India has a total of approximately 201 million cellphone subscribers as compared to 39 million landline subscribers. And this number is stopping nowhere. They are adding a delta 100 million each year and or around 8 million each month. This is a huge market, and a lot of startups are throwing their offerings in the ring to woo the customer.
Futuristic predictions around 3G aside, SMS(texting) has been a great success in India. With Indian customers still does not flashing iPhones, blackberrys, communicators, pocketPCs, smartphones, often either due to availability issues or exorbitant pricing, or both. The only service that works on all kinds of handsets is SMS. Thus, logically, any innovation over/for/with SMS automatically can deliver the big footprint. With SMS traffic expected to reach around 180 billion by 2010 in india, it was the right time to marry it with innovative ideas to build some real good and useful tools.
From the usage perspective, significant portion of SMS traffic in india is of SMS forwards. If you are in India, and you have a healthy social circle, then time and again you might be greeted with SMS forwards ranging from quotes, jokes, greetings from your family, friends, love interest, ex love interest etc. Some people have a reputation of sending good forwards that brings grin across your faces. Sending a forward never hurts you. You end up sharing it with sometimes 5-6 folks, and sometimes even more than that. Now there is a startup trying to make your forwarding experience even better. A brilliant idea, smart execution,nice blended features, intuitive usability, mass appeal, catchy name and loads of fun; is them.
Vakow! is an answer to some of the problems i mentioned in my earlier post. I usually run out of SMS storage on SIM, and find it tough to manage messages. I am always curious about the origin of this funny SMS, and how popular it is. How many people might have received it, and lots of other such questions . Being a lazy person, i always end up sending the latest new year greeting i received, to my family :-), now I have a better option 
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Details please?
Vakow! is an offering from two IIT Bombay alumnous, Rahul Gupta and Amit Upadhyay. Vakow! exposes the dark matter in SMS space. It helps you to discover popular SMS forwards, which was not possible till now. It allows to rate an existing SMS forward, someone else posted on their website. You can forward these SMS’s, free of cost. Also, there is an option of tagging SMS’s alongside rating. Other than you waiting for someone to forward this to you, you can subscribe to different users to get SMS’s as soon they post it, or as soon as it becomes popular(which feature i haven’t seen in any other application). Tag based subscription is also an option. You can always control the “quality” of SMS’s which you wish to receive from your subscriptions by adjusting the threshold rating. Plus, if you do not wish to be disturbed on phone, and still do not wish to miss the next interesting creation by someone else (which i’m sure everyone is), you can redirect it to your mailbox as well. It is always fun reading messages on Vakow!. Should i admit, it is FUN!
Why should you send your forwards to Vakow!?
Out of many reasons, the most promising is that they are forever stored on Vakow!. No risk of loosing them when you loose your cellphone, SIM next time. Plus if you do create lot of forwards, this is a boon for you. Ratings help to increase the visibility and potential footprint of your messages. You can post your messages from cellphone, or from web itself. Posting from cellphone does not burn holes in your pocket, as they are not a “special” number. Thus, posting a message on Vakow! costs as much as forwarding a message to you friends. I wished it could save me from pains of forwarding my existing SMS base to vakow in one go. I spoke to the founders, and they seem interested in doing this in near future along with many other interesting ideas to make the experience better. AddressBook is under development, and more SMS analytics to appear in near future.
Conclusion
On the whole, Vakow! is an example of one of those products having mass appeal in india, reflects good thinking, and are really innovative with respect to indian market. I feel the startup has it’s chances of success if they keep up the pace of innovation and also handle spam.
