Our comments and trackback policy You Link We Follow, You Comment We Promote

There is no dearth of opportunistic people out there, the day twitter announced that it is discontinuing its SMS service in all countries except U.S., Canada and India, we are seeing two startups rush to offer services to fill in this void.

TweetSMS is one such startup that is planning to offer this SMS service for twitter users in UK for a small price. The service has to really push itself to market in order to capture the huge crowd that would be left stranded on the train station by twitter. The service isn’t fully functional yet, but plans to roll out its service in the coming days.

In addition to this ZygoTweet is another service that is planning to fill this very void in UK. The service is being launched by ex-BT professionals and will be charging users (4-5 pence per message). What really amused me is the timing of their launch just like TweetSMS and also the way in which they approached me. Although the company claims to Ex-BT professionals the email pitch was rather crude to be polite.

Check out the original email sent by someone at ZygoTweet below:

Oh look. They went live:
http://www.zygotweet.com/

The model will be receiver pays, so if you are in the UK and you want to receive your tweets you can buy a bundle of credits (about 5p per message or less, down to 4p in large quantities) and we’ll relay d and @ messages to you. WE’ll build out more features over time. I should mention the servuce us unternatuional and will work across all networks in the world, so if you are a Russian twitterer or an Egyptian twitterer this will work for you. The team behind this runs Zygo Hubs which provides secure group SMS social software apps (mostly to companies and sports teams etc). And they are Ex Orange so are used to dealing with billions of SMS messages. We aim to have this up and running in about a month or so, depending on demand from Twitterers.

Call me if you need more.

Update: The team at Zygo offers an explanation for the crudeness in their email pitch. Read it for yourself. I would term it as First Rate PR management by a startup.

Zygo was not started up overnight in reaction to the Twitter SMS news earlier in the week, but we have developed our own mobile group communication service, launched in the UK initially as a consumer service called ZygoHubs (www.zygohubs.com).   The service is innovative, patented and we have had good industry recognition, such as this year being a Red Herring Top 100 Winner, as well as being voted an AO Global 250 winner earlier this week. 

We are passionate about group communication services (especially on mobile), and as such like Twitter.  When we heard about Twitter stopping users outside the US, Canada and India receiving messages we thought we might be able to help.  Having built our own platforms and billing systems, and having a lot of expertise in SMS – we are Ex-Orange (versus BT) – we are in a very good position to provide a service at a low cost (versus some of the touted reverse billing solutions).  We wanted to see if there was a ‘market’ for this therefore have asked people if they want this and how they might like it – hence the rapid deployment of a web page – ZygoTweet.

A friend, prolific blogger and Twitterer, Azeem, was very excited about the prospect of this and wrote to you -  in his own style/fashion!

So hopefully you can understand where we are coming from on this and how you arrived at hearing about it.

If you want to know anything else – just drop me a line.

Kind regards

Jeremy

Jeremy Krantz

CEO Zygo Communications