TechFold - Bold tech & web commentary

TxtVox - fast, easy, useful info via SMS

TxtVox is a lightweight, simple implementation of a straightforward idea: get time sensitive information into your hands when its relevant. TxtVox offers SMS alerts for sports scores, stock quotes, stock market updates, local traffic, weather, craigslist listings, jobs, classifieds, and quotes-of-the-day.

click to expand

TxtVox offers a high degree of customization, letting you choose the scope of your alerts, allowing you to receive notices from multiple sites, for different keywords, categories, time of day, etc.

Basically, you can be up and running with a set of customized, relevant alerts in a matter of minutes. While individual peices of the TxtVox functionality can be found elsewhere (stock quotes by SMS are not new), TxtVox brings together most of the alerts you would want to get by SMS in a single, simple to manage interface.

Problem (for me): TxtVox is US only, so I couldn’t actually try out the service.

TxtVox is free - I’m not sure what their business model is; perhaps they’re in some sort of revenue sharing deal with carriers? I found out about TxtVox from a press release describing the fact that TxtVox had been “approved” by all major US carriers suggesting a relationship deeper than TxtVox paying for SMS messaging through Click-a-Tell or something. There’s no premium offering available, and I couldn’t find out if there were ads appended to text messages or anything along those lines.

I’ve always been surprised that services like these aren’t more aggressively developed and promoted by cellular carriers - they seem like a simple, natural way to increase utilization of a value-added, monetizeable feature, particularly outside of the core-SMS teen market. If TxtVox gets traction, I’d think they’d be an attractive acquisition for a larger firm (carrier or otherwise) looking to round out their offerings; something akin to the rmail purchase.

Share This

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!