Texting was always hot in Emerging Markets such as India and the Philippines. Lately, it is becoming hot in Developed Markets as well. Here is an interesting fact: American kids text every 10 minutes when they're awake.  Read more here.

Text-based start-ups are even hotter. GroupMe, a service that lets users start a group chat using text messages, announced today that it has raised $10.6 million in its second round of funding.  The startup lets phone owners create a single phone number for a group chat. Whenever anyone sends a text message to that number, it’s sent out to everyone else in the group. It works for conference calls as well — anyone can dial into the number and start a group chat. “We compressed our 18-month road map into 9 months and we’re still finishing that up before we even consider thinking about revenue,” the company said. That didn’t stop Khosla Ventures or any of its other investors from throwing some cash their way. The group raised $850,000 in its first seed round of fundraising from the likes of Ron Conway’s SV Angel and Lerner Ventures. The most recent round of funding was led by Khosla Ventures, General Catalyst Partners and First Round Capital. More details here.

Another interesting one that I came across is TextWeight which tracks your weight loss progress and bugs you through SMS – kinda cool but also not so cool, but I can still see why someone would use it.  Read more here.

So for the entrepreneurs out there, there is money to be made both in the Emerging and Developed markets through an SMS-based business model---and txtWeb allows you to create and deploy an app in as little as 5 hours which works in India, US and Canada!

To access any of the 400+ txtWeb apps send an SMS with the app keyword to:

in US/Canada:  917 300 0111

in  India: 92433 42000