It has been a few months...and during this period txtWeb has traversed a long journey. More than 700,000 unique mobile users have used txtWeb with the user base doubling roughly every 2 months. Online community of entrepreneurs, developers, publishers and contributors on txtWeb.com is roughly 5000 strong. Several marquee organizations such as Wikipedia, Ushahidi, PWX and Cricbuzz have their content and/or services on txtWeb. Several others such as Grameen and United Nations Foundation are exploring ways to leverage txtWeb. In addition, several hundred budding entrepreneurs, such as Sandeep Bhaskar from Ideophone, have found txtWeb to be a fast and free way to connect with their customers and grow their businesses. txtWeb is available in three countries (India, US and Canada) with the ability to render content in almost all major languages of the world.

txtWeb's vision continues to remain simple yet profound. There are 7 billion people on this planet out of which more than 5 billion have a mobile phone. If you exclude the children and the very old, that is almost everyone on this planet. txtWeb endeavors to change the lives of those people by giving them access to every relevant service in their pocket. The approach txtWeb has taken is to create an open community of providers - ideators, contributors, entrepreneurs, developers and publishers - and providing them with a platform to further their ideas and impact the lives of the billions globally. Read detailed blog on vision here. 

Therefore, txtWeb has two stakeholders - mobile users and service providers - and it endeavors to fulfill the following promise to them:

1. For mobile users, txtWeb has to be the most convenient way to get the content/service they are looking for. Convenient because it is contextually relevant and faster than the next best alternative. txtWeb is actively reaching out and partnering with several organizations to get relevant services on the platform. In addition, it is actively nurturing an open community of entrepreneurs and developers to extend the long tail of services. Organizations like National Entrepreneurship Network (NEN) are helping us in this regard. Second, our engineering team is working tirelessly to cut down the end-to-end response time and ensuring that the content that is rendered is relevant to the mobile user (i.e. sensitive to their location, usage history etc.).

2. For service providers, txtWeb has to be the fastest way to make their services available to the billions globally. In this regard, our product and engineering teams are working to cut down the time it takes to get a service up on txtWeb - no more than 5 minutes for static content and no more than 5 hours for a dynamic service. In addition, txtWeb tutorials, videos and documentation are being continually updated and several hundred queries are being actively answered on txtWeb forum and facebook page, largely by our open community of txtWeb champions who are passionate to make these service providers succeed. 

We would love to hear your thoughts on this vision, the journey so far and additional areas for us to consider for future. If your organization is interested in partnering with us, please do reach out to us. Also, with the work expanding in many interesting directions, we are hiring interns and volunteers in our Bangalore and San Francisco offices. Feel free to leave a comment on this blog or confidentially email us at manish at txtWeb dot com

Manish