This article was taken from the April 2013 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by <span class="s1">subscribing online.
Deepak Ravindran wanted people with only feature phones to have access to the internet. So in March 2011 he launched SMSGyan, a service which lets you text questions -- and get a real-time answer.
SMSGyan has caught on among India's 900 million mobile owners: by the end of 2012, it had 120 million active users and brought in annual revenues of £1.8 million. It's partnered with Wikipedia, Bing, Wolfram Alpha and databases that aggregate health, transport or sports data. "And you can send Gmail messages, update your Facebook status or tweet, just by texting," says Ravindran.
The 24-year-old and fellow cofounders Mohammed Hisamuddin, Ashwin Nath and Abhinav Sree dropped out of Lal Bahadur Shastri College of Engineering in Kerala in 2009 to found Innoz, the startup behind SMSGyan ("gyan" means "knowledge" in Hindi). They launched through India's largest telecom provider, Bharti Airtel, which has almost 180 million customers. Users text a question to Innoz's server, whose algorithms then crawl the web and its related databases and send an answer as a 480-character text message. It costs the equivalent of 1p per query. "We work with every telecom provider in India, they just love it," says Ravindran. "They get 50 to 70 percent revenue share per search."
With $3 million (£1.8 million) from Indian investment firm Seedfund, Innoz plans to expand into Dubai and the US, where it would be used "by those whose data is down or off while roaming", says Ravindran. "It will be a secondary channel for internet access on your phone."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
