Hotxt co-founder profiled in The Independent
Link: Doug Richard: Exit the dragon - Independent Online Edition > Profiles
 But Richard, an American who has lived in the UK for five years, has high hopes that Hotxt can become a seriously big business. The start-up has already secured nearly £4m in funding, and its founder believes it can be a big hit with mobile users around the world. The Hotxt website says that the company offers a service that enables mobile users to send text messages to each other over the internet. But this is not a clue to what the company will become, according to Richard. “What it is now will not be what it becomes in the future,” he says.
Thanks for John and Tom for spotting this!
Dear Mr Ewan stand in [still to be named],
Methinks Doug is grabbing at straws. When the company started - the business model was £1 a week to lure users to move from the SMSC’s to the IP messaging. This has moved on - as all progressive interweb companies do, did it not attract the numbers?.
Looking at the traffic that the website attracts [not a major amount] he is in need of building up the customer base. I think doing PR stuff around himself is not the answer. What about concentrating on the product and the viral nature of the product and marketing?
In my view there are strong competitors in the market [especially in South Africa]. But the real jobbie for Doug is to lift his company from start-up status to his new found ‘future status’.
Will he leave messaging? Will it be mobile? I cannot wait to see, having dabbled in mobile I would really like to see the magic ingredients Doug pulls out of the hat for the next phase of Hotxt.
Dear Ewan, I understand you are in sunny Thailand, you lucky thing. Get back to work. And if you log on whilst you are there you are sad.
Loopy
Posted by loopy on May 24th, 2007 at 12:04 pm.Thailand? Rumours gossip and rumours.. I hear it’s somewhere far nicer
Posted by Alex on May 24th, 2007 at 12:59 pm.so what is Hotxt’s latest “real” news?
Not heard what they are upto recently apart from spinning out this story yet again that they have got £4M funding, one of their guys used to be on TV and that “they’ve got really exciting plans for the future”. Yeah you said and we know all that, move on. What is it Hotxt are actually gonna do next?
steve/itagg.com
Posted by steve procter on May 25th, 2007 at 6:07 am.you just know Ewan is gonna logon where ever he is to test out mobile access in some far flung place. Well unless that girl in the robe is there again !!
steve/itagg.com
Posted by steve procter on May 25th, 2007 at 6:09 am.Hi, let me introduce myself - I created Tex2me.com - we’ve been around a little longer then Hotxt, always been free and (we like to think) better. Ewan tells me he prefers it to Hotxt! We are very different to Hotxt in that we don’t have any investment - just do it out of our own cash.
I would not be surprised if Hotxt is finding it hard to get the numbers that they will have promised their investors. A lot of people think they still want to charge - and maybe they will, again, one day. Also the window of opportunity is closing on free texting now. So they are probably sepnding their luvly money (not jealous at all!) on dreaming up new features and functions - blogs, piccys, etc.. So am I!
So you guys tell me, what do you want from a social mobile app?
Posted by Phil Jones on June 13th, 2007 at 1:04 pm.