Imagine being able to get all the information you ever needed by just sending an SMS? Well, SmsGYAN does just that! We take a closer look at a product that delivers information from the Internet on to your handset without asking you to go online.

The days when everyone depended entirely on a dictionary to find the meaning of a word, or on an encyclopedia to find answers to questions, are rapidly vanishing into the past. We now have the Internet through which you can access loads of information on just about anything in the world.

That said, Internet penetration is still low in India, and the number of mobile phones has overtaken that of laptops and PCs. It was this fact that motivated a group of college students to launch SmsGYAN– “Your instant cup of knowledge,” as they call it.

SmsGYAN and DailyGYAN

Everybody—irrespective of age, location and vocation—has questions to ask. These could be simple or complex. And not everyone with a doubt has access to the Internet to get the answers. This is where SmsGYAN comes in, helping users clear doubts by sending a simple SMS. Deepak Ravindran, co-founder & CEO, Innoz Technologies, the Thiruvananthpuram-based company behind the product, explains: “SmsGYAN is an innovative text messaging interface for trivia and for simple definitions—at your fingertip. Any one with a query can send an SMS (by typing SMSGYAN<SPACE><your search term or keyword> to 09895974926) to receive an answer, which is short and mobile-friendly. The company also offers a daily subscription service, known as ‘DailyGYAN,’ which sends information about the importance of a particular day, every day, to subscribers through SMS.

How it all works

{quotes}Innoz maintains a database connected to all the free online resources available on the Internet, such as Wikipedia, Google, etc.{/quotes} When a sender makes a search request, the request is sent to the server. The GYAN platform searches for users’ inputs in the database and sends them the required information. “Unlike some other services, we don’t believe in sending users links. Instead, SmsGYAN provides instant information as we care for users’ time and money,” says Ravindran.

From GSM (global system for mobile communications) modems to dedicated servers, the GYAN platform follows a 100 per cent uptime policy. Multiple pairs of GSM modems on dedicated servers handle user requests. Once the input is received inside the GYAN platform, the keywords are identified and sent into the required request response centre. The response centre searches the database with the input keyword and identifies the correct trivia/definition.

About retrieving information, Ravindran says, “The data is retrieved from online resources upon key requests from the user. This collected data is first reduced to 160 characters (the maximum length of a single SMS) using the GYAN platform and then stored in the server. The information thus collected is then sent directly to the user using our Bulk SMS platform.” The Linux-based servers are constantly updated to store the procedures done on each step.

If users are not satisfied with the length of an answer of 160 characters, they can request for more information. For this, they can send another SMS in the form of a reply to the earlier response by typing ‘more’ and ‘more2’. “Our dedicated servers efficiently handle any number of requests and these can be simultaneously operated at the same speed,” adds Ravindran.

For DailyGYAN, users have to confirm their subscription by sending GYAN<space>Start (to 09895974926). Once the server identifies the subscription, the mobile number of the user will be stored in the subscription database, and an acknowledgment message sent to them. After the subscription is activated, users start receiving daily nuggets of information from the date of subscription.

Innoz uses a long-code digit of ten numbers, which, Ravindran reveals, helps in reducing the pricing. Hence,{quotes} each SMS sent to Innoz costs the user only the normal SMS rate unlike the short code, which results in higher pricing.{/quotes} Google, too, has been toying around the idea of ‘SMS search’ for a while now, and has even launched an SMS-based search service recently. Ravindran is quick to point out: “We were the first to launch and have a daily subscription service.”

Students team up to innovate

Innoz is the initiative of a group of engineering students. The founders, Deepak Ravindran, Abhinav Sree (chief operating officer) and Ashwin Nath (chief software architect) are final year students of Computer Science at the LBS College of Engineering (Kasargod, Kerala), while Mohammed.Hisamuddin (chief innovative officer) has just completed his Computer Science degree from the same college.

While all the four co-founders of Innoz are passionate entrepreneurs, it was Ravindran who originally initiated ‘Swades Solutions’, a Web start-up in 2005. “Being student entrepreneurs is definitely not easy, but support from the college, teachers and friends has helped us a lot in this endeavour,” reveals Ravindran. He adds that they have been successful in switching gears between studies and work, and have had support from their parents too.

“Over the past few months the idea has become clearer to us, taking the company completely into the product development field focusing on the Web and mobile sector,” says Ravindran. “We are a self-funded student start-up that initiated the virtual incubation process and are the first offsite-incubated company in India.”

The team currently offers Web design and development for a number of projects. The revenues from bootstrapping for the first quarter (since the inception of the company) stood at Rs 0.2 million and are expected to grow exponentially in the coming days. New revenue streams are being created by the release of products that are currently in the beta stage in the labs.

Joining forces

Ravindran says that the team at Innoz works on a technically interesting, growing structured wiki, and attends a lot of start-up events, getting to meet and partner several companies within the start-up ecosystem. Though it hasn’t been long since its inception, Innoz has entered into relationships with leading technology firms like Sun, Intel and Microsoft.

Ravindran says, “We are receiving good feedback from users, with around 10,000 daily requests and subscriptions. Day-by-day, new ideas are brought in to be integrated in the service, thereby making it more powerful.” The company is also promoting GYAN as a brand for SMS back-end support for customers. “We are inviting selective tie-ups with Indian brands so that they can utilise GYAN to support them with SMS delivery. Since we operate on keyword identified content delivery, targeted advertisement packages will be ideal for those promoting their services/products,” explains Ravindran.

All set to continue innovating

“Innovation is inevitable when it comes to doing well in business. Making good products is the backbone of any company. The marketing is completely useless if you don’t have the right product,” says Ravindran. At Innoz, the emphasis is on getting the basics right and then using creativity to come out with some magic! “The deep attachment that we share with the platforms that we will be developing applications for, makes it impossible for us to ignore the requirements that arise. And when we apply creativity to addressing those requirements, you get the best,” feels Ravindran. Though in the initial stages of their careers, the founders have strong opinions on where their priorities lie. Ravindran points out, “The current mobile market in India can be candidly summed in the sentence: ‘If there’s one thing a user will never mind doing with a phone, it is SMS.’ Every phone has an SMS feature. Richer media services such as MMS/3G/GPRS (general packet radio service) could be the future, but SMS will continue ruling for at least another three years. SMS is becoming more and more mainstream and this only means that it is a wide thriving audience that we are catering to. GPRS may go if 3G rolls out, and 3G will also give way one day to a superior technology, but SMS is here to stay no matter what comes.”