Push SMS Overload: Alertrix, Ibibo’s SMS+

By Nikhil Pahwa ⋅ February 25, 2009

After MyToday, SMS GupShup and the recent launch of Google’s SMS services, more and more companies appear to be entering this space. Two other companies – MIH India (Ibibo) and ValueFirst have also launched push SMS services.
Alertrix is a free SMS alert service from Spot On Media, a subsidiary of ValueFirst. Much like MyToday, a service that ValueFirst used to exclusively power, Alertrix offers editorialised content services like Career Tips, Cricket Trivia, Health / Fitness Tips and Inspiring Thoughts. Frankly, we don’t understand why ValueFirst is offering such a limited content service when MyToday is offering much much more. Alertrix is free, and if they intend to monetize it with advertising – they will need to operate at a fairly large scale.
Ibibo’s SMS+ allows small businesses to create and schedule SMS’, that may be sent to a selected set of contacts. The SMS’ are priced at a minimum of Rs. 0.10 each, and as much as Rs. 0.20 each for 500 SMS. This is much higher than the Rs. 0.02- 0.06 that a bulk SMS provider will charge for large quantities of SMS. I guess that’s where Ibibo makes the margin. Users get 5 free SMS on signing up.

This is fairly similar to Indiatime’s MocoLife, and we had covered that model here.