mobiK offer free SMS to Australians
Link: Computerworld - New mobile entrant serves up free SMS
“Your mobile phone should be free. You shouldn’t have to pay”. That’s the quote from Damian Thompson, CEO of mobiK, who’ve just launched their service providing free SMS in Australia.
Once you’ve registered, you can either send texts from your PC, or via a downloadable applet that resides on your mobile. And it’s free. So how do they make the cash?
mobiK is currently supported by ad ‘tags’ at the end of each message you send. Although the service seems to work in most of the world, it relies on the recipient of your message being in a region that has sponsors. For instance, it seems you can sign up and send free texts from the UK, but the messages will only get delivered if your recipient is in Australia, India, Malaysia, New Zealand and Singapore.
There’s also an incentive/affilate scheme - called ‘K’ - whereby you can accrue ‘K’ points by getting your friends to join. Not sure how many ‘K’ points it’d take, but you can apparently swap them in for a new mobile handset.
Since their launch in October last year they claim to have 400,000 users at the moment, mainly in Asia. I’ll be watching this one with interest.
I have signed up and I love this service!
Posted by Ajay Space on June 27th, 2007 at 1:25 am.Sounds a little annoying. I wouldnt want the sms to have ads at the ends of them.
Posted by couch_potato124 on July 1st, 2007 at 11:51 am.Tried mobiK, everybody says it is easy, even the Home page says so. But if you have people who don’t have email address, you can’t invite them so you can’t sms them!
Posted by Hafidzah on July 4th, 2007 at 5:56 am.Signed up as working in Oz for 3 months. Thought would save loads on text costs back to old blighty and friends in Europe but NOT. They don’t seem to have any ad sponsors anywhere in Europe.
Posted by Tom McKenna on July 4th, 2007 at 10:37 pm.K is a joke. Takes about 5 years to earn back a handset.
Suspect zero backing for this outfit and hence the parsimonious service.
U R talking so good about mobiK but not friendly to me. I have signed up and could no get my validation code. I email the “contacts” but NEVER get a reply from MobiK team.
Posted by lktan on August 24th, 2007 at 8:13 am.i signed for the service and it was easy to use, but i could only send sms to people in countries where thy have sponsors. I need the service so kept searching and find http://www.junglesms.com instead and they send sms everywhere for free too
Posted by rufus on September 4th, 2007 at 3:49 pm.