are all flash based and are of very good quality and best part is they are completely free. You can find greetings of all general categories like Birthday, love, Best Wishes but additionally they have event based greetings like Guru Purnima etc. which i have  never come across.

Free SMS is another feature which will draw users, workflow around sms is well made. User can schedule the sms, can send sms to a group also.

Chat is quite unique at 123timepaas, its a 1-1 chat with another user logged in the system. No chat rooms, cant select the user you can chat. Its totally a random chat with a stranger picked by the system, must admit quite a thrilling experience

Even games at 123timepass are flash based, quite engaging ones Pirate Shoot out is one of my favorite game. Games are categorized mainly into – Adventure, Board games, Sports, Shooting, Timeout.

I strongly believe intention of launching 123timepass is to give a tough competition to 123greetings.com and may be inspired by the IPO of later. 123timepass generates revenue from Ads.

Do indulge in 123timepass when you are bored and recharge yourself.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

Twitter has acquired a startup called Cloudhopper a messaging infrastructure company that enables Twitter to connect directly to mobile carrier networks in countries all over the planet. Cloudhopper is run by two techies and acquisition amount hasn’t been disclosed.

Cloudhopper provides mobile messaging technology and expertise to businesses in the wireless space. Currently, Cloudhopper powers some of the largest and most successful mobile messaging (SMS and MMS) campaigns in North America, Europe, and Africa.

Twitter has SMS written in its DNA. It started out with deep text message integration, the idea was to make it easy to broadcast a message to a number of ‘followers’ using mobile phones. Over time, as the service evolved, SMS became too expensive for the company, so it started dropping support for the free service. SMS is now making a comeback, as Twitter expands into areas where smartphones and even Internet access is limited. With the Cloudhopper technology, it will be able to manage the huge number of SMS it sends out to users.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com