After free email, Sabeer Bhatia introduces app for free SMS

Sabeer Bhatia, the guy who gave us Hotmail has now trained his attention to mobile phones. Jaxtr Inc. founded by Sabeer Bhatia and Yogesh Patel, today announced the launch of JaxtrSMS, an open texting application that looks to revolutionalize the SMS market by allowing users to send free SMS. About his decision to launch a mobile application, Sabeer says, “The world is moving towards mobile phones. Today mobile opportunity is bigger than Internet. While in 2003 over 3 billion SMS were sent, the number is likely to reach 12 trillion SMS by 2015, which is huge. We want to revolutionlize this space by making SMS free.” 

Sabeer Bhatia and Yogesh Patel at the event

JaxtrSMS, which has been developed completely in India can be downloaded through an app store or directly from the website, jaxtrsms.com. It’s compatible with all mobile operating systems be it the iOS, BlackBerry, Symbian, Android, J2ME, etc. Once downloaded, the app will use your number to send SMS over the Internet. With Jaxtr you can send free SMS to other Jaxtr users as well as other mobile users across the world for free. Speaking about the app, Sabeer says, “While other IM applications are closed network, with Jaxtr you can send SMS to anyone across the world for free and it doesn’t matter whether or not they have Jaxtr account, you can send the SMS to their mobile number. Currently the UI is available only in English, but the SMS text can be sent in any language. We plan to introduce UI in other languages soon.”   

While one can send SMSes for free, it will also include premium services at small cost like sending multimedia messages, archiving your SMS data, transferring data to another phone etc. Initially it will be AD free, but later there will contextual advertisement to generate revenue. After its soft launch about a month ago, the app was downloaded by thousands of users across 197 countries. After all who wouldn’t want to have the option of sending free SMS right there from their phones?

But ,make no mistake while this app though allows you to send free SMS the TRAI’s 200 SMS daily rule is applicable here as well.