Earn4Blog

160by2.com an innvoative free sms service

160by2.com offers free sms to India and seems to be having big potential growth. I am a member of that site and was using for a long time. I just wanted here now to share my insights and understandings on 160by2 on longer vision. From my experience I never come across with the concept like 160by2.com and its new. Not even on international sms sites. The reason they give sms for free is, on the total 160 character in a sms, they give half to us and half for them. i.e, 60 character for us to type and send and remaining 60 character reserved for their advertisers. Cool concept na? It’s an innovative thinking. The concept of monetizing from the free user end products are the only way to get internet business. This is what Google does from free search to free email.

Features on 160by2:

You can send sms to any Indian mobiles for free.

Web - Import your mobile contacts to their site and send sms easier than sending from mobile.

Email - send sms to any Indian mobile right from email

Mobile App - Send sms over GPRS from the mobile application

SMS - Group your friends and send one regular sms from your mobile to reach all of your friends.

Blog widget - Add the widget on your site and blog and your visitors send you sms.

I already see from their blog that they are trying to reach customers by location targeting ads. Hope you may know Adwords (Seen their content targeted Google ads on some sites) and how Google does Geo targeting. An advertiser need to reach his business only to certain area can also benefit from adwords. On countries like US we can target up to few miles around the areas like New York though google ads. How is this? The concept behind that is by tracking the IP of the visitor and show the ads according to his residing area.

Same way here 160by2.com have the targeting option from the mobile number series. Since they have tie up with mobile operators they can get the location information of the mobile numbers. But this is limited to state wise and cannot do exact city targets like what Google does using IP. The alternative is, they could get the visitor location through the membership profile of 160by2.com. For example my home town is Salem and If I work in chennai, how can they know that? Need to have two options for location as orkut have.. Home town and current location… This should be most valuable data for their business. The thing is I wanted to compare the concept of Google ad and 160by2 for Geo targeting and the potential value. 

The only thing which I am not interested is they use 160by2.com as sms sender. Why do not they use senders actual number since they register and verify the mobile number. For branding they can add 160by2.com on below of each sms. Removing the mobile number from the sms will give out space for this signature. This is really a great Idea for the customers as the sms looks as if sent from their mobile.. Also one more thing, I am wondering why still Google does not get in to these type of business. They are keen about making innovations in mobile. From my understanding the next target is capturing the mobile marketing industry.. 

Recently they have extended the mobile text ads to image ads. Their acquisition of Android, an open source mobile operating systems competing symbian OS, Windows Mobile and Iphone Like that. This is the sign of conquering the mobile industry since they become giant in internet. They give free email and many free stuffs but did not look in to free sms which may reach the customers who may not even use internet. How potential it has…. !!! I think one day Google will look in to free sms service… That time 160by2.com should have attained the goal. They started this project as experiment and now have become 7th most popular mobile site (Opera report). Need to extend this globally before some body follow this potential concept. If 160by2.com get the global business then Google may acquire 160by2.com in near future… WHO KNOWS!!!!