Asia Is The World Leader In SMS Innovation: Here Are 8 Great Examples

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There’s a lot of talk these days about where Asia stands with Silicon Valley, and I’ve certainly tackled this topic a lot, but maybe we need to shift the discussion into areas where the Valley is not touching. As Dave McClure mentioned to me last month, the phenomenon of large social media networks or platforms with millions of users that make no money is unique to the Valley. It’s unique to there in part because there’s enough risk-taking money to sustain cockamamy schemes of bright-eyed, daring young entrepreneurs.

Asian entrepreneurs, by contrast, grow up in considerably more practical circumstances. We don’t live in a world where over 60 percent of the population owns a smartphone. We live in a world where internet penetration sits around a 30 percent average, with countries like Japan, Korea, and Taiwan as the bright outliers. We live in a world where feature phones still dominate the landscape and will continue to do so for the years to come. This is the reality that Asians live in and the environment that Asian entrepreneurs have to build for.

This is why it’s so fascinating to take a look at the innovation that we’re seeing on top of feature phones instead of smartphones. Of course, SMS isn’t as sexy as an iPhone app, but the fact is it impacts hundreds of millions of people - maybe billions in Asia - on a daily basis and it has untapped potential. Here’s a few cool examples we’ve covered:

• ZipDial - An interesting startup out of India that sends an ad to a user if they call a company’s number for info but then hang up right away. This leverages on a culture in India (and greater Asia) wherein people call each other and hang up before picking up the phone, thereby “missed calling” them just to notify them of something without being charged. Who’da thought you could build a business on top of that?

• SMS for a toilet - In Beijing, the municipal government is looking for ways to let citizens to text their telco to get the location of the nearest public toilet.

• Hauraa - The Indonesian government approved the issuing of SIM cards that come prepackaged with useful Islamic-related content. The SIMs will come with video clips and guides for practicing Islam.

• SetechViet - This unique company out of Vietnam built a little device that has a SIM inside of it. The S-Bike is designed to be installed inside of a motorbike and can give all sorts of data to users. If you call it, it will tell you the GPS location; if you text it, it can ring or turn off the motorbike. It’s also useful in the event of bike theft.

• Smart Txtbks - This awesome Filipino startup is packaging entire textbooks and learning materials straight into a SIM so that the material can be read as SMS.

• XL Axiata’s SMS sticker packs - This fun perk for mobile users out of Indonesia is packaging stickers and emoticons along with telcos, hoping that users will choose to download the stickers onto their feature phones. This brings the fun sticker packs from messaging apps like Line and KakaoTalk straight into SMS.

• VeXeRe - This new Vietnamese startup, instead of issuing paper tickets and doing booking online for buses, sends tickets to users straight to their SMS, deleting all the hassle of picking up or printing tickets.

• SMSGyan - This awesome Indian startup literally built Google for SMS. In other words, users can text the service and it will send back search info related to the text’s query. It got over one million users in the first 100 days of use.

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