Opinionated comments on mobile phone industry news

If you all remember, in the old days when people used to fax: In its very inception, if you bought a fax machine you had no one to fax to, so it took quite some time before investing in a fax machine made sense. The growth curve for that must have been exponential after that, as when your business contacts (most likely at companies larger than your own) all had fax machines, you simply had to buy one yourself.

Hotxt is in a similar situation: To use Hotxt for the low rate of £1 a week both you and your SMS pals need to be signed up to Hotxt and run the Hotxt Java application. Hotxt supports an Out function to interface with normal SMS, but then the rate is 7.5p, which is way too high in my opinion.

It's both a logistical (convince all your friends and contacts to sign up to Hotxt) and pedagogical (you as a user must figure out that the application is needed on both sides; something that beta testers of my Jiminy! SMS application had trouble with) issue.

My spin on how Hotxt could solve this is that all SMSs sent to non-Hotxt users would automatically go through Hotxt Out with a considerably better rate than other operators (because you can view Hotxt as an SMS MVNO). That would serve as initial incentive for users to sign up. Later on the much better rate to existing Hotxt users would speed up the transition.

Is Hotxt Hot? at MobHappy