Rakesh Mathur, co-founder of Junglee and an investor in the parent company of GigaOM recently launched GupShup, an SMS-based Twitter-meets-Group chat service that had over 4 million subscribers now. Unlike Twitter, they have spent their energies on making the service SMS friendly. Given that PC penetration remains low in India, and people love to SMS, GupShup has left PC browser to be used primarily for management of groups. We have set-up GigaOM group on GupShup. Check it out and get our alerts via SMS. In India send you can join your group by simply sending “Join gigaom” to 567673434.
I guess this is not the exact context of this post but I wonder how would such mobile transplants will monetize in India if they depend on advertisements..local business is different ballgame in india and without online transactions/pc adoption/micro payment support structure etc. how well the brand advts will fit in if people are not going to carry over what they heard on mobile to cyberspace but to real shops.. just curious..i guess the answers might be very different from US context but i just think it is hard to just say mobile advt in India will follow same story as online ad market in US simply because instead of PCs Indians use mobile phones